The SEC paid fourteen schools within $4,116,525 of each other. Its team with the deepest playoff run wasn't one of them.

Same construction note as last time. Conference tax filings run about eleven months behind. The SEC closes its books on August 31 rather than June 30, so its fiscal 2024-25 covers September 1, 2024 through August 31, 2025, and the SEC filed the return on February 4, 2026. That window contains the entire twelve-team playoff that ended in January 2025. Every number below is that filing unless it says otherwise.

In the first piece I wrote that the SEC was the conference I couldn't explain. It publishes a playoff bonus schedule, its schools made the playoff, and its filed numbers showed almost none of it. I said the money either landed in a different fiscal year or sat on a line the filings don't break out, that I didn't know which, and that I wasn't going to guess.

Both of those explanations are wrong. I went and read the return.

The money is in the filing

The fiscal year explanation dies first. The SEC's year ended August 31, 2025, and the playoff had finished on January 20, 2025, so the money had nowhere else to be.

The hidden-line explanation dies second. Add the sixteen school payments together and you get $1,027,767,904, which is what the conference reported on Part IX, line 4, as benefits paid to or for members. The fourteen full-share schools average $72,362,795.43, and the SEC announced an average of $72.4 million for full-year participants, a figure it said explicitly includes bowl revenue retained by participants. The postseason money is in there.

One note for anyone replicating this. The per-school numbers are not on Schedule I, despite the name. Schedule I is NCAA assistance, $7,829,591 in total. The distributions are on Schedule A, Part I, in the supported-organizations table, under "amount of monetary support." I spent a while looking at the wrong table.

So where's the spread?

Here are the fourteen full members, top to bottom:

Top to bottom that's $4,116,525. The Big Ten's comparable spread was $14,041,885.

Part of the answer is embarrassingly simple and I should have seen it before reaching for an accounting explanation. Among schools on a full SEC share, the deepest playoff run in the 2024 season was one game: Georgia took a first-round bye and lost the quarterfinal, Tennessee lost in the first round, and that's the whole list.

The Big Ten had Ohio State play four games and Penn State play three, both on full shares. Same $3,000,000 per round, same twelve-team bracket, completely different result, because the runs were different. A mechanism that pays per round produces no divergence in a conference whose full-share members didn't survive a round.

The exception is invisible by construction

The SEC's deepest 2024 run belonged to Texas, which played three games: a first-round home win over Clemson, the Peach Bowl, and a semifinal loss in the Cotton Bowl. Texas is also the school that agreed to take no media rights money in its first full SEC year, so the one SEC program whose playoff run should have produced a large, visible premium sits outside any comparison against the conference median, not because it earned less but because its contract set that baseline to zero.

That exclusion turns out to be the cleanest natural experiment in the whole dataset. Texas and Oklahoma had identical media treatment in 2024-25, which is to say none. Texas received $12,113,287 and Oklahoma $2,575,481, a gap of $9,537,806. Texas played three playoff games at a $3,000,000 expense allowance each, which is $9,000,000.

Two schools, same contract, one played three playoff games and one played none, and the gap is $9,537,806 against $9,000,000 of allowance. That leaves $537,806 I can't account for, and I'm leaving it on the page the same way I'm leaving the one-dollar Schedule A discrepancy at the end of this piece. The mechanism I described in the Big Ten is running inside the SEC too. It just isn't visible anywhere the median can see it.

What I still can't explain, narrowed

The structure is on the record, and I had it wrong as an open question. The SEC pays a participation bonus of $3,000,000 for a first-round game, $3,500,000 for the quarterfinals, $3,750,000 for the semifinals, and $4,000,000 for the title game. League bylaws also give the SEC Executive Committee the power to determine a travel allowance for each round, and remaining proceeds are divided into equal shares among all members. Sportico reported the bonus schedule on December 31, 2024, and Front Office Sports described the allowance and the equal-share split in January 2026.

