Analysts: College football can triple TV revenue by 2034-35 if media rights centralize

Just as politicians in Washington, D.C. are determining whether professional sports leagues like the NFL or MLB should be able to continue selling media rights collectively, many power brokers in college athletics are advocating for collegiate sports to receive the same special treatment as the pros.

As it stands, the NFL, NBA, MLB, and NHL are granted antitrust exemptions that allow the leagues to sell broadcast rights collectively, rather than on a team-by-team basis. That’s not the case in college sports, where teams are the technical owners of their media rights and allow conferences to negotiate those rights on their behalf.

In college football, by far the most profitable college sport, this has created a system that many would argue is inefficient. Rather than a single, centralized body creating television schedules and optimizing media rights deals, conferences, teams, and television networks are often at odds. Some weeks are stacked with high-quality matchups that are forced to compete against each other, while other weeks feature no compelling games at all.

If college football could centralize operations, at least from a media rights standpoint, there’s a persuasive argument to be made that the sport could skyrocket revenues. Out in front of this argument is billionaire Texas Tech booster Cody Campbell, who has been publicly banging the drum for a centralized model over the past year.

And now, two prominent sports media consultants are publishing projections that would seem to back Campbell’s claims. Ed Desser and John Kosner, two former sports media executives that now run their own consulting firms, recently projected that, should college football move to a single-seller model for media rights a la professional sports leagues, college football’s total annual media rights haul could reach $14.8 billion by the 2034-35 season, up from about $3.9 billion per year now. That’s a 3.8x increase over current rates.

How would this massive revenue boost be realized? Desser and Kosner list several changes that could be made.

First, a centralized model would offer “a more limited set of national media packages” compared to the current 12 packages (one for each FBS conference), thereby spurring more “aggressive bidding” among networks to avoid losing the second-most-popular viewership sport in the country.

These packages would then attract more interest from tech giants like Netflix, Amazon, and YouTube, all of which have not yet seriously displayed interest in college football rights.

Schedules would improve as the central body can arrange more top-25 vs. top-25 games and limit power-conference schools to “one mediocre matchup per year instead of two or three currently.” The central body would also be able to leverage “the same AI scheduling software as major leagues,” thus spreading the best games into separate windows rather than some being played head-to-head. Further, college football could implement flex scheduling for late-season matchups to ensure that games of consequence are played.

The new deals could require cross-promotion of games on different networks, similar to the NFL, so fans are directed to the best games regardless of network or conference affiliation.

Desser and Kosner also offer suggestions that could spur “growth beyond $14.8 billion” if implemented. These include college football versions of “Sunday Ticket” and “RedZone,” new packages built entirely around rivalry games (like Ohio State-Michigan or USC-Notre Dame), and universal digital rights for short-form video platforms like TikTok.

To be sure, Desser and Kosner assert that college football is in for a huge revenue windfall during its next major media rights reshuffling, regardless of whether the sport centralizes rights negotiations. The Big Ten’s deal runs through 2030, and the SEC’s runs through 2034. The duo estimates that by the time the SEC negotiates its new contracts, annual media revenue for college football will jump from $3.9 billion to $8.4 billion, even if no structural changes are made to how the sport sells its TV rights.

That’s because, no matter how you slice it, college football is some of the most undervalued programming on television. Similar to the recent Guggenheim study, which showed that networks pay about triple the price for a single viewer hour of NBA rights than for NFL rights, Desser and Kosner’s analysis concurs. They say that NBA broadcast partners pay $3.04 in rights per viewer hour, while the NFL sits at $1.30. However, college football, the most-popular sport in America besides the NFL, earns just $1.07 per viewer hour in rights fees.

Those figures would indicate there’s a lot of untapped potential in college football media rights.

The question becomes, will Congress grant college football similar privileges to professional sports leagues, thereby allowing the sport to sell its media inventory collectively? And if so, would the college conferences come together and agree to do it?

Early indications suggest the answer is “no” on both fronts. For one, the federal government is actively considering whether to revoke the antitrust exemption granted to professional sports leagues, which allows them to sell media rights collectively. It would be quite rich for the feds to investigate that exemption for pro leagues while simultaneously granting that exemption to college football.

Second, the Big Ten and SEC have already come out strongly against the idea of centralizing rights, presumably to solidify their structural superiority over every other college conference. The current system already works very well for the two most-powerful conferences; why would they be interested in upending the status quo and potentially letting other conferences back in the fray?

So, while the money would clearly be there if college football were somehow able to move towards a single-seller model, the likelihood of that happening seems low, at least right now. Money, however, tends to win out, especially in college sports, so it’d be unwise to count out a centralized media rights model entirely.