One of the most vocal and potentially powerful boosters in college sports lashed out at conference commissioners for stymieing changes he thinks could save the rapidly changing industry, and then the commissioners barked back, with one of them saying the booster's views “reflect a fundamental misunderstanding of the realities of college athletics.”
The spat sprang from Texas Tech billionaire head of regents Cody Campbell's argument Thursday about how the proposed pooling of college TV rights could feed additional billions into school coffers, but that progress is being held back because “the conferences are all represented by commissioners who are very, very self-interested.”
“The commissioners don’t really care what happens at the institutional level,” Campbell said at a panel discussion held by the Knight Commission, an oversight group that released a survey in which a majority of college executives who responded said Division I sports was headed in the wrong direction. “All they care about is what happens to them. And I think that is fundamentally the problem.”
Campbell said he supports elements of the recently introduced SAFE Act, a bill co-sponsored by Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., that features a call for a rewrite of a 1960s law that would lift a restriction on college conferences from combining to sell their TV rights together. Campbell told attendees the move could be worth $7 billion, and said commissioners had said to him “privately” that they know a modification of that law would generate more revenue “but I don't want to give up control of my own media-rights negotiation.”
Greg Sankey, the commissioner of the Southeastern Conference, told The Associated Press those conversations with Campbell never happened.
“I have never stated — publicly or privately — that pooling media rights would increase revenue, nor do I believe that it would,” Sankey said. “His misrepresentation of my position raises serious concerns about the accuracy of his other claims. ... His comments reflect a fundamental misunderstanding of the realities of college athletics.”
The Big 12's Brett Yormark also responded by saying, “Cody is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”
“I’ve never said pooling media rights will increase revenue,” Yormark said. “The only thing I have said is that hope isn’t a strategy. There are unintended consequences to amending the (1961 Sports Broadcasting Act) that Cody and his team need to better understand.”
College sports has come under new financial pressure in the wake of the recent $2.8 billion House settlement that allows schools to directly pay players for use of their name, image and likeness (NIL) to the tune of up to $20.5 million per university, starting this season.
Media deals make up the backbone of most schools' bankrolls. The Power 4 conferences each have different, multibillion-dollar arrangements with varied expiration dates spread across multiple networks. The proceeds for those deals then go to conference offices, which all have their own formulas for divvying it up. The Atlantic Coast Conference, for instance, recently reworked its formula to base a portion of its payouts on viewership numbers for specific schools.
The Big Ten, meanwhile, has made headlines recently for being in late-stage efforts to procure up to $2 billion from private equity, which would create a new entity that would market the league's media rights and other properties.
“The fact that we’re bringing private equity into something that is, in my view, owned by the American public in college sports, is outlandish,” Campbell said. “We have halfway professionalized this thing. And so we have a professionalized cost model on one side where we pay coaches a lot. We’re now paying players a lot. But we have this amateurish media-rights marketing effort that makes absolutely no sense to anybody.”
The Big Ten did not respond to an AP request for comment. Sankey and Yormark, however, pushed back on the idea that commissioners are out of touch with what's good for college sports.
“My responsibility lies with the institutions I serve and the student-athletes on our campuses,” Sankey said. “Mr. Campbell’s suggestion that commissioners are indifferent to the institutional level is both irresponsible and damaging to his own credibility.”
“Our decisions are rooted in collaboration, accountability, and a deep understanding of the institutional impact for student-athletes,” Yormark said. “The SCORE Act is the first step in solving the issues facing collegiate athletics.”
The SCORE Act, which has support from the NCAA and the Power 4 conferences, proposes limited antitrust protection for the NCAA, mainly from lawsuits involving eligibility issues, and a prohibition on athletes becoming employees of their schools — a development that NCAA executive Tim Buckley said would be “the budget buster of the century” for college sports.
Campbell portrayed the SCORE Act as too broad a giveaway to the NCAA and the conference commissioners he excoriated for wanting to run their own fiefdoms instead of looking out for the good of college sports in general.
“Protecting your position and protecting your importance and your ego, I could not care less about that,” Campbell said. “Because I know that if we don’t change something and bring more revenue in, a lot of sports are going to be cut, a lot of scholarships are going to be cut, and a lot of kids are going to lose opportunity.”
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