What the SWAC’s Conference Revenue Doesn’t Tell You About HBCU Athletics Finance

Conference Finance  ·  Analysis & Commentary  ·  April 2026

The SWAC’s position as the top-revenue FCS conference is real and deserves recognition. But conference revenue and school revenue are two different conversations — and conflating them leaves the most important questions unasked.

A recent piece from SheLovesThee made waves across HBCU sports media with a bold claim: the 2025 FCS revenue numbers are in, the SWAC is number one, and critics owe the conference an apology. The enthusiasm is understandable. The SWAC’s financial position — $25.6 million in revenue, $22.4 million in net assets, zero liabilities — is genuinely impressive by any standard for an FCS conference. Commissioner Charles McClelland’s financial stewardship deserves recognition, and the cultural assets the SWAC has built — the Bayou Classic, the Magic City Classic, the SWAC Championship — are irreplaceable in ways no other conference can claim.

Data Driven HBCU does not dispute any of that. What we want to add is context — because some of the comparisons drawn and conclusions reached in that piece go further than the underlying data supports, and in ways that matter for how HBCU athletics finance is understood by its most important audience: the fans, administrators, and policymakers who care about the long-term health of these programs.

What the Data Can — and Cannot — Tell Us

The financial figures cited in the SheLovesThee piece come from IRS Form 990 filings, retrieved through ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer. You can view this data here. These are conference-level filings that document the amount of money flowing into and out of each conference office. They are legitimate, publicly verifiable, and appropriately sourced.

What they do not show is what individual member schools received, how that money was originally generated, or whether conference financial health translated into school-level financial sustainability. Those answers require a different set of documents: the NCAA Membership Financial Reporting System (MFRS) filings that each school submits annually. When you layer those school-level filings on top of the conference 990s, a more nuanced picture emerges.

It is also important to note that MFRS filings have their own limitations. Schools do not always classify incoming revenue consistently — some bundle conference and NCAA distributions into a single category, while others separate them. Some schools’ filings show distribution amounts in unexpected categories, near-zero figures that appear inconsistent with conference 990 data, or formats that prevent category-level extraction entirely. Any analysis built on this data, including ours, should be treated as an informed estimation rather than a verified fact. We are transparent about this limitation throughout our work.

The CAA Comparison Requires a Correction

The most significant factual issue in the SheLovesThee piece involves the comparison used to evaluate Hampton’s and NC A&T’s decision to join the CAA. The article cites the CAA’s revenue as $2.04 million, then asks how a school could leave a $14 million conference for a $2 million one.

CAA Football is a standalone nonprofit established specifically to administer football operations for CAA football members. Hampton and NC A&T did not join CAA Football in isolation — they joined the full Coastal Athletic Association, a multi-sport conference encompassing basketball, Olympic sports, conference championships, and a multimedia rights deal with CBS Sports Network. The full CAA’s revenue is substantially larger than $2 million.

Whether Hampton and NC A&T’s move to the CAA was the right decision financially is a legitimate question worth examining. But that examination needs to begin with accurate conference-level comparisons. Building the argument on CAA Football’s revenue alone understates the full CAA’s financial scope and produces a conclusion that the data does not support.

Conference Revenue Is Not School Revenue

This is the most consequential analytical gap in the piece. The SWAC generating $25.6 million in revenue does not mean SWAC member schools received $25.6 million. In FY2025, the SWAC distributed approximately $13.4 million to its member schools — a real and meaningful investment averaging roughly $1.1 million per member.

But that figure needs to be weighed against what those schools are actually operating on. When you examine individual MFRS filings for SWAC institutions, a consistent pattern emerges: student fees and direct institutional support account for the overwhelming majority of athletics revenue at virtually every school. Conference and NCAA distributions are supplementary income — not the financial foundation of these programs.

This is not a criticism of the SWAC’s financial management — it is a structural reality of HBCU athletics that exists independent of how well any conference office performs. Celebrating conference revenue growth without asking whether it meaningfully reaches schools leaves the most important question unexamined.

