In the final team meeting before LSU took the field to face Oklahoma in the Peach Bowl semifinal, Ed Orgeron began by hushing the room. He then asked for all of the Tigers’ graduate assistants and analysts — more than a dozen of them — to rise from their seats.
Several had gray hair and Power 5 coordinator and NFL coaching experience in their backgrounds. but these weren’t LSU’s position coaches or coordinators. They were the people who had handled a lot of the advanced detail research and assisted in game-planning. Orgeron thanked them and told his players how vital these staffers were in making the team better prepared than any other in the country. A few heartbeats later every Tiger player stood up to give them a standing ovation.
Staff resources like that have also helped Alabama dominate college football in the past decade. When Nick Saban and the Tide went started their run, the SEC distributed $132.5 million to its league members. When SEC commissioner Greg Sankey announced Thursday that the conference had raked in $650.1 million in the 2018-19 fiscal year, it represented an increase of more than $500 million and a whopping $44.6 million per school. And that revenue number is about to soar even higher once the conference signs its next TV deal, which will create an even bigger gulf of resources between the SEC and every other FBS league that isn’t the Big Ten.
In the next few years, the Power 5 could look more like the Power 2 plus Clemson, Texas and Oklahoma. The SEC is set to reap a massive windfall when its deal with CBS for the league’s best game each Saturday expires following the 2023 season. CBS pays $55 million a year for the package, which is the best bargain in televised sports. Sports Business Journal’s John Ourand has reported that Disney/ESPN is in line to get the package next. The price for the package in the new deal should eclipse $300 million, meaning the SEC stands to make at least $245 million more a year in media rights fees. Divided by 14, that’s an extra $17.5 million a year (at least) for each school. Given the revenue growth the past few years, that should put the distribution for each school between $65 million and $70 million a year.
As impressive as that is, it still might not top the Big Ten once that league makes its next media rights deals. A Michigan budget document obtained by Angelique Chengelis of The Detroit News showed a per-school distribution of $51 million in 2018 and $52 million in 2019. (New members Maryland and Rutgers do not yet receive a full share of Big Ten revenue. All 14 SEC schools receive an equal share.) Though the SEC should close the gap when it has Disney paying market value for the game-of-the-week package, the Big Ten also is due for another bump. Perhaps the most brilliant move recently retired commissioner Jim Delany made was choosing to sign short-term deals with Fox and ESPN that started in 2017. Like the “SEC on CBS” package, those deals also expire following the 2023 season — that is not an accident — and will allow the Big Ten to sell to the highest bidder. (Editor’s note: Feldman also serves as a college football reporter for Fox Sports and FS1.)
With the SEC’s football inventory about to be wholly owned by Disney/ESPN, that puts more pressure on Fox to ensure it keeps its portion of the Big Ten’s inventory. That should force Fox to pay a premium, because for all the talk about a rights bubble and ESPN’s shrinking subscriber fees, Mickey Mouse and his friends at the Worldwide Leader would love nothing more than to swipe Fox’s most prestigious college football property. Expect Fox to pay to ensure it doesn’t lose the Big Ten. That is the genius of Delany’s move. When he made those deals in 2016, no one knew exactly what entities might be bidding on college sports in 2022. But Delany knew this: People would still want to watch Big Ten football, and someone would be willing to pay a lot of money to show it. He could have taken a longer guaranteed deal, but his conference will get richer because he bet on the league’s popularity.
With the Big Ten and SEC duking it out at the top, where does that leave everyone else? Individually wealthy programs like Texas and Oklahoma — which have a better deal in the Big 12 than that league’s critics are willing to admit — will be fine. ACC schools are about to get a financial bump from their new cable network, but that probably only evens that league with the Big 12. The ACC Network likely won’t generate the kind of money the Big Ten and SEC Networks generate. The Pac-12, with its wholly owned network that has struggled to find demand and distribution, saw its revenue drop $12.5 million in fiscal 2018. The league distributed $31.3 million per school thanks to a reserve fund created to compensate members in years when the (partially run by the Pac-12) Rose Bowl is a College Football Playoff semifinal.
The Pac-12 also is set to negotiate new deals that would take effect after the 2024-25 school year. That’s a year later than the SEC and Big Ten. (As we said, that wasn’t an accident on the Big Ten’s part.) Barring a shocking offer from a new player, the Pac-12 is staring at a massive revenue gap compared to the Big Ten and the SEC. And there doesn’t appear to be anything the league’s leadership can do to change that. “There are two leagues — the SEC and Big Ten — that have entirely different resources,” a Pac-12 school administrator said.
