The Confidential

Capital One Cup Standings Update

What is the goal of an athletic director at one of the schools in the top several conferences?  Is it to win national championships in the revenue sports?  Is it to make consistently good showings in the revenue sports?  Or is it to have a broad array of athletes participating in non-revenue sports?  Well, the Big 10 folks like to talk about how it is the latter.  So what if they are not winning national championships, they are offering teams in skee-ball and hula hoops.  And all that leads to success in the Capital One Cup.

Or does it?

Here is the link to the current Capital One Cup standings.

The men are led by two Big 10 schools–but there are a lot of schools in the rankings that do not have Big 10 revenue.

Men’s top 25:

1. Indiana & Michigan     76 pts

3. Louisville    66 pts

4. Alabama & North Dakota State   60 pts

6. Notre Dame  47 pts

7. Stanford  43.5 pts

8. Oregon  41 pts

9. Georgetown  & Sam Houston State  36 pts

11. Oklahoma State and Penn State  35 pts

13. Georgia Southern, Maryland, and Syracuse 30 pts

16. USC  28 pts

17. Cal, Florida, Ohio State, Texas A&M   26 pts

20. Georgia  25 pts

21. Creighton, Eastern Washington & Wichita State  24 pts

25. Wisconsin  22 pts

Thus, five of the top 25 schools have all that Big 10 revenue.  4 schools come from the Pac-12 and SEC, respectively.  The low-revenue Big East has 4 schools as well.  The ACC and Big XII have one school.  The utterly low revenue schools number 6–with North Dakota State, Sam Houston State, Georgia Southern, Creighton, Eastern Washington, and Wichita State cracking the top 25.

For the women, other than Princeton, and BYU, no other non-BCS programs are cracking the list.   The Pac-12 has six.  The SEC has five each.  The Big 10 has four.  The current ACC and current Big East have three.  The Big XII has 2.

So, overall out of 50, you have 10 from the Pac-12, 9 from each of the B1G and SEC, 7 from the current Big East, 4 from the current ACC, 3 from the current Big XII, and 8 from schools outside the BCS-level conferences.

The Pac-12 lags well behind the B1G in revenue, but is outperforming them.  The Big East takes in a fraction of the B1G’s revenue, but is narrowly behind the B1G.  Much is made of the SEC’s football-centric focus; however, the SEC is doing just as well as the B1G in terms of depth of teams in the Capital One Cup standings.  And if the ACC had Syracuse, Louisville, and Notre Dame, it would be even with the B1G (although Maryland would give B1G back the edge).  In any event, once again, for the B1G, it is first in revenue…. and nothing else.