The Big Ten never changed its rules. Its schools ended up $14 million apart anyway.

A note on the construction of the college football years before we start. Conference tax filings run about eleven months behind, so the most recent full year available is fiscal 2024-25. That covers the 2024 football season and the playoff that ended in January 2025, the one Ohio State won. Indiana's championship came a year later and will not appear in a filing until 2027. Every number below is the 2024 season unless it says otherwise.

In 2022-23, the eleven longest-tenured Big Ten schools were paid within $175,000 of each other. Not roughly the same, but $175,000 apart, on a payout of $60.5 million, which turns out to be about one-quarter of one percent.

Ohio State won 11 games that year while Northwestern won 1 game, but they both received the same check. Two years later those same eleven schools were $14,041,885 apart.

The Big Ten did not vote to change anything. It still pays no bonus to schools that make the College Football Playoff and it is open about that. The money split them apart anyway, and the reason is a line item most people have never heard of.

The $3 million nobody can divide

When the playoff expanded to twelve teams in 2024, the CFP kept paying conferences the way it always had. If you make the CFP, your conference gets $4 million. Reach the quarterfinals, another $4 million. Semifinals, $6 million. Title game, $6 million more.

All of that goes to the conference and not the given school. Conferences split it however they like, and most are on record and split it evenly. But there is a second payment. Every team that plays a round gets $3 million to cover its expenses for that round, which goes to the team. A conference cannot spread it around as it's reimbursement for a trip a specific school took. Teams seeded in the top four get a first-round bye, so they collect one fewer than the bracket suggests.

Here is what that looks like in the Big Ten's 2024-25 filing, measured against the median payout for a Big Ten school that missed the playoff:

Indiana played one round so its premium was $2,952,339. The expense allowance for one round is $3,000,000. That is a gap of $47,661, which on Indiana's $81,009,897 payout is close enough to call it a match.

Ohio State played four games on the way to the title. Penn State played three. The ladder holds all the way up, with a bit left over at the top that hosting a home game and other bowl accounting can account for.

Everyone who missed the playoff landed within $2 million of the median, which is the old formula still running underneath, untouched.

The other conferences chose to make it worse

The Big Ten's divergence is the floor. It is what happens when a conference does nothing at all. Every other league had a choice about the $4 million and $6 million payments, and they made different ones.

The ACC hands them to the team. Its published policy pays a participating school $4 million for a first-round appearance, another $4 million for the quarterfinals, $6 million for the semifinals and $6 million for the title game. The school also keeps the CFP's travel money.

Clemson made the first round and lost. Its 2024-25 payout was $55,129,046, which is $8,582,309 above the ACC's median for a school that missed the playoff. Roughly three times what a Big Ten school collected for the same result.

The Big 12 is close to the allowance. Arizona State earned a first-round bye as a top-four seed, so it played one game, the quarterfinal. It finished at $43,009,550, up $3,737,543 on a median of $39,272,007. That is the $3 million allowance plus a little.

The SEC is the one I cannot explain. It publishes a bonus schedule too: $3 million for a first-round game, $3.5 million for the quarterfinals, $3.75 million for the semifinals, $4 million for the title game, plus travel.

Its filed numbers do not show that. Georgia had a bye and played one game, clearing the SEC median by $1,892,170. Tennessee played one game and cleared it by $1,020,454. Both came in under the $3 million a Big Ten school collected for the same thing. The conference's fourteen full members finished the year within $4.1 million of each other, top to bottom. Either that money landed in a different fiscal year, or it is reported on a line these filings do not break out. I do not know which, and I am not going to guess.

What actually changed

Every story about conference money this year led with the gap between leagues. The Big Ten distributed $1,372,758,005. The SEC $1,027,767,904. The ACC $736,617,636. The Big 12 $557,030,984. Those gaps are real. They are also ten years old and everybody has written that piece.

The new thing is that the gap moved inside the leagues.

For a decade the deal was simple. Get into a good conference and you get paid like everyone else in it. Your record did not matter. Ohio State and Rutgers cashed the same check. That ended in 2024-25, and it ended without a single conference vote in the Big Ten's case. A payment designed to cover hotel rooms and charter flights did what no realignment or TV deal had managed to do.

Then three other conferences looked at the same playoff and decided to amplify it.

The Pac-12 number everyone is quoting is the wrong one

You will read that Pac-12 revenue collapsed from about $604 million to about $112 million. Those figures are correct and they are conference revenue. They are not distributions. Money actually paid to schools went from $403,572,770 across twelve schools in 2022-23 to $58,522,466 across two schools in 2024-25. Per school it is a different story again. Oregon State received $33,582,310 in 2022-23 and $29,345,794 in 2024-25. A 13 percent decline. Oregon State and Washington State are being paid roughly what they were always paid. The conference did not get poorer per member. It got smaller. About $345 million walked out attached to ten schools, and those schools now show up in somebody else's total.