That could make a league that hasn’t put a team in the Playoff in three years even less competitive on a national level. LSU and Alabama can keep staffing up as more money rolls in, but USC and Oregon don’t have the same resources. (No, Nike co-founder Phil Knight will not write a check to cover every one of the Ducks’ wishes.)
Meanwhile, the best programs in the Pac-12 are going to find themselves competing with the bottom of the Big Ten and the SEC in terms of coaching salaries, which will further damage the league’s ability to attract top talent. Purdue’s Jeff Brohm is scheduled to make $5.35 million for this school year. That’s more than the reported amount for every coach in the Pac-12. (The last available amount for Stanford’s David Shaw comes from the school’s 2017 tax return. He made $4.6 million, but it’s possible he makes more now.) While Purdue had to pay Brohm well to keep him from leaving for Louisville, expect Ohio State’s Ryan Day and Penn State’s James Franklin to leapfrog him. Meanwhile, Minnesota’s P.J. Fleck will make $4.6 million next year.
Those numbers suggest the Pac-12 may struggle even more as the gap widens. Last week, Jon Wilner of the Bay Area News Group reported that UCLA ran an $18.9 million deficit for the 2019 fiscal year and needed a bailout from the campus in the form of an interest-bearing loan. The news was somewhat shocking because while other schools in the league have run deficits recently, UCLA had always been fiscally prudent. But the Bruins have been trying — and failing — to compete at the highest levels in football and men’s basketball, and that can get expensive.
Some of the deficit stems from the November 2017 decision to fire football coach Jim Mora, which required a $12.5 million payout to buy out the four years remaining on Mora’s contract. That money was paid out in the 2018 fiscal year — a year in which UCLA balanced its budget. But the expense ate into the reserve fund and the $16 million bonus the Bruins received for switching their apparel deal from Adidas to Under Armour. A pool of money UCLA had hoped to spread across multiple sports and projects suddenly shrank. Meanwhile, the Bruins had to pay for a new coach. Chip Kelly also had an offer from Florida when he chose UCLA, so that demand likely factored into a contract that pays Kelly an average of $4.66 million a season. (After Kelly picked UCLA, Florida hired Dan Mullen away from Mississippi State at an average salary of $6 million a year.)
To make matters more expensive, the storied UCLA men’s basketball team was floundering under Steve Alford. So Alford was fired in December 2018. Between his buyout and the amount owed for the remainder of the 2018-19 season, Alford was owed about $4.5 million. On top of that, UCLA gave new coach Mick Cronin a $2 million signing bonus to cover most of the $2.2 million Cronin owed Cincinnati for leaving while under contract.
Coaching changes in the SEC might include similar dollar figures, but they don’t hurt as much because schools either have the revenue to cover the cost or know they’re about to get that revenue. Arkansas pulled the ripcord on the Chad Morris era last season after 22 games. Buying out Morris will cost the Razorbacks $10 million over the next four years. That gets piled atop the $11.9 million the Razorback Foundation owed when Arkansas fired Bret Bielema*. But Arkansas administrators know they’re about to get an annual windfall once the CBS contract expires and Disney/ESPN begins paying an amount that better reflects that package’s market value. That makes erasing mistakes much easier to stomach.
* Arkansas may not wind up paying the full amount to Bielema. The Razorback Foundation stopped making the payments at the end of 2018 when it discovered that Bielema was being paid only $50,000 — well below market value — to coach the New England Patriots’ defensive line. Bielema has since been hired by the New York Giants, and the matter of his Arkansas buyout appears headed to court. If Arkansas doesn’t end up paying more money, it would save $7 million. More than likely, the sides will settle on an amount and be done with one another.
The fear among administrators in the Pac-12 is that trying to compete with Big Ten and SEC schools in terms of staffing and coaching compensation will all but guarantee deficits unless athletic directors bat 1.000 on their hires. “All of us in this league are two bad football seasons away from being in the exact same situation (as UCLA),” one Pac-12 administrator says.
