What is most interesting about football vs basketball is that the College Football Playoff will generate less revenues than the NCAA men's basketball tournament. There are two major differences, though. In football, the revenues are are mostly kept by the P5. In basketball, the NCAA takes in the tournament funds, uses the basketball revenues to fund its operations, and distributes the remaining funds in a more egalitarian way to the various conferences and schools, although a conference/school makes more money for winning tournament games.
Here are the NCAA numbers from 2012/2013 school year:
Total revenues: $912.8 mill.
Revenues from mens' NCAA basketball tournament: $769 mill.
Total payouts to conferences and schools: $527.3 mill.
The rest of the money was used by the NCAA to cover association wide programming ($122.2 mill.), management/administration costs ($97.4 mill.), running Division 1 championships in all sports ($41.8 million), allocation to Div. 2 schools ($35.6 mill.), allocation to Div. 3 schools ($27.5 mill.) and other stuff.
Of course it makes sense that the NCAA men's basketball tournament has higher revenues that the College Football Playoff as there are 3 football games, or about 10 to 12 hours of live programming vs 67 basketball games or ~140 hours of live programming. The viewership of the basketball final was 21.2 million last year and was 25.6 million for the BCS Championship, which is not too different.
In my opinion, football can break away from the NCAA because in reality it already has been separate (especially from a revenue standpoint) and the impact is only on a handful of schools. Basketball is another matter entirely as a break away would impact over 1000 colleges and every level of college sport in the US. And, the P5 would still need to replicate the NCAA for administration, conducting championships, developing rules,...
Why would Buzz Williams say this? Pretty simple, he is trying to make VT more attractive and relevant to high school basketball players in Virginia. Think about this. There are 14 Division 1 men's basketball schools in Virginia and some are up and comers that are not in the P5 like: George Mason, Old Dominion, and VCU. In addition, he is trying to recruit against out of state non-P5 schools like Georgetown, UConn, ... In the Virginia high school class of 2015, Williams lost out on 2 of the top 4 recruits to non-P5 schools (Georgetown and VCU) and almost lost the top recruit to UConn.