College football viewers may have noticed an interesting set of advertisements during games this season. The commercials, sponsored by Texas Tech booster Cody Campbell, advocate for Congress to amend the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 to allow college football programs to pool media rights together just as professional sports leagues do.
As it stands, individual college programs control their own media rights and allow their conference to sell them on their behalf. That’s how we get a system where ESPN controls all of the SEC while Fox, CBS, and NBC own the Big Ten. Under Campbell’s ideal system, all college teams, regardless of conference affiliation, could bundle their media rights together to sell to broadcasters.
Some observers believe this system would generate more revenue by allowing for a more efficient allocation of high-profile games. But there’s little incentive for the sport’s current power brokers, the SEC and Big Ten, to change the status quo. After all, those conferences are already dominating from a financial standpoint, and shaking up how media rights are sold could jeopardize their status on top of the college football landscape.
Asked over the weekend about the possibility of Congress amending the Sports Broadcasting Act, SEC commissioner Greg Sankey cited another reason why a change seems unlikely, at least for now: the length of the current media rights deals.
“The decision we’ve made, I think should be honored,” Sankey said, per AL.com. “I’m happy to have conversations. But it doesn’t seem that the numbers are consistent with reality. It doesn’t seem that the suggestion that you can just make this happen honors existing agreements. So there’s a lot more to that than just some magic button.”
The SEC’s current agreement with ESPN carries through 2034. The Big Ten’s set of deals runs through 2030. The ACC and Big 12 are signed through 2036 and 2031 respectively. It wouldn’t exactly be easy to blow up these existing agreements to completely reformat how college football programs sell their media rights, especially when there’s little incentive from the country’s top conferences.
Still, it’s an idea that is now out there and gaining steam, no matter how realistic it actually is.
About Drew Lerner
Drew Lerner is a staff writer for Awful Announcing and an aspiring cable subscriber. He previously covered sports media for Sports Media Watch. Future beat writer for the Oasis reunion tour.