That last provision forces a correction to the first piece. I wrote there that the $3,000,000 expense allowance goes to the team and that a conference can't spread it around, because it reimburses a specific school's trip. That holds for the Big Ten, where Front Office Sports confirms schools share earned distributions equally while still receiving requisite travel expenses. It doesn't hold for the SEC, where the Executive Committee determines the allowance. The Big Ten analysis in Part 1 stands. The universal claim doesn't, and I'm correcting it here.

There are two mechanisms in that structure and they pull in opposite directions. The travel allowance is discretionary, which is a genuine flattening device and the thing I got wrong in the first piece. The participation bonus is not discretionary. It goes to the school that played, and it should be visible.

It isn't. Measured against the median of the twelve full-share schools that missed the playoff, Georgia cleared by $1,892,169.50 and Tennessee by $1,020,454.50. The half dollar is there because a twelve-school median is the mean of the sixth and seventh schools. Both premiums are smaller than the smallest bonus on that schedule, before any travel allowance at all.

So the sourcing narrows the question without closing it. What's documented is that the SEC can hold back travel money the Big Ten passes through, and that accounts for part of the flatness. What isn't documented is where the participation bonus went. The filing reports one number per school and doesn't break out which component is which, so I can't tell whether the bonuses were paid and then netted against something else, or whether the schedule as reported applied to the 2024 season in the form described. I'm labeling that a judgment rather than a measurement.

Either way the flatness itself is measured, and it reverses the framing I used in the first piece. I wrote that three conferences looked at the playoff and chose to amplify the divergence. The SEC belongs in a different category; it looks like the conference that suppressed the divergence rather than amplified it.

One caveat on the sourcing. Sportico and Front Office Sports are secondary reports of the bylaws, not the bylaws themselves, and I haven't read the governing document.

One more thing in this filing

While I was in the return, three things turned up that have nothing to do with the playoff and are worth writing down.

The SEC lost money in its biggest year ever. Revenue of $1,108,919,128 against expenses of $1,123,407,863, a net loss of $14,488,735. Net assets fell from $132,142,075 to $117,653,340. ProPublica carries SEC returns back to the fiscal year ending August 2011, and that revenue figure is the highest in the series; the prior high was $852,577,281 in the year ending August 31, 2023.

The reason has a name, and the series says more than the single return does. Schedule D lists a Truist term loan of $233,333,333, down from $350,000,000, with $15,742,492 of interest paid during the year. Total liabilities across the SEC's returns read $0 in the fiscal year ending August 2020, then $350,000,000 in the year ending August 2021, and $350,000,000 again in 2022, 2023, and 2024, before dropping to $233,333,333 in 2025. So the debt didn't sit flat for four years having appeared at some unspecified point: it went from zero to $350,000,000 inside a single fiscal year, and that year ended August 31, 2021. On July 29, 2021, the SEC's presidents and chancellors voted unanimously to extend membership invitations to Oklahoma and Texas, two days after the two schools requested membership on July 27, 2021 and a day before their boards of regents accepted on July 30, 2021. All three dates fall inside that window. The invitations were effective July 1, 2025, though both schools in fact joined on July 1, 2024, a year ahead of that date. Three flat years and then a drop of exactly one third is a three-year amortization, and fiscal 2025 was the first payment.

The timing is a fact from the filings. What the borrowing was for is a judgment rather than a measurement, because no filing says. Public reporting has described the Texas and Oklahoma transition payments as coming out of television agreements and application fees paid in a prior year, which is consistent with a loan of this size landing in this year but doesn't prove the loan funded them.

And the endowment isn't one. Schedule D reports it as 100% board designated, with $291,662,506 flowing in and $328,417,071 flowing out in a single year, against a closing balance of $29,306,018, down from $138,696,055 two years earlier. Money moving through at that rate is a clearing account with a more permanent-sounding name.

What this predicts

Same rule as last time. If the reasoning holds, it should tell you what the next filing says before anyone sees it.

The Truist loan should read $116,666,666 or $116,666,667 in the return for the year ending August 31, 2026, and zero the year after. A third of $350,000,000 doesn't divide evenly and the filing truncates, which is why there are two candidates for 2026 rather than one. If the amortization is clean thirds, it lands on one of them.

