Big 12 reports $371 million in revenues for 2017, up more than 18%
Per school distribution for Big 12 schools is $34.3 million for the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2017. Be very careful when you read the article as it has a lot of inequities and leaves a lot of holes which can be misleading.
Per school distribution for Big 12 schools is $34.3 million for the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2017. Be very careful when you read the article as it has a lot of inequities and leaves a lot of holes which can be misleading.
- The article lists total conference revenue of $373 million for the ACC for fiscal 2016 and mentions there are 14 schools plus Notre Dame that gets distributions. Note that the data is for a different fiscal year. It also does not say what the per school distributions are. You can't just divide by 14 or 15 because you don't know how much the conference retains for operations and you also don't know Notre Dame's share.
- The article states the PAC-12 reported that it distributed an average of $28.7 million per school in fiscal 2016. Again this is for an earlier fiscal year.
- About six weeks ago, the 14-team Southeastern Conference’s returns showed $650 million in revenue, or an average of about $41 million per school. This is fiscal 2017 revenue, but the way they worded the sentence doesn't give me confidence in the distribution numbers. The wording of the sentence seems to imply distributions are $650 million divided by the 14 members, but that math doesn't workout to the stated average distribution. Can one assume the distributions did average $41 million per school and ignore the poor wording? Maybe. In that case the SEC would be ahead of the Big 12 by $6.7 million per school, not counting Big 12 tier 3 revenue.
- The article gets even more misleading when talking about Big 10 revenue. It reports distributions in fiscal 2017 were $36.3 million per school. That is only $2 million more than the Big 12 for the same fiscal year 2017. And remember the Big 12 numbers do not include tier 3 revenue. (Note: I don't know if the fiscal years for each conference are the same, so I'm making an assumption they are close.) Where the article misleads the reader is that it provides an estimate from a Detroit paper of Michigan's Big 10 revenue distribution for 2018 expected to grow to $51.1 million. I don't know if distributions are the same for each school. That isn't the case for most conferences due to various reasons, like different bowl game expense reimbursements. I think it's a stretch to put much stock in a local newspaper's estimate for one of the riches schools in the conference. The 2017 numbers are factual, so those are the ones to compare to. If revenues do jump next for each school as much as they think, then it will be a new discussion. But the other conferences will also have different numbers for 2018.
