One Game at a Time: How the MEAC & SWAC Earn Revenue from March Madness

The NCAA Tournament pays conferences for every game their teams play. For the MEAC and SWAC, those payments trickle down to programs running on thin margins. The FY2025 numbers show exactly how far they go.

Based on FY2025 NCAA Membership Financial Reporting System (MFRS) Data

On a Wednesday night in Dayton, Ohio, in March of 2025, Alabama State guard Amarr Knox caught the ball in the lane with 1.3 seconds left and laid it in. The Hornets beat Saint Francis PA 70–68 in the NCAA Tournament First Four — the program’s first March Madness win. Dayton erupted. It was the kind of moment college basketball was made for.

Two days later, Alabama State walked into the Round of 64 as a 16-seed, faced the top overall seed, Auburn, and lost by 23. That was it — two games, one extraordinary week, one inevitable one. The Hornets packed their bags and went home.

What they left behind, though, were two units.

Each game played in the NCAA Tournament generates one unit for the conference. At roughly $342,000 per year, paid over six years, that’s about $2 million per unit — shared equally among every school in the conference.

The NCAA’s tournament revenue distribution works on a unit system. For every game a conference’s team plays in the Men’s Basketball Tournament — win or lose, First Four or Final Four — the conference earns one unit. Those units are then paid out annually over six years. In FY2025, each unit was worth approximately $342,000 per year, meaning a single game — one night of basketball — generates roughly $2.05 million in total conference revenue over its lifespan.

Those funds are then divided among every member of the conference. A school that never makes the tournament still receives a share. A school that earns the bid still receives the same share as its conference siblings. The unit system is, by design, collective.

For Alabama State’s two units from the 2025 tournament, the SWAC will receive approximately $684,000 per year through FY2031 — just over $4.1 million total. Divided across eight SWAC members, that’s roughly $85,000 per school per year. It is, depending on your perspective, either meaningful recurring revenue or a rounding error in a department budget.

The table below shows exactly how units accumulate as a team advances through the bracket.

*Rule change effective 2026: In January 2026, the NCAA approved an expansion of the Basketball Performance Fund that adds units for championship game participants — one unit per team in the title game, plus an additional unit for the national champion. Those new units begin with the 2026 tournament and will appear in distributions starting in FY2027. They do not affect the FY2025 figures discussed in this report.

Following the Money

Understanding where that tournament revenue shows up in a school’s financial report requires knowing how the NCAA routes it. The NCAA does not write a check directly to Alabama State or any other school. The money goes to the conference first. The conference then distributes it to its members. That distinction matters when reading a school’s annual financial filing.

The NCAA Membership Financial Reporting System — MFRS — is the standardized financial disclosure that every Division I athletic department submits each year. Within it, two line items capture NCAA and conference-related revenue:

Category 12 is NCAA Distributions paid directly to the institution. This covers the money the NCAA sends directly to the school, bypassing the conference office. It includes the Academic Enhancement Fund, which is distributed based on academic performance metrics such as the Academic Progress Rate; the Student Assistance Fund, which covers student-athlete needs such as emergency travel, health insurance, and graduate scholarships; and Grant-in-Aid awards, a supplemental payment tied to the number of scholarships the school offers. Tournament unit revenue does not appear here — it never goes directly from the NCAA to a school.

Category 13 is Conference Distributions — everything the institution received from its conference. This is where tournament unit revenue lives. The NCAA pays the Basketball Fund to each conference annually based on its six-year rolling unit total. The conference then splits that amount among its members, typically equally. Category 13 also includes the conference’s own operating distributions, media rights revenue, championship proceeds, and any other NCAA pass-through programs the conference handles on behalf of its members.

This is why comparing Category 12 or Category 13 alone across conferences can be misleading. Two schools receiving the same total NCAA and conference revenue may show very different splits between the two categories, depending entirely on how their conference routes money. The combined figure — Category 12 plus Category 13 — is the more meaningful comparator.

March Madness 2025: The 2025 Tournament

Four of the conferences discussed in this report sent representatives to the 2025 NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament. Their results — and the units they generate — will appear in conference distributions beginning in FY2026.

Norfolk State drew the #1 seed Florida and lost by 26 — a common outcome for a 16-seed facing the tournament’s top line. But Norfolk State was there, and that appearance generated one unit for the MEAC, worth roughly $342,000 per year for six years, shared among the conference’s members. SIUE played its first-ever Division I NCAA Tournament game against the #1 seed Houston and lost by 38. One unit for the OVC is all the same.

The SWAC left Dayton with the most units — two — courtesy of Alabama State’s Knox and that layup with 1.3 seconds remaining.

