The Big Ten’s Bigger Footprint

Forbes magazine recently proclaimed the Big Ten conference the “cash king” of college sports. The conference generated $315 million in revenue in the fiscal year ended in June 2012, the most of any conference, and was expected to reward most of its member schools with a split of $25.7 million each the next year. The primary source of the money has been television -- most of it coming from a lucrative contract that Jim Delany, the Big Ten’s commissioner, negotiated with ESPN and from the conference’s own cable network, which Delany was mostly responsible for creating in 2007.

Delany was among the first to recognize the influence of cable, then satellite. His biggest coup has been the creation of the Big Ten Network, which is expected to produce $270 million of revenue in 2013 for the conference and its schools. And yet, for all of the TV money now in college sports, according to a recent Moody’s study, 90 percent of athletic departments at public schools require subsidies from their universities to meet their budgets. Even as the TV ratings grow, the National Collegiate Athletic Association, college sports’ governing body, faces mounting litigation and questions about the core purpose of college athletics, most prominently: Who should benefit from all of the money that college sports generate? And why do most athletic departments still run at a deficit? As Delany pushes the Big Ten into the New York and Washington metropolitan areas, he acknowledges the issues but says, “I’d rather have the problem of too much money than too little.” (Nov 30)