The SWAC’s $22.4 million in net assets — nearly seven times the MEAC’s $3.4 million — reflects genuine financial discipline. Reserves serve real purposes: stability, capital investment, and protection against revenue volatility. But the relationship between conference-level reserve accumulation and school-level financial sustainability is worth continued scrutiny, and it is a conversation HBCU athletics stakeholders should be willing to have.

Clarifying the NCAA Tournament Unit Claim

The SheLovesThee piece states that the SWAC pulled in “$10.8 million from consecutive First Four wins.” This characterization needs three corrections.

The dollar figure is off. The SWAC’s FY2025 Form 990 shows approximately $9.2 million in NCAA pass-through distributions — not $10.8 million.

The mechanism is a rolling six-year pool, not a lump sum. The NCAA’s tournament unit system works as follows: every game a conference’s team plays in the Men’s Basketball Tournament — win or lose, First Four or Final Four — earns the conference one unit. In FY2025, each unit paid approximately $342,000 per year over six years, totaling roughly $2.05 million per unit over its lifespan. Those payouts are distributed annually, meaning the $9.2 million the SWAC received in FY2025 represents units accumulated across every tournament from 2019 through 2024 — six cycles simultaneously paying into the same pool. The most recent contribution came from Grambling State’s 2024 tournament appearance: they won the First Four against Montana State and lost in the Round of 64 to #1 Purdue, earning the SWAC two units worth approximately $684,000 per year through FY2030. That is one meaningful slice of the pool, not the whole picture — and it takes years of appearances accumulating together to produce a $9 million annual distribution.

The money does not stay at the conference. Tournament unit revenue flows through the SWAC to its member schools. It is a pass-through, not a revenue line the conference retains. How the SWAC allocates that revenue among its members internally is not publicly disclosed in the documents available to us — we cannot confirm the exact distribution methodology from the 990 or MFRS filings alone. What we can confirm is that it reaches schools, and that presenting it as a SWAC financial achievement without that context misrepresents what the number actually means. For a deeper breakdown of how the unit system works and what individual SWAC schools received in FY2025, see our companion piece: One Game at a Time: How the MEAC & SWAC Earn Revenue from March Madness.

Within Conferences, Distributions Are Not Equal

One finding that emerges clearly from school-level MFRS data is that conference distributions are not evenly shared, and post-season success leads to dramatic variation in what individual schools receive.

The Celebration Bowl illustrates this directly. Each conference reportedly receives $1.5 million from the bowl. According to confidential sources, the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference’s bowl participant that season, South Carolina State, received the majority of the Celebration Bowl revenue. The remaining schools split the remaining fraction. The financial reward for winning is real and appropriate, but the headline conference revenue number conceals that concentration entirely.

The MEAC’s distribution policy applies the same principle to basketball: the school that earned an NCAA tournament bid retains the majority of its six-year rolling share. This is why some MEAC schools’ distribution figures look dramatically different from others with comparable program profiles. Year-over-year comparisons and multi-year averages tell a far more accurate story than any single filing year.

A Note on Accounting Consistency

Across the MFRS filings we examined, inconsistencies in how schools classify distribution revenue appear. Without further context from member institutions, we cannot say with certainty that a specific dollar amount came from a conference’s television contract versus its NCAA pass-through pool. The total distribution figures are more reliable than their internal breakdowns. Any published analysis, including ours, should state that limitation clearly.

The Bottom Line

The SWAC’s position as the highest-revenue FCS conference is a genuine achievement. The classic game portfolio — Bayou Classic, Magic City Classic, SWAC Championship — represents cultural and financial assets that no other conference can replicate, and the conference’s management under Commissioner McClelland has produced something financially durable. SheLovesThee’s piece captured real momentum, and the community pride behind it is well-founded.

Data Driven HBCUs’ intention here is not to diminish that achievement. It is to ensure that the conversation around HBCU athletics finance is grounded in what the numbers can actually support. The CAA comparison used in the piece needs to account for the full conference, not just its football subsidiary. Conference revenue and school revenue are different conversations that require different data. Post-season distributions create year-to-year volatility that single-year snapshots cannot fully capture. And the central question of whether conference-level financial success is translating into school-level sustainability remains open — and deserves to stay open until the data provides a clearer answer.

We will continue examining that full picture as the data becomes available. That is what this work is for.