What Was Active in FY2025

The 2025 tournament did not generate the distributions recorded in FY2025 MFRS reports — they reflect units accumulated from 2019 through 2024. Six tournament cycles are in play simultaneously, each contributing a slice of annual revenue until their six-year window closes. The 2024 tournament is the most recent one reflected in FY2025 distributions.

Howard’s loss to Wagner in the First Four still generated one unit for the MEAC — participation alone earns it, regardless of result. Grambling’s First Four win over Montana State, followed by their first-round appearance against #1 Purdue, earned two. Howard received a share of the MEAC’s unit distributions in FY2025, as did every other MEAC member.

The six-year rolling pool means FY2025 distributions include units from every tournament between 2019 and 2024. A deep run from years past still contributes to this year’s check. A run of early exits shrinks the pool — slowly, but steadily.

What the Schools Actually Received

The table below shows FY2025 figures for Categories 12 and 13 for 10 HBCU programs with available MFRS data, along with total program revenue and the operating surplus or defDeficit

The first thing the table makes clear is the variation in how conferences route money. Prairie View A&M received just $8,019 in direct NCAA distributions (Category 12) but $1.26 million through the conference (Category 13) — meaning nearly all of their NCAA-adjacent revenue arrived via SWAC distribution. Norfolk State, by contrast, received $837,521 in Category 12 and $951,608 in Category 13, a split that reflects both the MEAC’s distribution structure and Norfolk State’s own academic program metrics. Neither split tells you what each school “earned” from the tournament. The combined figure is the one that matters.

Four of the five MEAC schools in this dataset reported net positions of zero, with expenses exactly matching revenues. This reflects how certain institutions categorize institutional transfers and auxiliary revenues, not necessarily that the books balance perfectly at every level. Their full financial statements provide a more complete picture.

The SWAC Financial Landscape

Among the six SWAC programs with FY2025 data available, four ran deficits. The table below adds context: student fee dependency, institutional support as a share of revenue, athletic aid spending, and NCAA and conference distributions.

Prairie View A&M posted the largest deficit in the dataset at $8.15 million — $26 million in expenses against $17.9 million in revenue. The program sponsors 18 sports, committed $4.19 million to athletic aid, and received $1.27 million in combined NCAA and conference distributions. Institutional support accounted for 54.6% of the program’s reported revenue.

Grambling State carried the second-largest deficit, $4.97 million, on a total revenue base of just $9.27 million — the smallest in the SWAC subset. That revenue base means Grambling’s athletic aid commitment of $3.95 million represented 42.6% of total revenue, the highest ratio in the dataset. Grambling was the SWAC’s 2024 tournament representative. Their two units from that run are contributing approximately $684,000 per year to the conference’s Basketball Fund distributions through FY2030.

MVSU and UAPB were the only SWAC programs in this dataset that did not record a deficit. MVSU’s $286,303 surplus came on a $5.58 million revenue base — the smallest athletic budget in the group. UAPB reported revenues and expenses equaling $14.2 million.

Distributions Against the Gap

Putting unit-based revenue alongside the operating deficit numbers yields a different picture.

For Prairie View, $1.27 million in combined distributions represents about 15.6 cents for every dollar of the $8.15 million gap. For Grambling, $1.12 million covers roughly 22.5 cents on the dollar of their $4.97 million deficit. FAMU distributions cover about 181% of the $399,229 deficit — the one case in the SWAC data where the distribution figure exceeds the gap.

These distributions bundle multiple revenue streams. Tournament unit revenue is one component alongside the Academic Enhancement Fund, Student Assistance Fund, and conference-specific allocations. Isolating the tournament unit contribution precisely requires conference-level distribution records that are not uniformly captured in public MFRS filings. The figures above represent the full picture of what each school received from the NCAA and its conference — not just tournament units.

A Different Starting Line

NC A&T State competes in the CAA — a conference whose member programs operate at a meaningfully different financial scale. In FY2025, UNC Wilmington earned the CAA’s automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament, drew the #3 seed Texas Tech in the Round of 64, and lost 72–82. One unit for the CAA. NC A&T — along with every other CAA member that did not make the tournament — received a share of that unit’s annual payout alongside whatever other distributions the conference sent.

NC A&T recorded $1,056,054 in combined NCAA and conference distributions in FY2025, against total revenues of $22.5 million and a modest surplus of $113,273. The program’s student fee dependency stood at 47.8% of revenue — the highest among all eleven schools in this dataset. Athletic aid spending was $2.89 million, 12.9% of total revenue, the lowest percentage in the group.

What the data doesn’t answer is whether the structural gap between conferences — in media markets, institutional resources, and historical investment — is widening, holding steady, or narrowing. That question requires more years of data than one fiscal year can provide.

