Big Ten, SEC push back on college football media rights consolidation

In the past year, momentum in college sports to lobby Congress for an antitrust exemption similar to what professional sports leagues get via the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 has grown substantially, spearheaded by Texas Tech billionaire booster Cody Campbell who founded the organization Saving College Sports.

Campell’s premise is simple. By pooling media rights across college conferences, rather than each conference selling its own media rights packages, college sports could generate more revenue from its media rights deals. In Campbell’s estimation, centralizing these rights would allow for more efficient scheduling, thereby maximizing viewership (and the value) of broadcast inventory in college sports, particularly in relation to football.

It’s a model that has worked swimmingly for the NFL. The league sells media rights on behalf of its 32 teams and is able to efficiently dole out games to the tune of $10 billion per year, a number that is soon to be much more after reworking its deals in the next year or two.

The four major conferences in college football command a combined $2.55 billion per year on average by selling their media rights separately. Campbell believes that figure would go way up if there was a single entity in charge of selling media rights for college sports.

But the Big Ten and SEC are staunchly opposed to such a model, likely for fear that centralizing the sale of media rights would upend the structural advantages currently keeping both conferences atop the food chain. According to a recent report by Ben Portnoy in Sports Business Journal, the two conferences commissioned a white paper to serve as a reference for Congress as the legislative body examines whether to reopen the Sports Broadcasting Act to consider giving college sports an antitrust exemption.

The Big Ten and SEC claim that the current structure, where conferences compete with one another in the marketplace selling media rights, is superior to a centralized model because it breeds innovation.

“By keeping control at the conference level, the system retains optionality to pilot new formats, adopt mid-week showcases, experiment with streaming exclusives, and iterate sponsorship models — all of which could help generate substantial additional revenues that could be used to support other sports,” the paper reads. “But this result can only be accomplished by market forces. A federally created single-seller sports media regime would reduce optionality, slow decision cycles, eliminate college and university autonomy over their own athletic programs without generating more revenue.”

There is some truth to what the paper is claiming. Universities would have less flexibility over their schedules under a single-seller model, which could rankle some schools that like to exercise strict control over who they play and when, such as the handful of Big Ten schools that refuse to play night games late in the season.

But the idea that a single-seller model wouldn’t experiment with new formats, mid-week showcases, and streaming exclusives is nonsense. The NFL, and every other pro sports league afforded an antitrust exemption, disproves that premise immediately. These leagues are incentivized to maximize media rights revenue in any way possible, and they’ve all iterated their broadcast schedules in more or less the same ways the Big Ten and SEC claim wouldn’t happen under a single-seller model. If anything, centralizing media rights would make such innovation more likely, not less, given what we’ve seen from other leagues.

And the idea that a single-seller model would “slow decision cycles” is equally ludicrous. College sports now is an unwieldy beast of competing interests. Conferences, schools, the NCAA, TV networks, etc., are all often pulling in different directions to protect their own bottom lines. Think about how long it took for the College Football Playoff to expand from four teams to 12. And now there’s yet more bickering over playoff expansion that has kicked the can down the road for another season. The “decision cycles” of college sports right now are far from efficient.

This letter reeks of two conferences, the Big Ten and SEC, scrambling to protect their own statuses as the ultimate power brokers in college sports under the auspices of protecting innovation and autonomy.

Are some of their points valid? Yes. It’s understandable for conferences to want to protect rivalry games and other elements that make college sports unique. But let’s not kid ourselves. The point of this letter isn’t to make a good-faith argument about maximizing media revenue. It’s to ensure the Big Ten and SEC continue to call the shots for the rest of the college sports ecosystem.