In January, Division I’s power conferences approved a measure allowing schools to provide “full cost of attendance” scholarships to student-athletes, expanding upon how much a scholarship will cover and, as a result, increasing the value of each scholarship.

Traditional athletic scholarships covered the cost of tuition, books, and room and board — no more, no less. The new cost of attendance scholarships would cover the full cost of the college experience each year, beginning at the start of the fall semester and concluding at the end of the ensuing spring semester.

Each school will determine its own cost of attendance, taking into account variables like cost of a parking pass or cost of public transportation, additional school supplies beyond textbooks and even just a meal outside the campus dining halls once in a while.

Although the cost of attendance value can vary by school, if the power conferences begin adopting this policy and raising the value of their scholarships, the SEC would stand to benefit more than any other conference in the country.

Why? Because the SEC makes the most money, so raising the value of scholarships across the board would benefit the SEC more than other conferences due to a simple advantage in disposable income.

While other conferences would have to potentially tighten budgets in other areas to compensate for the additional value of student-athlete scholarships, the SEC and its members would be able to continue their recent run on high-profile basketball coaches like Rick Barnes and Ben Howland, as well as their recent slew of stadium and facility renovations.

If the SEC has the best, highest-paid coaches, the nicest facilities and its recent tradition of athletic success all working in its favor, it’s hard to argue the SEC wouldn’t benefit from full cost of attendance scholarships, which would in turn widen the financial gap between the SEC and everyone else.

So where does all this money come from that would enable the SEC to benefit from more expensive scholarships across the board?

There are a few answers to that question.

First, the SEC has a lucrative television deal with ESPN (the parent company of the brand-new SEC Network), a deal that one media analyst told Forbes might be the biggest in history. It also maintains its partnership with CBS during football season, and it’s not uncommon for SEC men’s basketball programs to be featured on a CBS broadcast during the winter months.

So the SEC has television money funneling in from multiple sources, and the largest sports media company on the planet owns the SEC’s very own network, a network no other conference would obviously have any financial stake in.

Of course, the SEC is not the only conference with its own network — the Big Ten and Pac-12 do as well — but those deals wilt in comparison to the big bucks the SEC brings in from its partnership with ESPN. Those conferences would gain an edge over other leagues (we’re looking at you, Big 12) by having their own networks to generate revenue for their member schools, but they won’t generate revenue in the ballpark of what the SEC will be grossing when its new ESPN deal really hits its stride.

For what it’s worth, Fox Sports estimated before the start of last football season that the SEC and ESPN would combine to generate more than $600 million in revenue just from SEC Network subscription fees alone; that number has nothing to do with the previous agreement between ESPN and the SEC nor advertising revenue, and it certainly has nothing to do with the SEC’s ties to CBS during each fall.

We could extend this financial look-in even further, all the way to the dawn of the new College Football Playoff, which began last year and included three SEC teams in its playoff and additional New Year’s-based games (Alabama, Mississippi State and Ole Miss). Those three teams alone were estimated to have earned more than $87 million for the SEC in just the first year of the playoff system, according to CBS Sports.

Conferences earn money based on the number of teams in the playoff, the number of teams in New Year’s Six games and the number of games played in the playoff (a conference is rewarded if a member school wins a playoff semifinal and/or the championship), so there are direct financial benefits to loading up teams in the CFP system, especially if those teams succeed upon reaching the postseason.

No other conference earned more from the CFP last year than the SEC; in fact, the ACC was the only conference to even come within $25 million of what the SEC earned from the new playoff system in just its first year.

Because the SEC has maintained a sterling reputation on the gridiron, and because recruiting rankings indicate the SEC will be relevant in the playoff discussion for years to come, we can expect the SEC to continue to earn more, or at least as much, as any other conference in the nation. Once again, the SEC has gained a financial edge that no other conference has enjoyed to this point in time.

So as you can see, this financial edge is no myth; it is very, very real, and implementing full cost of attendance scholarships would only widen the SEC’s obvious financial advantage.

It’s not that the SEC would be offering better scholarships. It’s that after offering more expensive scholarships, the SEC would still have more money left over than anyone else for stadium renovations or to attract coaches like Barnes or Howland.

College sports are entering a new day and age in the form of greater compensation for its student-athletes. As usual, the SEC is ahead of the curve.