IU coach Curt Cignetti has said on multiple occasions the financial situation in the Big Ten was part of the appeal when Indiana came calling in 2023.
A new report by Steve Berkowitz of USA Today highlights just how advantageous being a member of the league has become.
The conference distributed approximately $63.2 million to each of its 12 longest-tenured schools including IU in connection with the 2023-24 league year ended June 30, 2024. That represented a 4.5% increase in revenue over the prior year, but just the beginning of what’s to come under the league’s new media rights deal.
Indiana should get around $75 million from the Big Ten alone in the fiscal year that ends next month, and likely north of $80 million in 2025-26.
That information helps to answer a couple key questions.
Where will the athletic department money come from to fund the new roughly $20 million expenditure for revenue sharing with athletes? Based on the report, Big Ten revenue distributed to Indiana should swell by roughly that same amount from 2023 to 2026.
And that new media rights deal that has created the abundance of incremental resources for Big Ten members was possible in large part due to the addition of four new schools to the league — USC, UCLA, Oregon and Washington. We can now see with more clarity why the Big Ten moved quickly to add those four attractive institutions.
That urgency to expand in recent years wasn’t born out of the thin air. Conference leaders saw a real sink-or-swim moment, and the maneuvers by the Big Ten helped its members emerge in a lucrative position relative to the rest of college athletics.
Comparing the Big Ten to the rest of top-tier college sports adds greater clarity. The Pac-12 is no longer, and the ACC has become a disjointed shell of its former self, a product of the desperation of the moment.
And the Big Ten’s biggest competitor, the SEC, is strong as well, but remains well behind the Big Ten for now in terms of the resources it provides to its members.
According to Berkowitz’s reporting, the SEC released tax records in February that showed $840 million in total revenue and average per-school distributions of about $52.5 million to the 14 schools other than newcomers Oklahoma and Texas.
So each longstanding SEC school got more than $10 million less than their Big Ten peers.
In a turbulent era with significant financial uncertainty, the Big Ten has positioned itself alone at the top.
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