How much money will your school make this bowl season? Did your school not make a bowl and you’re wondering why you’re reading this? Well, thanks to the Big Ten’s revenue sharing arrangement, all 14 teams will receive a payout this season regardless of whether you actually play in a bowl game. So, you’re welcome Rutgers, you still benefit!
In order to tabulate approximately what each team will take in, I looked up what each bowl paid out in 2015 along with what the current College Football Playoff payouts are to each conference and school. Since the Big Ten shares revenue equally, each schools payout will go to the conference to pool together. In addition to the individual bowl payouts, the College Football Playoff pays out the conference $300,000 for each bowl eligible school that achieves the NCAA APR goals, a whopping approximate $51,000,000 if your conference has an Orange Bowl, Rose Bowl or Sugar bowl tie in for their conference champion, and $300,000 to each school individually for meeting the above APR goal. Here is the breakdown for this year:
Quick Lane Bowl (Maryland Terrapins) - $1,200,000
Foster Farms Bowl (Indiana Hoosiers) - $2,212,500
Music City Bowl (Nebraska Cornhuskers) - $2,750,000
Outback Bowl (Iowa Hawkeyes) - $3,500,000
Pinstripe Bowl (Northwestern Wildcats) - $2,000,000
Holiday Bowl (Minnesota Golden Gophers) - $2,825,000
Orange Bowl (Michigan Wolverines) - $4,000,000
Fiesta Bowl (Ohio State Buckeyes) - $6,000,000
Rose Bowl (Penn State Nittany Lions) - $4,000,000
Cotton Bowl (Wisconsin Badgers) - $4,000,000
Total - $32,487,500
Additionally, factoring in the APR payout for each school to the conference plus the APR payout to the school, that’s an additional $6,000,000 in the pot because we’re all B1G and have smart athletes, right?
So, that puts it at $38,487,500. That’s a lot to split but since the College Football Playoff also has its own payout if your conference has a direct tie in for its champion to the Rose, Orange or Sugar Bowl (aka, if you are a Power 5 conference), you get an additional $51,000,000 payout to be distributed to your league’s schools. That puts the total at a whopping $89,487,500 to split up.
All things equal, that puts each schools payout at $6,391,964.29. That’s a ton of money per school simply for the Big Ten getting 10 bowl eligible schools but really a vast majority comes from having a team in the playoffs and three additional teams in NY6 bowls, which have much larger payouts than most other bowls.
Oh, and don’t worry Ohio State and Wisconsin, because the playoff semi-final as well as the Cotton, Fiesta or Peach Bowl are called out in the guidance, you also receive a $2.08M stipend for each game (so OSU could receive it twice if they go to the national championship) to cover expenses associated with it. To be honest I have no idea why the Orange and Rose Bowl aren’t mentioned in that guidance as well since they are apart of the NY6 bowls, but here we are. It could have just been poorly worded and meant to cover all NY6 bowls but that would just be a guess on my part.
Of course, this is all a projection based upon 2015 total figures and is certainly subject to increase if there are additional revenues realized. Additionally, the new popular thing is for these bowls to give players individual packages of various apparel and/or other items as well, so it’s the rare instance in which a player is actually compensated with something. All of this is also subject to revenue sharing, of which Rutgers and Nebraska (?) are still not full revenue sharing members of the Big Ten. That could skew things slightly but not too much. Maryland’s contract was setup in a unique manner where they are a full member up front and they start receiving lesser shares a few years down the road once their financial condition improves. Let's hope the on the field results this bowl season are as good as the money the conference is getting!