Making sense of splitting the Big 12 dollars
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. | Revenue distribution in the Big 12 comes down to the direction you face.
Those who look back favor the status quo. Those looking ahead seek change.
Hindsight carried the day.
Thursday, as the annual Big 12 meetings wound down, commissioner Dan Beebe and board of directors chairman Harvey Pearlman announced no adjustments in the plan that this year will distribute a record $113.5 million to the members.
“It would be more important for us to focus on how to increase revenue overall for the conference than worrying about distributing the revenue we have,” said Pearlman, the Nebraska chancellor.
New media streams such as the league’s own cable channel and Web site possibilities are in Beebe’s sights, and Thursday’s pronouncement was also about curtailing the chatter about distribution. Frankly, Beebe is tired of talking about it.
The issue won’t disappear, not with larger-budget schools such as Texas, Oklahoma, Nebraska and Texas A&M likely pulling in more annually — mostly from television football revenues — than Kansas State, Iowa State and Baylor.
But the Big 12 made the right move by standing pat. Here, history is important. When it became apparent in the early 1990s that the Big Eight and Southwest Conferences wouldn’t survive separately in the changing college sports landscape, they pooled their strengths.
Greatest among them, the national drawing power of the major football programs. But there was a complication. The Longhorns and Aggies had choices to join other conferences, and the state of Texas represented half of the new conference’s television markets. Compromises had to be made, and the 12 schools agreed to a formula in place today.
Half of regular-season TV income is separated in 12 equal shares. The other half goes into an appearance pool and participants kept their bounty, which today means as much as $520,000 for a network nonconference appearance.
The idea now, as then, is to have it both ways. Share half, and let the more attractive programs coveted by the networks keep half.
“Did everybody receive exactly what they wanted? No,” said Oklahoma athletic director Joe Castiglione, who was Missouri’s athletic director when the conference formed.
But at the end of those meetings, the founding fathers believed they had crafted the right agreements.
Recently, more have asked whether it’s time to change.
“The league is 12 years old, and it’s a good time to take a look at the issue,” Baylor athletic director Ian McCaw said.
In the current system, smaller-budget schools earn about $1 million to $2 million less annually from TV appearance money than the bigger-budget schools such as Texas, Oklahoma, Nebraska and Texas A&M.
Even McCaw realizes the difference isn’t great.
“It wouldn’t have a dramatic affect on any one athletic department,” he said.
But more money is available to smaller-budget schools by scheduling better nonleague games. Baylor will pick up $300,000 for playing at Connecticut on ESPN2. The message: Play better schedules.
Selling tickets is a bigger revenue generator than TV money as the bottom lines at Missouri and Kansas will prove when the fiscal year ends. Win games, sell tickets, which means more TV — it’s all a winning cycle that closes the gap of larger- and smaller-budget programs more than asking the conference to change a formula.
And after a year in which two mid-to-smaller-budget programs — the Jayhawks and Tigers — wound up as the league’s highest-ranked Big 12 teams, it’s difficult to argue for change.
