MW The $7 billion reason the Big Ten is dominating college sports
By Weston Blasi
The Big Ten Conference took its third major title for the 2025-26 athletic season with the University of Michigan's NCAA Championship win this week
University of Michigan men's basketball head coach Dusty May celebrates after defeating the UConn Huskies 69-63 in the national championship game on Monday night.
Three major titles in one year? The Big Ten is having a moment.
The Big Ten Conference continued its dominant 2025-26 athletic season with the University of Michigan's 69-63 victory over the University of Connecticut in the men's basketball national championship game on Monday night. The victory marked the first time since 2007 that a single conference has secured the national titles in football (Indiana University), women's basketball (UCLA), and men's basketball.
So what's the reason for the Big Ten's dominance? The story begins, and ends, with money.
In 2022, the Big Ten signed a new media-rights agreement with Fox $(FOX)$, CBS $(PSKY)$ and NBC $(CMCSA)$, worth approximately $7 billion over seven years, to share the TV broadcast rights to the conference's football and basketball games. The deal is believed to be the richest ever on an annual basis for a college sports property - outpacing the Southeastern Conference (SEC), whose TV deal is also for $7 billion but spread over 10 years.
Television rights are the economic engine of college sports, with windfalls flowing directly into universities' coaching salaries, facilities and recruiting infrastructure. Luring in the best players is a surefire way to win on the field, and those efforts can compound over time.
"Money guarantees relevance, if not winning," said Bill Carter, founder of NIL Forum and part of the consulting practice Student-Athlete Insights. "If you're as visible as the Big Ten schools are, you're going to get attention of elite recruits."
Carter believes that Big Ten's annual revenue - approximately $1 billion, which gets distributed to each school - is a main driver of the conference's recent success. But it's not as if other conferences have not tried to get bigger TV deals to compete. The Big Ten was only able to negotiate such a strong deal after some savvy maneuvers.
According to Carter, the Big Ten was smart to not choose only one network to broadcast its games. Unlike the SEC, which is exclusively tied to ESPN, the Big Ten split its rights across Fox Sports, CBS Sports and NBC Sports, maximizing both exposure and revenue - a model long used by the NFL.
Carter also touted the Big Ten's ability to organize name, image and likeness deals for athletes using NIL collectives. While some schools and conferences have deprioritized NIL collectives, the Big Ten has used them as a recruiting chip, he said. Instead of direct pay from universities, athletes receive funds indirectly through NIL collectives, donors and sponsorship deals, which the school can broker. Collectives are affiliated with, but not run by, the schools.
Thirdly, Carter pointed to the Big Ten's recent expansion as a main driver of revenue, and subsequently of its recent success on the court and field.
"We are going to look back at the geographic expansion of the Big Ten ... when they signed USC, UCLA, Washington and Oregon, as one of the most significant developments that could have happened in college sports," Carter said.
After a series of expansions, the Big Ten grew from 10 member institutions to 18, most recently in 2024.
Part of the idea behind expansion - in addition to getting big schools with historic athletic programs and large followings into its ecosystem - was expanding the footprint of the conference and, just as importantly, its broadcast window.
"Think about the Big Ten as a media company - they want the largest possible geographic footprint. It starts at New Jersey [and] goes all the way to USC [and] Oregon, with its most powerful schools right in the middle," Carter said. "Visibility, selling tickets, that's important. But then, pick a Saturday in the fall: Because of that expansion, the first Big Ten [college football] game comes on at noon [Eastern time], and the last game is on 10 p.m. [Eastern time]. That looks more like the NFL."
In effect, the Big Ten isn't just thinking about itself as an athletic conference, but as a distribution network.
The Big Ten's main conference competition, the SEC, has expanded too. But it has remained geographically focused on member schools across the Southern U.S., whereas the Big Ten now has a coast-to-coast presence.
See: The 5 highest-paid college basketball players this year: No. 1 is making $4.2 million from NIL
The Big Ten's financial power is evident in men's basketball, where three Big Ten schools (Illinois, Michigan and Michigan State) ranked among the top seven spenders among the schools that made the Sweet 16 round of this year's March Madness tournament, as reported by The Athletic.
And in college football, Michigan, Ohio State, Penn State and Oregon are also routinely among the biggest spenders in the country.
Much of the focus on TV revenue and NIL spending are confined to men's basketball and football, the two biggest revenue drivers for most Division I schools' athletic programs.
"I think what it does, it affords us the opportunity to make sure that we can continually do the things we need to do to take care of our student-athletes, to fortify our institutions, to build our programs," Big Ten Commissioner Kevin Warren told the Associated Press about the conference's landmark TV deal when it was signed.
The financial strength of the conference is part of the reason some private-equity funds have been doing due diligence on the Big Ten, with hopes to invest in the conference itself.
Of course, more money doesn't always guarantee championships, but it does raise the floor. And right now, no conference's floor - or ceiling - is higher than the Big Ten's.
"It takes a while to knock the big dog off the porch," Carter said. "We could be looking at a seven- to 10-year run of Big Ten success."
Read on: When college athletes go to the NFL, some of them are taking pay cuts in the millions
-Weston Blasi
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(END) Dow Jones Newswires
April 11, 2026 12:46 ET (16:46 GMT)
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