The revenue gap obviously affects coaching salaries and ancillary football staff numbers, but it also raises the cost of keeping up in other areas. Beyond the additional brainpower and experience with a deep bench of seasoned coaches in support roles, power brokers around college athletics point out that the added financial resources mean bigger nutrition programs. They allow schools to hire staff for and/or beef up mental health programs. They mean more employees on the training and medical staffs and more academic support personnel. The money also impacts the way teams travel in recruiting. More access to private planes allows coaches to see more prospects and waste less travel time waiting for connections that often get delayed. The benefit of that is less time in the airport and more time visiting with recruits.
Other lower-profile sport teams at Big Ten and SEC schools can charter planes, which athletic directors note is better for the players’ bodies and for their academics. One Power 5 coach (not in the SEC or Big Ten) talked about how his budget for analysts is less than what some individual analysts make in the SEC. That coach also pointed out that his recruiting staff is limited to one in-house recruiting person, a graphics person and a student in a work-study program. This matters in an age when, he says, “Kids don’t want to read text messages. They respond to graphic messages, and there were some places that have 10 people doing that.”
On the top end of the college football food chain, you have Ohio State. The Buckeyes have 11 full-time recruiting employees. That includes five who work in creative media. Three videographers and two graphic designers work to create the messaging that the program sends to recruits. That 11 number doesn’t include two full-time interns in personnel, one student helping with on-campus visits and two more students who help with graphics and video. The Buckeyes have had top-five recruiting classes in four of the past five recruiting cycles.
This is what the schools in leagues outside the Big Ten and the SEC will be up against for the foreseeable future. The schools may attempt to make rules curtailing staff sizes, but any such rule will be ripe for an antitrust challenge in federal court. The NCAA already lost such a case in the 1990s when restricted earnings coaches sued, so it will be difficult to craft any rule that doesn’t make it look like competitors are conspiring to arbitrarily cap a labor market. (We should also assume that when more money flows to the players, it probably won’t shrink the gap but merely change the numbers.)
Schools such as Oklahoma, Texas and Clemson have the earning power/donor bases to keep up, but the rest will have to be more creative. The Big Ten and SEC schools will be able to overwhelm with sheer staffing numbers, and it won’t only be Alabama, LSU, Ohio State and Penn State. The windfalls to come will give Ole Miss, Minnesota and Illinois the kind of purchasing power only the superpowers used to enjoy.
But as long as the same five leagues keep acting like peers, we’ll expect the same kind of results no matter how much fatter the wallets are in two conferences.
Several had gray hair and Power 5 coordinator and NFL coaching experience in their backgrounds. but these weren’t LSU’s position coaches or coordinators. They were the people who had handled a lot of the advanced detail research and assisted in game-planning. Orgeron thanked them and told his players how vital these staffers were in making the team better prepared than any other in the country. A few heartbeats later every Tiger player stood up to give them a standing ovation.
Staff resources like that have also helped Alabama dominate college football in the past decade. When Nick Saban and the Tide went started their run, the SEC distributed $132.5 million to its league members. When SEC commissioner Greg Sankey announced Thursday that the conference had raked in $650.1 million in the 2018-19 fiscal year, it represented an increase of more than $500 million and a whopping $44.6 million per school. And that revenue number is about to soar even higher once the conference signs its next TV deal, which will create an even bigger gulf of resources between the SEC and every other FBS league that isn’t the Big Ten.
In the next few years, the Power 5 could look more like the Power 2 plus Clemson, Texas and Oklahoma. The SEC is set to reap a massive windfall when its deal with CBS for the league’s best game each Saturday expires following the 2023 season. CBS pays $55 million a year for the package, which is the best bargain in televised sports. Sports Business Journal’s John Ourand has reported that Disney/ESPN is in line to get the package next. The price for the package in the new deal should eclipse $300 million, meaning the SEC stands to make at least $245 million more a year in media rights fees. Divided by 14, that’s an extra $17.5 million a year (at least) for each school. Given the revenue growth the past few years, that should put the distribution for each school between $65 million and $70 million a year.
As impressive as that is, it still might not top the Big Ten once that league makes its next media rights deals. A Michigan budget document obtained by Angelique Chengelis of The Detroit News showed a per-school distribution of $51 million in 2018 and $52 million in 2019. (New members Maryland and Rutgers do not yet receive a full share of Big Ten revenue. All 14 SEC schools receive an equal share.) Though the SEC should close the gap when it has Disney paying market value for the game-of-the-week package, the Big Ten also is due for another bump. Perhaps the most brilliant move recently retired commissioner Jim Delany made was choosing to sign short-term deals with Fox and ESPN that started in 2017. Like the “SEC on CBS” package, those deals also expire following the 2023 season — that is not an accident — and will allow the Big Ten to sell to the highest bidder. (Editor’s note: Feldman also serves as a college football reporter for Fox Sports and FS1.)
