Something like 60% of the money goes to the conferences while 40% goes to the NCAA. Right now the NCAA gets about $1.1B per year for the tournament, a laughable amount considering that it just gets renewed with a modest bump every time the exclusive rights window opens up. Put it out for an open bid, and it gets $1.5B easily, and don't have it funding D1, D2, and D3, and the money for the D1 conferences skyrockets. There are 6 power conferences in basketball, and those are the schools that drive the ratings, those conferences could receive $200M each per year if they break off, and provide $10M a year each to the other D1 conferences that take part in the tourney. Each conference then gets $1M for each win a school records in a tournament, and all the D1 schools will be taking home about 5-10 times the money they are now. The bottom of the rung conferences are getting about $2M a year from the NCAA (6 years x $330,000 tourney unit), so the Southland Conference will go from receiving $2M a year "guaranteed" to $10M a year guaranteed. Those schools will go from receiving $200K a year to $1M a year. Instead of having the $1M per tourney win go to the conferences, maybe the schools that win the games would have it sent directly to them. That way the tourney champ would get a $6M bonus, and Cinderellas would get a crystal slipper instead of a glass one.