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The SEC set a new record Sunday, earning more men’s NCAA tournament bids than any other conference in history. The total number, led by conference champion Florida: 14. The previous record, set by the Big East 14 years ago: 11.
The conference will earn $26 million right off the bat.
The breakdown goes something like this: Each conference earns a distribution from the “Equal Conference Fund” for participating in the tournament and sending their conference champion, considered the conference’s “automatic qualifier.” The pool is between $50 million and $60 million.
Then, from the Men’s Basketball Performance Fund, conferences earn a “unit,” about $2 million, for each additional team they send to the Big Dance. Teams continue to earn units for each time they survive and advance, all the way up to the national championship game. The fund is worth between $170 million and $180 million. Because conference champions aren’t part of the units calculation, the SEC will wind up with $26 million.
Building a Conference Powerhouse
The SEC wasn’t always steamrolling other conferences in men’s March Madness. A decade ago, the league was sending as few as three teams. But commissioner Greg Sankey invested heavily in the sport, hiring men’s basketball leadership at the conference office and creating performance bonuses.
Fast forward to now, and the league has created a “college football Saturday” culture for men’s basketball. The SEC men’s basketball group-chat boasts six of the top-20 highest-paid coaches (of all the publicly reported contracts) in the sport, schools have built sparkling new facilities, and the league has invested in its conference tournament.
“I say, within this iconic conference, that men’s basketball is still this unique growth opportunity,” SEC associate commissioner for men’s basketball, Garth Glissman, tells Front Office Sports.
The biggest question going into the tournament is whether an SEC team can cut down the nets for the first time since Kentucky’s 2012 championship.
For more on the SEC’s ascent to men’s basketball supremacy, read the FOS Sunday feature.