With the SEC’s football inventory about to be wholly owned by Disney/ESPN, that puts more pressure on Fox to ensure it keeps its portion of the Big Ten’s inventory. That should force Fox to pay a premium, because for all the talk about a rights bubble and ESPN’s shrinking subscriber fees, Mickey Mouse and his friends at the Worldwide Leader would love nothing more than to swipe Fox’s most prestigious college football property. Expect Fox to pay to ensure it doesn’t lose the Big Ten. That is the genius of Delany’s move. When he made those deals in 2016, no one knew exactly what entities might be bidding on college sports in 2022. But Delany knew this: People would still want to watch Big Ten football, and someone would be willing to pay a lot of money to show it. He could have taken a longer guaranteed deal, but his conference will get richer because he bet on the league’s popularity.
With the Big Ten and SEC duking it out at the top, where does that leave everyone else? Individually wealthy programs like Texas and Oklahoma — which have a better deal in the Big 12 than that league’s critics are willing to admit — will be fine. ACC schools are about to get a financial bump from their new cable network, but that probably only evens that league with the Big 12. The ACC Network likely won’t generate the kind of money the Big Ten and SEC Networks generate. The Pac-12, with its wholly owned network that has struggled to find demand and distribution, saw its revenue drop $12.5 million in fiscal 2018. The league distributed $31.3 million per school thanks to a reserve fund created to compensate members in years when the (partially run by the Pac-12) Rose Bowl is a College Football Playoff semifinal.
The Pac-12 also is set to negotiate new deals that would take effect after the 2024-25 school year. That’s a year later than the SEC and Big Ten. (As we said, that wasn’t an accident on the Big Ten’s part.) Barring a shocking offer from a new player, the Pac-12 is staring at a massive revenue gap compared to the Big Ten and the SEC. And there doesn’t appear to be anything the league’s leadership can do to change that. “There are two leagues — the SEC and Big Ten — that have entirely different resources,” a Pac-12 school administrator said.
That could make a league that hasn’t put a team in the Playoff in three years even less competitive on a national level. LSU and Alabama can keep staffing up as more money rolls in, but USC and Oregon don’t have the same resources. (No, Nike co-founder Phil Knight will not write a check to cover every one of the Ducks’ wishes.)
Meanwhile, the best programs in the Pac-12 are going to find themselves competing with the bottom of the Big Ten and the SEC in terms of coaching salaries, which will further damage the league’s ability to attract top talent. Purdue’s Jeff Brohm is scheduled to make $5.35 million for this school year. That’s more than the reported amount for every coach in the Pac-12. (The last available amount for Stanford’s David Shaw comes from the school’s 2017 tax return. He made $4.6 million, but it’s possible he makes more now.) While Purdue had to pay Brohm well to keep him from leaving for Louisville, expect Ohio State’s Ryan Day and Penn State’s James Franklin to leapfrog him. Meanwhile, Minnesota’s P.J. Fleck will make $4.6 million next year.
Those numbers suggest the Pac-12 may struggle even more as the gap widens. Last week, Jon Wilner of the Bay Area News Group reported that UCLA ran an $18.9 million deficit for the 2019 fiscal year and needed a bailout from the campus in the form of an interest-bearing loan. The news was somewhat shocking because while other schools in the league have run deficits recently, UCLA had always been fiscally prudent. But the Bruins have been trying — and failing — to compete at the highest levels in football and men’s basketball, and that can get expensive.
Some of the deficit stems from the November 2017 decision to fire football coach Jim Mora, which required a $12.5 million payout to buy out the four years remaining on Mora’s contract. That money was paid out in the 2018 fiscal year — a year in which UCLA balanced its budget. But the expense ate into the reserve fund and the $16 million bonus the Bruins received for switching their apparel deal from Adidas to Under Armour. A pool of money UCLA had hoped to spread across multiple sports and projects suddenly shrank. Meanwhile, the Bruins had to pay for a new coach. Chip Kelly also had an offer from Florida when he chose UCLA, so that demand likely factored into a contract that pays Kelly an average of $4.66 million a season. (After Kelly picked UCLA, Florida hired Dan Mullen away from Mississippi State at an average salary of $6 million a year.)
