Speaking of money, here's a good article on how the NCAA tournament divides up the money :
http://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/sports/ncaa-money/
Interesting quotes on CAA:
But for smaller conferences, the basketball fund is much more important, in some cases constituting nearly 70 percent of annual revenue.
A handful of conferences are in a league of their own for overall revenue, thanks largely to television contracts related to football, dwarfing the rest of the conferences.
Large conferences get the bulk of the money, as they have more teams make the tournament and advance, but...
For smaller conferences, payments from the basketball fund represent a significant portion of revenue.
“The standard of living, if you will, is really dependant on the men’s basketball tournament,” said Tom Yeager, commissioner of the Colonial Athletic Association.
Yeager’s conference has its own complicated formula for the basketball fund: the conference keeps the money it is guaranteed every year thanks to its automatic bid, and any more money gets split in half, with one half getting split among the 10 schools, and the other half doled out competitively through an “Excellence Fund.”
In the 2006 tournament, Yeager’s conference enjoyed unexpected success that brought in larger-than-expected payments for years.
George Mason’s run to the Final Four, coupled with UNC- Wilmington making the tournament as an automatic bid, meant a six-unit tournament. That 2006 tournament earned an estimated $7.7 million over six years for a conference whose total annual revenue that year was $2.8 million. A lot of that money went into the “Excellence Fund” and found its way back to George Mason and other schools, and some of it stayed with the conference. Some it also went to cover conference costs, such as Yeager’s salary. Over the six years that 2006 tourney windfall paid out, Yeager saw his total compensation more than double, from $203,600 in 2006 to $428,130 in 2012, tax records show.
Yeager said there was no connection between tournament success and his pay. The CAA acquired football-playing schools in 2007, he said, and his responsibilities expanded.
“It didn’t have a darn thing to do with basketball,” Yeager said. “My compensation follows what’s going on in our schools and generally increases at a very modest rate.”
