Brett Yormark plans to allow each Big 12 team to decide how to use revenue share

Questions about the revenue share era are starting as teams get set to enter the fray in the next few weeks. One of the biggest is over how money will be allocated.

There’s no set standard for how schools might distribute the money, though there are some currently favored models. But Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark made it clear he’s leaving things up to the individual schools.

“We’re going to let our schools determine how they want to rev share,” Yormark said on The Triple Option podcast. “It’s going to be a school-by-school decision. Obviously the revenue-generating sports are going to receive the bulk of it. OK? But it really will be up to the schools in how they distribute what we call a permissive cap up to $20.5 million in Year 1.”

The cap on revenue share has been decided by the House settlement. It will adjust in the years to come, but for now, there’s a firm starting line.

How schools operate from there will vary. Yormark outlined one of the most popular distribution models.

“Many schools have been very public already about how they’re going to distribute it,” Yormark said of revenue share. “One of the models out there, not to say it’s right or wrong, is 75, 15, 5 and 5. 75% to football, 15% to men’s basketball, 5% to women’s basketball and 5% to other Olympic sports. But there are probably going to be variations of that model and it’ll be determined by the schools themselves.”

Keep in mind, too, that this is only the start of revenue share. The entire concept figures to evolve in the coming years as schools get a handle on what works best.

Yormark pointed out that the revenue share numbers themselves are set to grow each year. Then there will be a periodic review of the overall numbers to slide the cap up or down as needed.

“As part of the settlement, there’s a 4% increase every year,” Yormark said. “And then I want to say it’s every three years we can go through a reset based on the average amount of revenue that is being brought into the system by the defending conferences. And it’s 22.5% of revenue. And that gets recalculated every three years. But it is 4% a year.”

All of that will create an ebb and flow to revenue share that programs will have to grapple with. But, at least for the time being, the Big 12 will let programs make their own decisions as far as allocation.