To make matters more expensive, the storied UCLA men’s basketball team was floundering under Steve Alford. So Alford was fired in December 2018. Between his buyout and the amount owed for the remainder of the 2018-19 season, Alford was owed about $4.5 million. On top of that, UCLA gave new coach Mick Cronin a $2 million signing bonus to cover most of the $2.2 million Cronin owed Cincinnati for leaving while under contract.
Coaching changes in the SEC might include similar dollar figures, but they don’t hurt as much because schools either have the revenue to cover the cost or know they’re about to get that revenue. Arkansas pulled the ripcord on the Chad Morris era last season after 22 games. Buying out Morris will cost the Razorbacks $10 million over the next four years. That gets piled atop the $11.9 million the Razorback Foundation owed when Arkansas fired Bret Bielema*. But Arkansas administrators know they’re about to get an annual windfall once the CBS contract expires and Disney/ESPN begins paying an amount that better reflects that package’s market value. That makes erasing mistakes much easier to stomach.
* Arkansas may not wind up paying the full amount to Bielema. The Razorback Foundation stopped making the payments at the end of 2018 when it discovered that Bielema was being paid only $50,000 — well below market value — to coach the New England Patriots’ defensive line. Bielema has since been hired by the New York Giants, and the matter of his Arkansas buyout appears headed to court. If Arkansas doesn’t end up paying more money, it would save $7 million. More than likely, the sides will settle on an amount and be done with one another.
The fear among administrators in the Pac-12 is that trying to compete with Big Ten and SEC schools in terms of staffing and coaching compensation will all but guarantee deficits unless athletic directors bat 1.000 on their hires. “All of us in this league are two bad football seasons away from being in the exact same situation (as UCLA),” one Pac-12 administrator says.
The revenue gap obviously affects coaching salaries and ancillary football staff numbers, but it also raises the cost of keeping up in other areas. Beyond the additional brainpower and experience with a deep bench of seasoned coaches in support roles, power brokers around college athletics point out that the added financial resources mean bigger nutrition programs. They allow schools to hire staff for and/or beef up mental health programs. They mean more employees on the training and medical staffs and more academic support personnel. The money also impacts the way teams travel in recruiting. More access to private planes allows coaches to see more prospects and waste less travel time waiting for connections that often get delayed. The benefit of that is less time in the airport and more time visiting with recruits.
Other lower-profile sport teams at Big Ten and SEC schools can charter planes, which athletic directors note is better for the players’ bodies and for their academics. One Power 5 coach (not in the SEC or Big Ten) talked about how his budget for analysts is less than what some individual analysts make in the SEC. That coach also pointed out that his recruiting staff is limited to one in-house recruiting person, a graphics person and a student in a work-study program. This matters in an age when, he says, “Kids don’t want to read text messages. They respond to graphic messages, and there were some places that have 10 people doing that.”
On the top end of the college football food chain, you have Ohio State. The Buckeyes have 11 full-time recruiting employees. That includes five who work in creative media. Three videographers and two graphic designers work to create the messaging that the program sends to recruits. That 11 number doesn’t include two full-time interns in personnel, one student helping with on-campus visits and two more students who help with graphics and video. The Buckeyes have had top-five recruiting classes in four of the past five recruiting cycles.
This is what the schools in leagues outside the Big Ten and the SEC will be up against for the foreseeable future. The schools may attempt to make rules curtailing staff sizes, but any such rule will be ripe for an antitrust challenge in federal court. The NCAA already lost such a case in the 1990s when restricted earnings coaches sued, so it will be difficult to craft any rule that doesn’t make it look like competitors are conspiring to arbitrarily cap a labor market. (We should also assume that when more money flows to the players, it probably won’t shrink the gap but merely change the numbers.)
Schools such as Oklahoma, Texas and Clemson have the earning power/donor bases to keep up, but the rest will have to be more creative. The Big Ten and SEC schools will be able to overwhelm with sheer staffing numbers, and it won’t only be Alabama, LSU, Ohio State and Penn State. The windfalls to come will give Ole Miss, Minnesota and Illinois the kind of purchasing power only the superpowers used to enjoy.
But as long as the same five leagues keep acting like peers, we’ll expect the same kind of results no matter how much fatter the wallets are in two conferences.
