Thank you for opening up this week’s issue of NILnomics. This is part II of a series where I’ll be diving into conference tax return data (part I can be read here). Without further ado, let’s get into it.

In the public narrative about college athletics finance, conference revenue and school revenue are treated as roughly synonymous — when the SEC announces a new television deal worth $300 million per year, the implicit assumption in most coverage is that this money flows to member schools more or less in its entirety, with the conference serving as a transparent pass-through.

The Form 990 filings say something more complicated. Conferences are not pass-throughs. They are organizations with employees, facilities, administrative operations, championship events, legal expenses, and executive compensation structures, and all of those costs are paid before a single dollar is distributed to a member institution. The question this issue addresses — how much of conference revenue actually reaches schools, and what happens to the rest — turns out to have a more interesting answer than the conventional narrative suggests.

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The expense detail in a conference 990 lives in Part IX, the Statement of Functional Expenses, and it is the most analytically rich section of the entire return. Unlike the revenue side, where a single line item (program service revenue) dominates the picture, the expense side reveals a genuine organizational structure — the categories and magnitudes of spending that define what a conference actually is, as a functioning entity, beyond its role as a revenue distribution mechanism.

The largest expense line for every major conference is grants and other assistance to domestic organizations, which in this context means distributions to member schools. This is the check that schools cash each year — the revenue sharing payment that represents the primary financial benefit of conference membership. The second and third largest lines are typically salaries and compensation (covering all conference staff, not just senior leadership) and professional services (legal, financial, and consulting fees). Below those three categories, the expense picture varies considerably by conference size and operational scope: championship event expenses, travel, facilities costs, and technology infrastructure all appear at different scales depending on whether a conference runs its own properties or contracts those functions out.

What this structure reveals, when you look at it longitudinally across all major conferences, is that the relationship between conference revenue and member distributions is not fixed — it has been changing over time in ways that have different implications for different types of conferences.

For Power Four conferences, the distribution efficiency ratio — the share of total expenses that flows directly to member institutions — has historically been high, often in the range of 75 to 85 percent. This makes intuitive sense: when a conference is distributing $500 million or $700 million annually to member schools, even a substantial administrative apparatus represents a relatively small share of the total expense picture. A conference office with $50 million in staffing and operational costs is managing 8 to 10 percent overhead on a $600 million distribution — not unreasonable by the standards of intermediary organizations managing comparable financial flows.

The G5 picture is different in an instructive way. Because G5 conferences distribute far less absolute revenue to member schools, their fixed costs — legal staff, administrative personnel, championship operations, technology infrastructure — represent a meaningfully larger share of the total expense picture. A conference that distributes $25 million to member schools while maintaining a $10 million administrative operation is running 40 percent overhead, which changes the financial logic of membership in a way that the gross revenue figures alone do not reveal.

The more interesting trend, visible in the 990 data across the full 2012–2023 window, is not the level of overhead but its trajectory. Conference administrative expenses have grown faster than distributions at several major conferences during this period, driven primarily by growth in total compensation expense — which encompasses not just senior leadership but the full staff buildout that has accompanied the expansion of conference operations into content production, digital media, officiating infrastructure, and compliance monitoring. Whether this growth in administrative capacity represents value created for member schools or margin captured by the conference apparatus is a question the 990 data raises but cannot definitively answer.

Beyond the distribution efficiency ratio, the 990 data allows a more granular examination of how conference administrative spending has grown in real terms over the past decade. The total compensation expense line — which covers all employees, not just the leadership cohort that appears in Schedule J — is a useful proxy for the growth of conference office operations, because staffing is the primary driver of administrative cost in service organizations of this type.

Across the Power Four conferences, total compensation expense has approximately doubled between 2012 and 2023, a growth rate that substantially exceeds inflation and that, in several cases, has outpaced the growth in member distributions. This is not, by itself, evidence of inefficiency — the period saw a dramatic expansion in what conferences are expected to do, including content production for conference-owned media properties, officiating and replay review infrastructure, Title IX and NIL compliance monitoring, and the legal and lobbying work associated with defending the amateur model through a decade of litigation. All of those functions require staff, and competent staff in a competitive market requires competitive compensation.

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What the data does establish is that the notion of a conference as a lean pass-through mechanism is increasingly at odds with what the 990 filings actually describe: organizations with multi-hundred-person staffs, nine-figure compensation budgets, and operational complexities that extend well beyond the scheduling and championship functions that conferences were originally created to perform.

For Group of Five conferences, the expense structure tells a more urgent story. With member distributions in the range of $10 to $40 million annually, these organizations face a fundamental cost structure challenge: the minimum viable conference operation — legal staff, compliance personnel, scheduling infrastructure, championship events — costs roughly the same whether a conference is distributing $30 million or $700 million to its members. The result is a G5 overhead burden that, expressed as a share of total expenses, is structurally higher than what Power Four conferences carry, and that has been growing as operational demands increase without a commensurate increase in media rights revenue to absorb them.

The Form 990 data makes this squeeze visible in a way that no other public data source does. It also raises a question that conference realignment discussions rarely address directly: at what point does the math stop working for a mid-tier conference? The Pac-12's collapse was driven by an inability to close a media rights gap, but the financial logic that made departure attractive to UCLA and USC was also partly a function of the overhead load that the conference was carrying relative to its revenue base. The G5 conferences that survive the current era of consolidation will likely be the ones that find ways to reduce the overhead burden — through shared services, reduced championship footprints, or operational consolidation — before the revenue gap widens to the point where member institutions face the same calculation that the Pac-12's largest schools ultimately made.

NILnomics has a partnership with NILNewsstand, a leading platform covering Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) and the revenue-sharing era of college athletics. As part of the agreement, NILNewsstand will launch the “NILNewsstand Data Series (Powered by NILnomics)”, a recurring content initiative available within NILNewsstand Pro, the platform’s professional membership offering.

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Unlike traditional coverage, the NILNewsstand Data Series is built specifically for professionals working inside college athletics.

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The latest issue is around job titles, positions, and what can be learned analyzing Division I staff directories. Find the full article here.

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Best,

Greg Chick, PhD
Data Analyst

NILnomics is a research and analytics platform covering the business of college sports. We build original data infrastructure — drawing on public filings, financial disclosures, and athletic department records across hundreds of institutions — to power in-depth reporting, interactive dashboards, and financial models. Our work helps administrators, agents, and industry leaders understand how athletic departments raise, spend, and report money. Founded by a data analyst with a PhD in NCAA financial policy, NILnomics pairs academic rigor with decision-ready analysis.