Ordered by conference winning percentage, then conference wins. Division splits and tiebreakers aren’t applied. AP: the AP poll, final (else the final AP rank). Elo is our own rating, a measure of strength, not a prediction.
From Wikipedia’s 2019 all-conference team article (CC BY-SA): each player on the best team any selector named him to (the coaches’, the media’s or the AP’s), in the article’s order. 28 more on third teams aren’t listed here. Players link to their pages where we could match them.
Conference titles as each program’s Wikipedia infobox lists them (CC BY-SA), shared titles counted for every co-champion; the conference’s earlier names count as the same conference.
Football moves from Wikipedia’s lists of NCAA Division I conference changes; the season is the first one played in the new conference, and the date the one the lists or their sources give for the announcement. SportsDataverse’s football memberships agree with ours in all 828 team-seasons from 1953. Conference realignment: Wikipedia (CC BY-SA); memberships: SportsDataverse.
Counted only in seasons a school was a member on file (from 1953); a draft pick counts for the season before the draft. Heisman and All-America lists from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA), draft picks from CollegeFootballData.com.
The money
The Big Ten Conference is a nonprofit. Its IRS Form 990 for the year to June 2025 reports $1.47 billion in revenue, $1.35 billion of it from sports revenue, and $1.45 billion in expenses; it ended the year with $280.7 million in assets. Its best-paid, former commissioner James E Delany, was paid $5.8 million.
From the organization’s IRS Form 990, via ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer and the IRS’s e-file data. Fiscal years end in June; top pay is the best-paid person’s total compensation on the return, listed for e-filed years (2018 on). Grants are the ones the conference lists on Schedule I; bowl payments are the ones bowls list on theirs. See every filing at ProPublica (EIN 36-3640583).
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