Despite only five of its teams receiving 2024 March Madness bids, the ACC will earn roughly $34 million from its success in this year’s men’s basketball tournament, more than any other conference.
The NCAA distributes revenue to its member institutions via a complex series of funds, the largest of which is based on March Madness performance. Instead of giving that money directly to the schools, however, the governing body pays it out to the conferences using a system called “units.” Every conference earns one “unit” for each tournament game its teams play prior to the final.
This year, the ACC earned 17 units for the 17 games that its teams will play prior to the final. Based on NCAA revenue projections, Sportico calculates that each unit will be worth approximately $2 million, for a total of $34 million.
Although No. 1 seed North Carolina lost in the Sweet 16, the ACC sent three teams to the Elite Eight: No. 4 Duke, No. 6 Clemson and No. 11 NC State (which made the Final Four). The Wolfpack was the only double-digit seed to even reach the third round, and their five unexpected units helped push the ACC over the other conferences.
The SEC, which claimed last year’s largest unit haul, finished just behind the ACC this year, as the eight teams it sent to the tournament earned 16 units worth $32 million. The Big 12 and Big Ten were also close with 15 units apiece.
Even though the Final Four is yet to be played, the unit totals for this year are fully set because no units are awarded for the championship game.
The smaller conferences had relatively underwhelming results this year, as opposed to 2023 when Conference USA picked up five units via No. 9-seed Florida Atlantic’s trip to the semifinals, or 2022 when Saint Peters’ Cinderella run yielded four units for the MAAC.
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 2024, that starts with a payment of roughly $349,000 next year and ends with a payment of roughly $335,000 in 2030 (the value eventually goes down because the canceled 2020 tournament concentrated payments for the following six years).
The Pac-12, whose future is uncertain with 10 of its members switching conferences after this season, picked up 10 units this year. The departing schools recently signed a formal agreement with the two remaining members—Washington State and Oregon State—which states that all future Pac-12 revenue will stay with the conference. This means that Arizona, which earned three units by advancing to the Sweet 16, will not see any of the revenue that will flow from those units. It will be the same for the tens of millions of dollars for success in previous March Madness tournaments that are yet to be distributed to the Pac-12.
In the conference realignment era, units, and therefore the corresponding payouts, generally stay with the conferences, meaning that many schools aren’t seeing money from their past units earned. Houston, for instance, made the Sweet 16 in 2023, but revenue from that run will be funneled to the American Athletic Conference, to which Houston belonged last year, as opposed to the Big 12, to which the school now belongs.
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. That’s significant for Gonzaga, the school that has earned more units over the past six years than any program in the country.
In the women’s tournament, the Pac-12 has played 20 games, the most of any conference, with a handful of games left in the bracket. The NCAA distributes no money based on teams’ success in women’s March Madness, but there is active discussion toward setting up a process by which similar payouts would occur similarly to the men’s tournament.
With assistance from Eben Novy-Williams.
More March Madness stories:
–March Madness Exile Pepperdine Makes the Most as Tourney Host
–UConn Banks on Basketball’s Value in Football-Driven NCAA
–Ousted Cinderellas Still Cash in After March Madness Losses
–JuJu Watkins, Hannah Hidalgo Lead Next Wave
