The ACC and Big 12 Are Losing a Rigged Game
How revenue sharing, NIL money, and TV economics are pushing two power conferences toward irrelevance
One of the most entertaining spectacles on social media is the rivalry between fans of the ACC and the Big 12. The debate over which conference will outlast the other becomes so heated at times that it resembles a prize fight.
In one corner we have ACC fans, made overconfident by the revenue advantage of the ACC Network and a sense of entitlement. In the other corner stand the more grounded and long-suffering fans of the Big 12.
The debate is great theatre. Opinions are more important than facts. Data points are misconstrued, misinterpreted, and skewed to prove a point. A large chunk of fans, and many content creators, would rather defend a comforting story than confront an uncomfortable trajectory.
The truth is inconvenient. It doesn’t fit the narrative. And when you do look at the data honestly, what it shows isn’t comforting. It’s distressing.
The Uncomfortable Truth
Here’s the uncomfortable truth fans are avoiding: the economic model of college football is squeezing both the ACC and Big 12 into irrelevancy. The key factors threatening their power conference status – revenue sharing, unregulated NIL payments, and insufficient conference revenue – combine to fetter both with an almost insurmountable competitive disadvantage when compared to the Big Ten and SEC.
The outlook for the viability of the ACC/Big 12 is distressingly bleak. How bleak? Imagine they are shipwreck survivors in open water with no raft and no hope of rescue. They can tread water for a time, but without resources, the struggle to keep their heads above water brings them ever closer to drowning.
The dilemma facing both conferences is fundamentally a capital problem. Across both leagues, nearly every member lacks the resources to keep pace with its peers. The reasons vary by conference and by school. The ACC faces a distinct set of structural constraints. The Big 12 faces a different set. The result, however, is the same: a widening revenue gap that threatens their status as power conferences.
Once money became the primary determinant of survival, the outcome was no longer in doubt. The only mystery is how long they can survive.
A Dire Forecast
Prior to the 2018–19 season, the revenue gap separating the power conferences functioned largely as a point of pride rather than a distinct competitive advantage. That equilibrium began to erode with the launch of the NCAA Transfer Portal on October 15, 2018, and was shattered when court-mandated revenue sharing took effect on July 1, 2025, increasing the cost of remaining competitively relevant by more than 40%.
Revenue sharing is just the “canary in the coal mine” foreshadowing the troubled times ahead. For Big Ten and SEC programs, the additional expense amounted to an inconvenience rather than a financial crisis. For many programs in the ACC and Big 12, however, the mandate exposes underlying financial strain at schools that already require direct institutional support to balance athletic budgets.
How bad is it? It’s 13-9 bad. The disadvantage facing the ACC and Big 12 becomes clear when comparing the cost of revenue sharing across conferences. While the Big Ten and SEC easily absorb revenue sharing as a manageable share of conference distributions, the same obligation consumes a far larger portion of ACC and Big 12 revenues, creating a persistent and escalating competitive imbalance.
By 2031, the projected per-school revenue disparity between the Big Ten/SEC and the ACC/Big 12 is expected to grow from $23-$35M to $59M by 2036. At the same time the cost to fully fund revenue sharing is expected to increase by 54% in the next ten years.
Therein lies the danger for both the ACC and Big 12. A perfect storm of converging economic forces is rapidly pricing both leagues out of national relevance, increasing the cost of remaining competitively viable by more than 40 percent while leaving both with limited options to close the gap.
The Doom Spiral
None of the programs in the Big Ten or SEC will struggle to fully fund revenue sharing, but nearly half of the ACC and Big 12 will – and that should be a red flag to fans. Why? Because parity is essential to revenue growth.
The Big 12 parlayed its parity -- Nearly half (47%) of all conference games from 2018 to 2022 were one-score games, the highest in the power 5—into a 44% increase in per-school media payouts—despite losing Oklahoma and Texas as members.