Numbers in this data that are not what they look like

Anyone pulling these filings hits the same traps.

Texas received $12,113,287 in 2024-25. Oklahoma received $2,575,481.

Neither is a market signal. Both negotiated an early exit from the Big 12 and agreed to take no media rights money in their first full SEC year. Texas's athletic director said so publicly and said the shortfall had been reserved for. The year before, both received $27.5 million in transition payments. The year after, they move to full shares above $70 million.

SMU was paid the least of any school over five years. $52,327,777 total. Four of those years are American Athletic Conference money. The fifth is an ACC year in which SMU had agreed to forgo all media revenue for nine years in exchange for the invitation. Its $17,065,303 in 2024-25 still included $4 million for making the playoff.

Notre Dame looks poor and is not. It takes a reduced ACC share as a member in sports other than football, $18,142,243 in 2024-25. Its NBC football contract is paid straight to the university and does not appear in ACC filings, except once. In 2020-21 Notre Dame received $34,899,808, because it played the 2020 season as a full ACC football member under COVID scheduling and shared its NBC revenue with the league as part of the deal. ACC television revenue rose 19.4 percent that year to $397.4 million, partly on Notre Dame's money. It is the only year in this data where the Notre Dame problem runs backward.

Schools carry their old conference's money with them. USC's $33,700,321 in 2022-23 is Pac-12 money. Any table that files it under the Big Ten is wrong by that amount. In the dataset below every school sits with the conference that actually paid it that year.

How this was checked

Every conference total reconstructed from the school rows was tested against what the conference announced.

Per-school figures line up too. The ACC's 2021-22 range of $37,961,705 to $41,282,420 matches the reported $37.9 million to $41.3 million. The Big 12's 2021-22 range of $41,996,797 to $44,855,131 matches the reported $42 million to $44.9 million. The Pac-12 paid every member between $33,554,728 and $33,700,321 in 2022-23 against a reported $33.6 million.

Methodology

Source is conference Form 990 filings, retrieved through ProPublica.

Form 990 is due the 15th day of the fifth month after the fiscal year closes, and one filing extends that six months. A June 30 year-end therefore surfaces around May of the following year. The roughly eleven-month lag here is that deadline, not a delay.

Fiscal years are not aligned. The Big Ten, ACC, Big 12 and Pac-12 close June 30. The SEC closes August 31. A row labeled 2024-25 covers a different window for the SEC than for the other four.

Distributions are not athletic department revenue. Tickets, donors, licensing and institutional support never appear here.

Two things were changed from the raw filings, and both are flagged in the data.

BYU's independence years are excluded. Its pre-2023 ESPN contract was never disclosed, BYU is private, and a school's own media deal does not pass through a conference and would not appear in a conference filing at any value. Estimates put it between $6 million and $10 million a year. Rather than pick one, those rows are gone.

Texas and Oklahoma's 2023-24 figures combine payments from two conferences. They are split using the SEC's announced $27.5 million transition payment, and both resulting rows are marked as derived. That split moves the Big 12's 2023-24 total from $531 million to $476 million against a reported $470 million.

One thing stayed strange and is published as-is. The SEC paid more per school in 2020-21 than in either of the two years that followed. That is real, it reconciles exactly to the conference's own announcement, and it is partly explained by a $4 million per-school share of a CBS signing bonus that year. The spread among SEC schools that season, $12.2 million top to bottom, is not explained. It is in the data with a note on it.

What this predicts

If the mechanism above is right it should be able to tell you what next year's filing says before anyone has seen it, so here is the prediction on the record.

Fiscal 2025-26 closed on June 30, 2026 and the Big Ten's return on it will not be public until around May 2027. That year contains the 2025 season and the playoff Indiana won. Indiana was the top seed, took a first-round bye, and then played three games, beating Alabama in the Rose Bowl, Oregon in the Peach Bowl and Miami for the title. Ohio State was the second seed, also took a bye, and lost its only game to Miami in the Cotton Bowl. Oregon played three as well, a first-round home game against James Madison followed by the Orange and Peach Bowls, but it is on a partial share through 2030 so it has to be measured against its own baseline rather than the conference median.

The Big Ten still awards no participation bonus and the expense allowance was still $3 million a round, so that allowance is the only thing that should move. That puts Indiana roughly $9 million above the median Big Ten school that missed the playoff, Ohio State roughly $3 million above it, and everyone else including Michigan sitting flat on the same number as each other.

It also means the ladder inverts. Ohio State was $13,494,524 clear of the median last year and should be about $3 million clear this time, while Indiana goes from $2,952,339 to roughly three times that on the strength of a season that was already over before the money moved.

If those numbers come in wrong in May 2027 then the explanation in this piece is wrong, and I will say so here.

The data

Download the full dataset (CSV)

70 schools, five conferences, 2020-21 through 2024-25. One row per school-season with fiscal year end, share type, source, and a note on every row that needs one.

Take it and check the work. If something is wrong, say so and I will fix it in public.