JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – The Florida Gators may have won a national title, but the real winner of the 2025 NCAA Tournament is the Southeastern Conference, colloquially known as the SEC.
Recommended Videos
The entire conference consists of 16 schools, and 14 of those schools qualified for this year’s “March Madness,” a record number that surpassed the Big East’s 11 in 2011.
The SEC schools that received a bid for the 2025 NCAA Tournament include:
- Auburn
- Texas A&M
- Ole Miss
- Florida
- Oklahoma
- Missouri
- Arkansas
- Mississippi State
- Vanderbilt
- Alabama
- Georgia
- Kentucky
- Tennessee
- Texas
Now, for each game that one of the schools mentioned above played in, the NCAA awarded the SEC with a “unit,” which according to Sportico, is worth about $2 million.
Based on that math, if every SEC team had been eliminated in the Round of 64, the conference still would’ve earned nearly $30 million.
Overall, the SEC played in 35 games throughout the tournament’s entirety, earning the conference 35 units totaling about $70 million, by far the highest payout awarded to one conference since the ACC accrued 25 units in 2016.
Garth Glissman, an associate commissioner of men’s basketball in the SEC, said, “In the SEC, we believe the financial results follow the underlying work, and we remain laser-focused on our work.”
How is the money disbursed?
Florida, which played in six games throughout the tournament, earned the SEC about $10 million (no units awarded for championship game); however, that money doesn’t go directly to the University of Florida.
The earnings, as explained by Reuters, are distributed to the conferences over six years, meaning the SEC’s dominance this year will lead to payouts for the conference through the 2030-2031 season, with payouts earned this season being disbursed when the following season commences.
However, Florida winning the title this year doesn’t mean they will receive a larger portion of the pot. Similarly, Texas’s early elimination from the tournament doesn’t mean they will receive a smaller amount of money.
The $70 million earned by the SEC this year will be evenly distributed among all 16 conference members over the next six years, meaning that in the 2025-2026 season, each team will receive about $4.4 million from the 2024-2025 season in addition to whatever the conference has accrued from the past five tournaments (usually six, but 2020 season was canceled).
About one year ago, Sportico created this video explaining the value of a March Madness win, and in that video, it states that the NCAA “encourages conferences to split this money evenly,” but sometimes that isn’t the case.
Special Cases
The ACC and SEC, two of the most successful conferences in college sports, divide their winnings among each team evenly, even if a team hasn’t qualified for the NCAA Tournament in the six-year window where winnings are disbursed.
For example, Boston College and Wake Forest haven’t qualified for the NCAA Tournament in the last six years, yet they will receive a payout from the success of schools like Duke, the University of North Carolina, or NC State.
But in the WCC, West Coast Conference, which is typically represented in the NCAA Tournament by Gonzaga, a larger share of the money earned goes to teams that advance further in the tournament.
This was negotiated in 2018 when Gonzaga was considering leaving the conference to join the Mountain West.
In 2026, Gonzaga is set to join the rebuilt Pac-12 Conference, and it remains to be seen how it will divide the conference’s winnings in the 2026-2027 NCAA Tournament.