Parity, and the competitive balance it ensures, directly translates into brand equity…and that is gold to broadcasters. The Big 12 doesn’t get that 44% raise without robust competitive balance.
Parity requires that ALL conference members commit the resources necessary to compete at the highest level. The House settlement changed the formula. It introduced a new fixed operating expense that required allocating existing discretionary capital—capital previously devoted to facilities, coaching retention, recruiting, and program infrastructure-- into mandatory payroll.
If the ACC and Big 12 hope to close the revenue gap with the Big Ten and SEC, they must preserve a critical mass of programs capable of competing at that financial tier. Without it, parity becomes meaningless—producing competitive balance only within a league that is steadily losing relevance in the national hierarchy.
The math tells a grim tale. Projections for both show a widening gap driven by slower media-revenue growth and rising fixed costs tied to revenue sharing. Even optimistic scenarios fail to alter the underlying trajectory: fewer programs able to compete nationally, diminished playoff access, and declining leverage in the broader college football economy.
The Coup de Grâce: Unregulated NIL
Revenue sharing reset the cost floor of college football. Unregulated NIL determines which programs rise above it. Once conference distributions are largely spoken for, the primary differentiating factor becomes donor support—the ability to supplement shared revenue with private capital. That capacity is unevenly distributed, both within conferences and across them.
In theory, most ACC and Big 12 schools can meet their revenue-sharing obligations through institutional support. In practice, they cannot come close to matching the donor-driven NIL ecosystems that now power the Big Ten and SEC. That money does not flow through athletic departments. It flows through boosters, collectives, and private deals that are largely unregulated and detached from real endorsement value.
What exists today is not a functioning NIL market. It is backdoor gamesmanship, a recruiting and retention system that rewards the richest donor bases, not the best-run programs. More donor money produces stronger rosters, stronger rosters produce more wins and exposure, and that exposure attracts still more money. Once this cycle tilts, it accelerates.
The economic reality of the “pay for play” era of college football is daunting for the ACC and Big 12. Since NIL payments began in earnest on July 1, 2021, the playoff picture has hardened into something brutally familiar. Georgia. Michigan. Ohio State. The same programs, over and over, backed by the same donor ecosystems that have always dominated the sport. The names change less than the dollars behind them.
When you map playoff participants to key revenue categories the pattern that emerges is impossible to ignore. Revenue sharing, unregulated NIL and the disparity in conference revenue combined to stratify a caste system in college football. At the top are the apex programs – the titans of college football -- programs that benefit from donor support that often dwarfs conference revenue.
Not surprisingly the most affluent titans are concentrated in the Big 10 and SEC. If you rank power 4 members by using donor-contributions (10-year total) 26 of the top 35 donor bases belong to the Big Ten and SEC. The ACC and Big 12 together scrape together 9. That’s not imbalance. That’s structural separation.
The schools that live in the top tier of donor giving also live in the playoff. Everyone else gets the occasional invite, but they don’t get to stay. They are tourists. They pass through when the bracket breaks just right or when they happen to be the highest-ranked outsider, but they are not built to survive in a donor-driven, pay-for-play economy.
What Comes Next
The real danger facing the ACC and Big 12 is not competitive imbalance. It is the cost of meaningful competition. In the new economic model of college football—where unregulated NIL has become the primary engine of advantage—both leagues are being priced out of national relevance. They simply lack the financial gravity to orbit among the sport’s titans.
“It is not the things we don’t know that get us into trouble. It is the things we know for sure that just ain’t so.”
— Mark Twain
And the thing many fans still believe—that tradition, parity, or clever management can overcome structural capital deficits—just ain’t so.
In Part Two, we’ll stop arguing about which conference has the louder fans and start looking at the only thing that actually matters now: survival. How the ACC and Big 12 plan to navigate a post-NIL, post-media-bubble world, and whether either of them has a path forward that doesn’t end in slow, inevitable irrelevance.