SEC announces $721M in revenue for 2021-22, distributing nearly $50M per school
Business is booming in the Southeastern Conference.
The SEC announced its revenue distribution for the 2021-22 fiscal year on Thursday, revealing that it doled out a total of $721.8 million among its 14 members. That’s an average of $49.9 million per school.
That money comes from media contracts, bowl games, the College Football Playoff, the SEC football championship, the SEC men’s basketball tournament, other NCAA tournaments and “a supplemental surplus distribution.”
That’s a massive figure, but it actually represents a small decline for the conference from the year prior when it reported a total $777.8 million, which came out to roughly $54.6 million per school.
According to USA Today, the main reason for the slight decline in revenue and distribution is because each school received “a $4 million share of a signing bonus” from a new football TV deal with CBS in December 2020.
The decline in revenue — the first in 10 years, per USA Today — won’t be a reoccurring thing, however. The SEC has a new TV deal with ESPN that begins in the fall of 2024 and will bring in even more money to the conference.
Additionally, the SEC is set to add Oklahoma and Texas as its 15th and 16th members. OU and UT are slated to join the conference in 2025, but there’s still a chance they could be added for the 2024 season.
The SEC is the first conference to release its fiscal data from 2021-22. The conference has routinely out-gained its counterparts, other than the Big Ten, by a significant margin. The Big Ten, which also has a new TV deal starting in 2024, distributed around $54.2 million to each of its members last year.
