The rich just got a whole lot richer, and in the case of the Big Ten, its schools are now part of the billionaires club.
The 2025 season marked the first full season of the Big Ten’s landmark media deals across Fox, NBC, and CBS. And while the SEC may have won the ratings war with its triple-header on ABC each week, the Big Ten is winning on the field and in their bank accounts.
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The conference announced a record haul of $1.37 BILLION to distribute to schools in the first year of their new media deals. While this amounts to an average of $76 million to each of the 18 member instituttionss, the exact payouts are not known yet and are likely to be scattered across the board with newer members receiving less than longtime institutions and potential CFP bonuses.
The new figure represents an incredible $490 million increase compared to the previous year.
The Big Ten Conference today announced a distribution of $1.37 billion to the conference’s 18 member institutions for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2025, marking the largest distribution in conference history. This represents an increase of $490 million when compared to the fiscal year ending June 30, 2024, during which the conference distributed $883 million. The distributions provide meaningful support to institutions in their continued effort to provide broad-based athletic opportunities to more than 14,000 Big Ten student-athletes.
The record disbursement reflects the first full year of the Big Ten’s current broadcast media rights agreements, as well as the conference’s success in the first year of the expanded College Football Playoff. It also marks the first year in which the conference was comprised of 18 world-class universities following the additions of Oregon, UCLA, USC and Washington in August 2024.
The Big Ten had even expressed interest in a private equity cash infusion, although that seems laughable now given this announcement. It also makes the claim that there’s not enough money to go around, or political pushes to return to yesteryear and abandon NIL compensation, patently absurd given we’re talking about a literal billion dollar industry in just the media revenue from one conference.
The Big Ten has won each of the last three national championships in college football with Michigan, Ohio State, and Indiana all lifting the trophy at season’s end. The balance of power in the sport has decisively shifted north in the NFL after a generation of SEC dominance. Don’t cry too much for the SEC, though. They already crossed the $1 billion mark last season in total distribution going back to schools.
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The sizable increase in revenue will only serve to separate the gap between the Power 2 conferences and everyone else in college football. To put the Big Ten numbers in perspective, just their increase in media revenue of $490 million surpassed what the Big XII earned as a whole just two years ago at $470 million. The SEC and Big Ten already have what amounts to a duopoly over college football with CFP control and this will only entrench their power further. However, it seems they can’t agree on much between themselves at the moment when it comes to what to do with all that money and all that power.
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