Schools actually lose money on going to the lesser bowl games taking into considering the costs of moving the team/band, etc. for the game.
Coaches and players get the extra weeks of practice for them that they otherwise wouldn’t be eligible.
Those pre-Christmas bowls are for the diehards.
Most non-p5 do. But the P5’s usually have a distribution of funds for the bowls. A certain amount of every bowl game goes to the conference and member schools. So let’s say the Sugar pay out is 15 mill. 10 mill goes to the SEC of which the sec keeps a mil for itself and then the rest goes into a pool that gets added up with the other games and then split equally. So Oklahoma would get 5 Million+its bowl share from the other games. I am pulling numbers out of my but and I am not certain how every conference does it but that’s been the standard practice for conferences for awhile.