The SEC announced Thursday that $741 million of total revenue was divided among its 14 universities for the 2022-23 fiscal year — an average of about $51.3 million per school, excluding bowl expenses paid by participants.
That $51.3 average distribution per school is up from $49.9 million in 2021-22 and more than double the $20.8 million paid out a decade prior in 2012-13. Last year’s figure was also more than the revenue of all but 67 athletic departments at the Division I level.
The total distribution figure accounts for revenue from television deals, football bowl games, the College Football Playoff, the SEC Football Championship, SEC Men’s Basketball Tournament, and NCAA Championships. It does not include an additional $8.1 million of NCAA and SEC grants split among the 14 member schools.
“SEC member universities are proud to support thousands of student-athletes who participate in broad-based athletics programs across the league,” SEC commissioner Greg Sankey said. “SEC universities are committed to providing a high-level experience for all of our participants through an impactful and life-changing college experience that includes world-class support in coaching, training, academic counseling, medical care, mental health support, nutrition, life-skills development and post-eligibility healthcare coverage for student-athletes.”
The SEC’s new television deal with ESPN doesn’t begin until this year, meaning we won’t see the impact of that 10-year, $7.1 billion contract ($710 million annually) reflected in the conference’s revenue distribution until January or February of 2026.
The SEC also announced a partnership with the Big Ten recently in which the two powerhouse conferences will share a “joint advisory group” that will act as a consultant of sorts. Leaders were careful not to call their cooperation an “alliance” after the Big Ten’s last partnership with the ACC and Pac 12 ended with the collapse of the latter conference.
ESPN’s Pete Thamel speculated that the SEC and Big Ten’s joint advisory group could be used to help facilitate a settlement in House v. NCAA, and perhaps even chart a new path forward for revenue sharing in college sports. Billions of dollars in damages are at stake in House v. NCAA, which could be settled this spring before a scheduled trial next January.
“A settlement and some sort of revenue share could help encourage action from federal lawmakers, who have thus far made little tangible progress toward voting on the type of bill the NCAA and its members say they need,” Thamel wrote. “The settlement as a bridge to federal help is an idea being discussed, and it’s one the SEC and Big Ten appear set to dig in on once they determine which members — presidents, chancellors, and athletic directors — will make up the advisory group.”
| PROPERTY | MEDIA PARTNER(S) | YEARS | EXPIRES | TOTAL | AVG. VALUE |
| Big Ten (starts 2023) | Fox/NBC/CBS | 7 | 2030 | $8.05B | $1.15B |
| SEC | ESPN | 10 | 2034 | $7.1B | $710M |
| College Football Playoff | ESPN | 12 | 2025-26 | $7.3B | $608.33M |
| Pac-12 | Fox/ESPN | 12 | 2024 | $3.0B | $250M |
| ACC | ESPN | 20 | 2036 | $4.8B | $240M |
| Big Ten | Fox | 6 | 2023 | $1.44B | $240M |
| Big 12 | Fox/ESPN | 13 | 2025 | $2.6B | $200M |
| Big Ten | ESPN | 6 | 2023 | $1.14B | $190M |
| SEC | CBS | 15 | 2023 | $825M | $55M |
| Notre Dame (football) | NBC | 10 | 2025 | $150M | $15M |
| Big Ten (basketball) | CBS | 6 | 2023 | $60M | $10M |
The average looks better than saying a handfull of schools make less than the ACC and Big 12 schools! LOL
I hope each school with a swim team puts a little bit of that money towards swimming.
Crazy thing is, even Vanderbilt gets the money.
And they’ll use it to continue to invest in baseball while not caring about the vast majority of other sports. I don’t think there is another power 5 school in the country that uses outside athletic trainers instead of employing their own staff.
Between the academics and its location in everyone’s new favorite American city Nashville and its charmed space in the SEC, Vanderbilt is a sleeping giant. If they can figure out how to expand the student-body to say, 30-35k, and get an admin that prioritizes it, they could be very good in a lot of things.
Not an expert on Nashville, but last I was there, it *felt* like they had room to grow. Maybe not the same room to grow as more rural schools do, but definitely some space.
I can’t think of a private university that has that level of academic reputation that has 30-35k students though. The closest you’re going to get is Northwestern at 23k, but undergrad enrollment is only 8k which is very close to the Vandy number. Even if athletics would support growing enrollment to pull more fees, a board and president likely aren’t going to want to completely overhaul a university to chase being a powerhouse.
Very true, but then IDK why they’d be kept in the SEC at such a small enrollment. I think ‘bringing up the academic average’ is going to matter less-and-less.
NYU is the only large, academically-elite private school I can think of – though they’re D3. Penn and Harvard are close if we’re willing to count grad students. Harvard is over 25k now, Penn is close to it.
I mean, could top-30 academics + 30k enrollment + SEC football be something that an innovative leader sees as an opportunity to be a one-of-a-kind college experience? Maybe that’s not worth as much as I’m giving it credit for.
The way of society these day is the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
Playing well with others is taking a thumping, sadly.
My daughter’s mid major school’s entire athletic budget is about half that 51m. I fear she’s riding out the end of mid and low mid majors even being called D1.
Exactly. With this NIL in recruiting nonsense, and then on top of that the possibility of schools opting to start paying players–a can of worms, for sure–the days of mid-majors competing with the big dogs will be truly over, though in some non-revenue sports they could be competitive. Mid-majors will likely be in a different classification altogether. Going forward there will be some players in the major conferences who could be receiving 1) a full, four-year scholarship; 2) serious NIL money; and 3) regular pay for playing. Can you imagine? Totally transactional, totally insane. In part due to absurd court and agency decisions (hello NLRB), there won’t be much left of the “college” part of college sports.
I thought that the SEC would be the conference that would have brought in the biggest payouts especially after Texas and Oklahoma joined, but the Big Ten’s contract is more than 60% bigger per year (using the numbers in the table from the article).
Basically just because they negotiated their deal after the SEC.
Between those 2 it will kind of always be like the next QB that’s due to get paid.
The market will always be reset by a huge margin when the deal is up.
The B1G negotiates after the SEC because it is the higher value property. And will continue to be as a national conference.
Thinking about this (it doesn’t involve back or breaststroke, so I can wrap my poor little dive parent mind around it), nine of the top ten alumni bases by size are in the new Big 10 with Texas going to the new SEC being eighth.
I’ve seen the same list as you….but IDK I have doubts about the veracity of those websites. I think for one, they include online degrees, which I’m not sure contribute substantially to a fanbase (my SIL got an MBA from Penn State online, and I don’t think has any special affinity toward their football team). There’s some other funny-math in there, like Purdue gets to count a portion of the IUPUI alumni base.
But anyway, yes that’s powerful. I wonder what the respective size of the “t-shirt fan” base is for SEC schools versus Big Ten schools. That must be the difference maker, right?
I do agree on that, no one wears tshirts like the SEC. 😜