Are College Football Playoff Payouts Becoming More Imbalanced?

In 2014, the distribution of football revenue to conferences changed hands from the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) to the College Football Playoff (CFP), a single-elimination invitational tournament (two semifinal games and a championship game) to determine a national champion for the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS). With the exception of the University of Notre Dame (an independent university selected to play in the CFP and a semifinalist in 2018–19 and 2020–21), the four selected teams each year have all been from Power 5 conferences [Southeastern (SEC), 14 schools; Atlantic Coast (ACC), 15; Big Ten, 14; Big 12, 10; and Pac-12, 12]. No team from the next five largest conferences commonly known as the Group of 5 [American Athletic (known as the Big East before the 2013–14 season), Conference USA, Mid-American, Mountain West, or Sun Belt] has ever been selected for the CFP. Because the CFP is run by the conferences and not by the NCAA, all bowl game revenue goes directly to the conferences, much of it to the Power 5. The bowl revenues earned by the Power 5 conferences are substantially larger than those of the Group of 5 conferences. The growing disparity between these two groups is well-documented (Leeds et al., 2018, The Economics of Sports). This paper adds to the existing literature by quantifying the degree of revenue payout imbalance in Power 5 conferences, Group of 5 conferences, and all 10 conferences