Bottom line, viewership drives the world of college sports. Football, though, makes considerably more money than the other sports programs combined and the power it commands steers its respective school as a powerful brand.

People were stumped in 2022. The defections of the Pac-12’s top college programs to the Big Ten was simply baffling. Then the dust settled and a bigger pot of gold was seen far at the end of a rainbow somewhere in the mid-west, the Big Ten, where even the middle of the pack programs saw revenues in the $50M range.