University of Tennessee Athletics
SEC Sets Another Record By Distributing $ 108.8 Million
June 4, 2004
DESTIN, Fla. (AP) - In what is becoming a rite of spring, the Southeastern Conference announced another financial windfall Friday, doling out a record $108.8 million to its 12 members for this school year.
The amount is 6 percent more than last year and nearly $75 million more than the schools divvied up just a decade ago.
Schools that participated in football bowl games also kept another $7.9 million from their payouts. In addition, the NCAA provided $624,000 to SEC members for academic enhancements.
The bulk of the money was generated by football. The SEC received $44.5 million from its television packages, $21 million from bowls and $12.5 million from the league's championship game.
Basketball TV packages generated $11.3 million, while the men's tournament brought in another $3.3 million. The remaining $16.2 million was raised from various NCAA championships.
The league closed its annual spring meeting on Friday, having already approved its major objective two days earlier - a plan backed by commissioner Mike Slive to promote better compliance with NCAA rules and more objective means of enforcement.
The SEC currently had four schools on probation and two more that could be facing sanctions. The league has been plagued by 10 major scandals in football alone over the past decade.
NCAA president Myles Brand, who met with SEC presidents on Friday, praised the initiative to cut down on cheating. Slive had made it a goal to have every league school off probation by 2007.
"My expectation is the SEC will do what it says it's going to do," Brand said. "I hear the commitment from every president on every campus that they are going to abide by these guidelines. It's impressive."
The SEC approved only one other noteworthy measure during the meetings: prohibiting schools from scheduling events during their exam periods except in special cases approved by the commissioner.
But a number of issues were discussed, including:
-Changes in the Bowl Championship Series. Slive said the SEC is likely to oppose any plan that would affect its numerous tie-ins with bowls such as Capital One (Orlando, Fla.), Outback (Tampa, Fla.) and Peach (Atlanta). All are expected to be in the running if the BCS adds a new bowl to its rotation.
-Bowl relationships. The SEC wants to avoid a repeat of last year, when the Outback messed up the conference's bowl arrangements by inviting Florida. Higher-ranked Tennessee wound up having to take the lower-paying Peach for the second year in a row. "Traditionally, the bowls have had the selection rights," Slive said. "We have no problem with that, but on occasion there needs to be some acknowledgment of what's best for the conference."
-Recruiting reform. The SEC plans to make recommendations to an NCAA committee that is studying changes in the wake of the Colorado scandal. In particular, the conference is concerned about the fairness of any new rules governing the transportation of recruits. "In a big city, you do transportation one way," Slive said. "In smaller communities, you do transportation another way."
-State-funded scholarships. The SEC turned back complaints that some schools have an unfair advantage in non-revenue sports because of programs such as Georgia's lottery-backed HOPE scholarship. Florida, Kentucky, LSU, South Carolina and Tennessee also benefit from such programs, and Arkansas will soon join the list. Schools in Mississippi and Alabama submitted a proposal to count state grants as athletic scholarships, but it was voted down.
-Basketball tournaments. The SEC rejected the idea of playing both the men's and women's tournaments at the same time in the same city.
