The Media Rights Flywheel: How One Revenue Stream Came to Define Everything

Good morning and thank you for spending some of your time with NILnomics. I’m starting the first of a four-part series this week. I’ll be diving into the federal tax return data from each of the major FBS conferences. I hope you enjoy seeing what I found.

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Every tax-exempt college athletic conference in the United States files a Form 990 with the IRS each year. It is a public document, available to anyone, and it reports the organization's full financial picture: what it earned, what it spent, what it kept, and what it paid the people who ran it.

Because it is submitted under penalty of perjury, it carries a different weight than a press release or a self-reported budget summary. Conferences do not get to describe their finances the way they would like to be perceived. They have to report them the way they actually are.

This series is built on those filings. I pulled the 990s for every major Division I conference going back more than a decade, extracted the financial detail from the raw XML, and built a panel dataset that lets me track what changed, how fast, and for whom.

What I found is not surprising if you have been paying attention to college athletics, but it is clarifying in a way that the usual reporting rarely achieves, because the 990 does not editorialize. It just shows you the numbers.

The number that explains most of the last decade sits on Line 2 of Part VIII, under the heading "Program service revenue." For a conference, this is the revenue from its core activity — the media rights distributions, the NCAA tournament money, the postseason payments, and the bowl revenue. All of it flows through this line before any of it reaches member schools.

For a power conference at the start of this window it was already the dominant figure in the filing. By the end of the period, for the conferences that controlled premium television inventory, it had become nearly the entire filing. The organizations that make the most consequential decisions in college athletics had effectively become single-product enterprises, and that product was television.

The mechanism that got them there is a flywheel. A large media rights deal produces large distributions to member schools, which raises the financial stakes of conference membership, which makes schools desperate to join the conferences with the best deals, which makes those conferences more attractive to television networks, which produces even larger media rights deals.

Once the wheel is moving, the conferences that started with the best content — the ones whose football games drew the most viewers — accelerate, and the ones that didn't stagnate. The gap does not close. It compounds. What follows is a decade of compounding, charted directly from the filings.

Taking a quick break to make one last pitch for my college sports finances dashboard.

I'm releasing an early version of the tool that powers all my analysis — giving users direct access to the school- and sport-level revenue and expense data behind every NILnomics breakdown. I'm looking for beta testers who are willing to dig in, share feedback, and help shape where this thing goes.

The goal is simple: build the best free resource the college sports community — researchers, fans, reporters, and administrators — has for understanding where the money actually flows.

Interested? Just reply to this email and let me know.

The two tiers in that chart are not just different magnitudes — they represent different kinds of organizations. A Group of Five conference is, financially, a budget line item at a Power conference. The total revenue of every G5 conference in this dataset, combined, is less than what the two richest conferences in this analysis each distribute to their members in a single year.

For an individual G5 school, the calculation is starker still: what it receives annually from its conference is a fraction of what a single SEC or Big Ten school takes home. This is not a commentary on the G5's management or ambition. It is a structural consequence of who signed the bigger television deals. The financial distance between tiers is not a gap that can be closed through operational efficiency or creative revenue generation at the conference level. The only lever is media.

The chart also obscures something worth naming. Every line in the Power tier is climbing, but they are not all climbing at the same rate or from the same base. Some crossed the $500 million mark early in this window; others passed $1 billion well within it. The timing of those threshold crossings corresponds almost exactly to when each conference executed or renegotiated its major media rights deals — the SEC Network launch in 2014, the Big Ten's landmark deal, the ACC's long-term tie-up with ESPN. The revenue lines are a direct visual record of when each conference's television contract started paying.

Looking at those lines more carefully, though, reveals a methodological problem that matters for how we tell this story. "Revenue" is clear enough. "Media revenue" is not.

Conferences do not report media rights to a uniform standard. Some file a clean, itemized "Television" or "Media Rights" line that tells you exactly what they received from broadcast partners. Others report a blended "Sports Revenue" or "Conference Operating Revenue" line that aggregates media, sponsorship, and other sources into a single figure that cannot be disaggregated after the fact.

This is not fraud or evasion — it is just the way different organizations choose to describe their finances to the IRS. But it creates a real problem for anyone trying to measure how dependent conferences are on television specifically.

What I can do — and what this analysis does — is distinguish between two definitions. A narrow measure counts only what a conference explicitly labels as media, broadcast, or television rights. A broad measure adds NCAA distributions and postseason money, which are themselves television dollars flowing through a different institutional pipe before they reach the conference. Both are defensible. The gap between them, and what it means, is the actual finding.

What the Pac-12's final filings show is a conference that remained operationally viable right up to its dissolution — paying its bills, distributing to members, running its championships — but falling steadily further behind the organizations it was benchmarked against.

The gap between the Pac-12's revenue line and the SEC or Big Ten line is not the story of a failing organization. It is the story of an organization that could not grow fast enough to remain competitive in a landscape where growth itself had become the basis of membership value. When the financial gap became large enough, the calculation for individual schools changed, and the conference could not survive the individual calculations of its most valuable members.

This is what the flywheel produces at scale: not just a divergence in revenue, but a divergence in the institutional security that revenue buys. Issue 2 follows the money one step further — past the conference's total revenue and into what happens to it before it reaches member schools.

Next: The money comes in, but most of it does not stay. Issue 2 follows what conferences keep versus what they pass through — and what the per-school payout gap reveals about the real stakes of conference membership.

This is the start of a new series digging into conference tax returns. I’m excited to dive into this new dataset and see what I can come up with. Stay tuned for more. If you have any feedback - please drop it in the comments below.

Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you next week.

Best,

Greg Chick, PhD
Data Analyst