Texas and Oklahoma move to full shares in fiscal 2025-26. The buy-in exception disappears, which means that for the first time the SEC's full range will include whatever its best playoff team earned. If the equal-share structure works the way Sportico and Front Office Sports describe it, the sixteen schools will still finish within a few million of each other despite the 2025 playoff. If the SEC is actually passing postseason money through and 2024-25 only looked flat because nobody went deep, the spread should open up in line with rounds played.

That's a genuine fork, and next spring's filing settles it. If it comes in wrong, the explanation in this piece is wrong, and I'll say so here.

Methodology

Source is the Southeastern Conference Form 990 for the fiscal year ending August 31, 2025, EIN 63-0377461, filed February 4, 2026, retrieved through ProPublica. Per-school figures are Schedule A, Part I, column (v). Conference totals are Part IX, line 4, and Part I, lines 12 and 18. Balance sheet items are Part X and Schedule D, Parts V and X.

Everything in this piece that isn't from the 990 comes from these.

• SEC 2024-25 distribution: announced as $1.03 billion total, $37.4 million retained by CFP and bowl participants, $72.4 million average for full-year participants, and Oklahoma at $2.6 million and Texas at $12.1 million related to CFP and bowl participation and designated NCAA funds. SEC release and ESPN/AP, February 5, 2026.
• SEC 2023-24 distribution: $808.4 million total, being $790.7 million from the conference office plus $17.7 million retained by bowl participants. SEC release, February 6, 2025.
• CFP structure: $4,000,000 per bid, $4,000,000 for the quarterfinals, $6,000,000 for the semifinals, and $6,000,000 for the title game, all paid to the conference, plus $3,000,000 per team per round for expenses. CFP distribution model as reported December 2024.
• SEC bonus schedule and the Executive Committee travel allowance: Sportico, December 31, 2024; Front Office Sports, January 2026.
• Conference policy comparison, with the ACC on full pass-through, the Big Ten and Big 12 on equal sharing, and the SEC on a hybrid: Front Office Sports, January 2026.
• Revenue history and the total-liabilities series, fiscal years ending August 2011 through August 2024: the SEC's earlier Form 990 filings for EIN 63-0377461 on ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer. The August 2024 liability figure is the beginning-of-year column of the August 2025 return, because ProPublica carries the 2024 return as a PDF rather than as structured data.
• Texas and Oklahoma invited to join the SEC by unanimous vote of the presidents and chancellors on July 29, 2021, effective July 1, 2025, after the schools requested membership on July 27, 2021 and before their boards of regents accepted on July 30, 2021. Both joined on July 1, 2024. SEC release, July 29, 2021, as carried by AP, CBS Sports, and Forbes.
• Big Ten spread of $14,041,885: my own dataset, Part 1.

Three cautions for anyone working from the same filings.

Fiscal years don't line up across conferences. The SEC closes August 31; the Big Ten, ACC, Big 12, and Pac-12 close June 30. A row labeled 2024-25 covers a different window for the SEC than for the other four.

Conference revenue is not conference distributions. The SEC's 2024-25 revenue was $1,108,919,128 and its distributions were $1,027,767,904. Tables circulating with the larger figure in a distributions column are reporting the wrong line.

And the SEC's own presentation changed between these two years. In fiscal 2023-24 the amount reported as benefits paid to members was $790,749,300, which matches the conference-office distribution and excludes the $17.7 million retained by bowl participants. In fiscal 2024-25 the reported figure matches the announced total including the $37.4 million retained by playoff and bowl participants. Year-over-year comparisons across that boundary are not like for like, and roughly $37 million of the increase is presentation rather than money.

One small thing I can't resolve: Schedule A totals $1,027,767,904 and Part IX, line 4 reads $1,027,767,903. A dollar. It's in the filing and I'm leaving it there.

The data

The dataset from the first piece covers all five conferences and seventy schools, one row per school-season, and is unchanged: download the CSV.

Take it and check the work. I got the SEC wrong the first time and only found out because I went back to the filing.