What One Game Buys

Amarr Knox’s layup earned Alabama State a place in the record books. It also earned the Southwestern Athletic Conference two units — about $4.1 million over six years, split among every program in the league, including those that have never made the tournament and those that may not for years.

That is the design. The unit system is meant to spread tournament revenue broadly across Division I, not concentrate it at programs that are already winning. Whether the amounts reaching the MEAC and SWAC — distributed through conferences, diluted across members, bundled with other programs in a two-line MFRS entry — represent meaningful support for programs running multi-million-dollar deficits is a question this data raises.

It does not answer it.

‘A National Spotlight and an Additional Unit’

SWAC Commissioner Dr. Charles McClelland has been direct about what the First Four represents for his conference. In 2021, as the SWAC’s Alabama State was preparing for a First Four appearance, McClelland put it plainly: “The First Four for us provides an opportunity for a national spotlight and an opportunity for us to get an additional unit.”

The framing is notable. The First Four, as a structural matter, places the SWAC’s automatic bid against another conference’s automatic bid in a play-in game. Win, and the conference earns two units instead of one from a single tournament appearance. Lose, and it still earns one — the same as going directly to the Round of 64 as a 16-seed and losing there.

McClelland, it is worth noting, was not just the SWAC commissioner when he made that statement. He was also serving on the NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Committee — the body responsible for seeding and bracket placement — and would later serve as its vice chair. He understood the mechanics of the system from both sides of the table.

“The First Four for us provides an opportunity for a national spotlight and an opportunity for us to get an additional unit.”

— SWAC Commissioner Dr. Charles McClelland

No equivalent public statement from MEAC Commissioner Sonja Stills specifically addressing the First Four unit opportunity has surfaced in available reporting. Stills, who became the first female commissioner of a Division I HBCU athletic conference when she took the MEAC post in January 2022, has spoken broadly about revenue generation and building the league’s national brand — goals that tournament exposure and unit revenue both serve.

The Question the Data Doesn’t Resolve

Commissioner McClelland’s framing raises a question that sits at the center of the financial picture this data presents, and it is worth putting to readers directly.

Under the current system, a MEAC or SWAC automatic bid placed in the First Four is virtually guaranteed one unit simply by showing up — the same unit it would earn by losing to a #1 seed in the Round of 64. Win the First Four game, and it earns a second. The structural incentive, then, is not necessarily to build a basketball program capable of winning in the Round of 64. It may be to build one capable of winning a First Four game against a comparable opponent — a far lower bar.

But here is the tension. Investing meaningfully in a basketball program — in recruiting, coaching, facilities, and support staff — costs money that many of these departments do not have. Programs running multi-million-dollar deficits on revenue bases of $9 million or $14 million are not positioned to increase investment in a single sport simply. And the unit system, by distributing revenue equally among all conference members regardless of which school made the tournament, does not create a direct financial incentive for any individual program to invest more in basketball. The conference as a whole benefits from a tournament appearance. The school that earned the bid benefits equally with the ones that did not.

So the question, for readers who have followed the numbers this far: are the additional units available through a First Four appearance — roughly $342,000 per year for six years, divided across all conference members — sufficient to make increased investment in basketball a financially rational choice for these programs? Or does the structure of the unit system, combined with the scale of the deficits and the distribution of revenue back to non-participants, make that investment difficult to justify on financial grounds alone?

Those questions do not have simple answers. The data, laid out here, is where any honest attempt at them has to start.

Data Notes

Incomplete conference coverage. Not all MEAC or SWAC members have available FY2025 MFRS data at the time of this writing. Bethune-Cookman is a private institution not required to file publicly. The patterns here reflect the schools for which data is available.

Unit component isolation. Categories 12 and 13 figures bundle tournament unit revenue with other NCAA distributions. Isolating the precise dollar amount attributable to basketball units requires conference-level allocation records not captured in public MFRS filings.

MEAC net position reporting. Four of five MEAC schools in this dataset reported revenues exactly equal to expenses. This likely reflects how those institutions categorize institutional transfers, not a literal breakeven. Full institutional financial statements provide more context.

Unit value fluctuation. The $342,000 per-unit annual value reflects approximate FY2025 figures. Unit values change annually as the NCAA’s total basketball fund revenue grows. Future values under the current media rights structure are not yet fully reflected in public reporting.

Conference distribution methodology. How each conference divides unit revenue among its members is determined internally and not publicly disclosed in MFRS filings. Equal distribution is the common approach, but it is not universal.

This analysis is based entirely on publicly filed FY2025 NCAA Membership Financial Reporting System (MFRS) data. Financial figures are reported as filed. All unit values and payment projections are approximations based on published FY2025 distribution rates. This report does not constitute financial, legal, or investment advice.