NCAA Division I
Sports rights Sport National TV contract Total Revenues ( Per Year )
NCAA March Madness Basketball CBS , Turner $ 8.8bn ( $ 1.1bn )
College Football Playoff Football ESPN $ 5.6bn ( $ 470m )
Pac-12 Conference All Fox , ESPN $ 3.0bn ( $ 250m )
Big Ten Conference ( Big Ten/B1G ) All Fox , ESPN , CBS $ 2.6bn ( $ 440m )
Atlantic Coast Conference ( ACC ) All ESPN $ 3.6bn ( $ 240m )
Big 12 Conference All Fox , ESPN $ 2.6bn ( $ 200m )
Southeastern Conference ( SEC ) All CBS , ESPN $ 2.6bn ( $ 205m )
American Athletic Conference All ESPN $ 910m ( $ 130m )
Mountain West Conference All CBS , ESPN $ 116m ( $ 18m )
Mid-American Conference ( MAC ) All ESPN $ 100m ( $ 8m )
Broadcasting and revenue
NCAA Division I schools have broadcasting contracts that showcase their more popular sports — typically football and men 's basketball — on network television and in basic cable channels . These contracts can be quite lucrative , particularly for DI schools from the biggest conferences . For example , the Big Ten conference in 2016 entered into contracts with Fox and ESPN that pay the conference $ 2.64 billion over six years . The NCAA also holds certain TV contracts . For example , the NCAA 's contract to show the men 's basketball championship tournament ( widely known as March Madness ) is currently under a 14-year deal with CBS and Turner that runs from 2010 to 2024 and pays $ 11 billion . For the 2014–15 fiscal year , the conferences that earned the most revenues ( and that distributed the most revenues to each of their member schools ) were : SEC — $ 527 million ( dispersed $ 33 million to each of its member schools ) Big 10 — $ 449 million ( dispersed $ 32 million each ) Pac 12 — $ 439 million ( dispersed $ 25 million each ) ACC — $ 403 million ( dispersed $ 26 million each ) Big 12 — $ 268 million ( dispersed $ 23 million each )
NCAA Division I (D-I) is the highest level of intercollegiate athletics sanctioned by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) in the United States. D-I schools include the major collegiate athletic powers, with larger budgets, more elaborate facilities and more athletic scholarships than Divisions II and III as well as many smaller schools committed to the highest level of intercollegiate competition. This level was once called the University Division of the NCAA, in contrast to the lower level College Division; these terms were replaced with numeric divisions in 1973. The University Division was renamed Division I, while the College Division was split in two; the College Division members that offered scholarships or wanted to compete against those who did became Division II, while those who did not want to offer scholarships became Division III. For college football only, D-I schools are further divided into the Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS), the Football Championship Subdivision (FCS), and those institutions that do not have any football program. FBS teams have higher game attendance requirements and more players receiving athletic scholarships than FCS teams. The FBS is named for its series of postseason bowl games, with various polls ranking teams after the conclusion of these games, while the FCS national champion is determined by a multi-team bracket tournament. For the 2014-15 school year, Division I contained 345 of the NCAA's 1,066 member institutions, with 125 in the Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS), 125 in the Football Championship Subdivision (FCS), and 95 non-football schools, with six additional schools in the transition from Division II to Division I. There was a moratorium on any additional movement up to D-I until 2012, after which any school that wants to move to D-I must be accepted for membership by a conference and show the NCAA it has the financial ability to support a D-I program.