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Sportico: SEC to Net NCAA Record $70 Million From March Madness Units


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Posted (edited)

https://www.sportico.com/leagues/college-sports/2025/ncaa-tournament-units-sec-payment-march-madness-1234845447/

SEC to Net NCAA Record $70 Million From March Madness Units

By   March 30, 2025 7:54pm
 

The SEC entered March Madness with a record number of teams in the tournament. It will finish with the biggest payout in tournament history.

Long considered more of a football conference than a basketball one, the SEC qualified 14 of its 16 teams into the men’s field this year, including No. 1 seeds Florida and Auburn. Both are still alive heading into the Final Four next week in San Antonio.

The NCAA distributes hundreds of millions of dollars each year based on success in the men’s tournament. The money flows directly to each conference for every game its teams play in the tournament before the final. It’s a complex formula called “units”—which Sportico broke down in detail here—but in its simplest form, every game played in this year’s tournament will be worth an estimated $2 million for each conference. Now that the Final Four is set, we know exactly how many units each conference has earned.

The SEC, which will play 35 games before the final and therefore earned 35 units, will receive roughly $70 million for its performance in the tournament. That’s by far the highest total ever, eclipsing the 25 units the ACC won in 2016. This year the Big Ten was second, with 21 units, which will pay an estimated $42 million. The Big 12 was third with 20 units for $40 million.

Smaller conferences fared far worse. Twenty leagues earned just one unit, and another four earned just two.

The SEC’s rise as a basketball conference began with Greg Sankey’s ascension to commissioner in 2015. At the time men’s basketball coaches in the league felt the SEC had given up on the sport to focus primarily on football. Sankey and advisor Mike Tranghese, former commissioner of the basketball-focused Big East, raised officiating standards, encouraged teams to spend up for top coaches, and pressed self-promotion. The rise of NIL, which has let richer schools flex their might; expansion; and a new batch of TV deals all helped as well.

From 2014 to 2023, the average SEC men’s basketball budget jumped 76%, a bigger increase than in the Big Ten (69%), Big 12 (66%), ACC (61%) or Pac-12 (50%). The SEC now averages the second-highest men’s basketball budgets in the country, behind only the ACC.

Units are distributed over six years, generating payments to the conferences in annual chunks starting the year after the tournament in which the units are earned. For units earned in 2025, that starts with a payment of roughly $360,000 next year and ends with a payment of roughly $345,000 in 2031, per Sportico’s rough calculations. The funds typically grow about 2.9% each year, but the value goes down temporarily because the canceled 2020 tournament concentrated payments for the following six years.

Many conferences split their unit payouts evenly among their schools, but not all. The West Coast Conference, for example, gives a higher percentage of its distribution to the team that actually earned the units. The ACC, which won the most units in last year’s men’s tournament, also gives more money to the championship teams.

This is also the first year of units in the women’s tournament, a much smaller pool of money ($15 million this year) that is paid out slightly differently. Those payouts can be fully calculated when women’s March Madness finishes its Elite Eight on Monday.

Edited by gatormarc
Images aren't embedding, deleting extra space.

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