SEC, Big Ten come together to reject proposal to pool media rights
By Luke Greco
Published:
The SEC and the Big Ten joined forces this week, sending a white paper to Congressional lawmakers that outright rejected a proposal to pool media rights across the college sports landscape, according to a report from Yahoo’s Ross Dellenger.
More specifically, the two conferences targeted Cody Campbell’s “Saving College Sports” movement in these papers. Campbell is a former Texas Tech offensive lineman and has played a major role in his alma mater’s NIL initiative.
The 2 leagues primarily argued against the claim that consolidating FBS TV rights would generate additional revenue to save college sports from its current situation. They pointed to a similar strategy, attempted in 1984, that ultimately failed with the College Football Association. The papers pointed out that “schools and conferences left the CFA because they generated more revenue at the conference level than as part of the CFA pool.”
Here’s part of what the SEC and Big Ten wrote, per Dellenger:
The thesis of these proposals is that creating a new entity (perhaps federally supervised) to ‘administer’ the media rights for all of college sports, most notably for the 136 Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) teams, and then distribute that revenue as this entity sees fit, would somehow dramatically increase the value of college sports media rights… The consolidation that is being proposed would erode local decision-making and reduce the flexibility that conferences use to generate value for their teams and media partners.
Dellenger continued to explain the papers from the SEC and Big Ten in a thread on X and ended his thread with this final post:
SEC & Big Ten leaders are against the concept as-detractors contend-they wish to preserve the current advantageous framework. The leagues say that the Saving College Sports movement would involve government oversight of the industry and see schools/conferences lose control.
