A study commissioned by the Southeastern Conference and the Big Ten concluded that allowing conferences to pool their media rights — a key proposal among some looking to solve money problems in college sports — would generate less revenue than if the leagues continue the decades-old practice of selling their own games.
The idea of pooling media rights has been touted by some lawmakers and sports leaders as the best way to supercharge revenue and ensure
college sports remains solvent in a new, more-expensive era brought on by name, image and likeness (NIL) payments to college players.
The study, a copy of which was shared Thursday with The Associated Press, estimated that at the rate leagues like the SEC, Big Ten, Atlantic Coast Conference and Big 12 are increasing the value of their media rights, they would outperform one much-cited projection that said schools could add $7 billion in worth over the next decade or so by pooling the rights.
“The ... proposal not only fails to produce more revenue than the current conference structure but also introduces a dangerously unworkable model and new risks to the college sports landscape,” the paper said.
The $7 billion projection is the brainchild of Cody Campbell, the billionaire head of the board of regents at Texas Tech, who established a nonprofit called Saving College Sports, which is the focal point of the paper's analysis.
Both Campbell and a Democrat-backed bill in the Senate, called the SAFE Act, have proposed rewriting the 1961 Sports Broadcasting Act, which bars the conferences from combining their TV rights.
Campbell has acknowledged that the unspooling of TV contracts that have varying expiration dates between the league and broadcasters would take years. The SCS proposes creating an independent entity charged with maximizing revenue, with options to sign on to what could be a reworked Sports Broadcasting Act within 12 years.
He has been critical of conference commissioners, saying that rather than looking at the big picture, “all they care about is what happens to them. And I think that is fundamentally the problem.”
The SEC's Greg Sankey shot back at that by saying Campbell's views “reflect a fundamental misunderstanding of the realities of college athletics.”
Sankey and Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti hired the FTI Consulting Firm, which pokes holes in virtually all of Campbell's assumptions, including the idea that college sports could replicate NBA and NFL revenues by pooling their games.
The study said the NBA's recent $6.9 billion-a-year deal spread across a number of national networks and streamers “reflect a number of market dynamics and are not simply the result of 'aggregation.'”
“Instead, the NBA was successful in selling smaller packages of games to larger numbers of distributors thereby increasing market demand and adding additional media partners for smaller packages,” the report said.
The relatively small number of NBA (30) and NFL (32) teams compared to the 136 that would be part of a college pool (if every school agreed to participate) makes those deals more manageable, according to FTI.
The study also took a historical perspective, including a reference to a seismic shift in college football TV rights in the early 1980s.
After the Supreme Court declared that the NCAA's pooling of games violated antitrust laws, schools formed the College Football Association to package games. The study said that arrangement produced less revenue: $43.6 million, compared to $69.7 million under the NCAA package.
That spurred Notre Dame to leave the group, followed by a steady exodus by the conferences, which led to the system that is in place today in which all the leagues parcel out their own media rights, mostly to ESPN, CBS, Fox and NBC.
“Decentralization also helps preserve the unique character of college sports — an incredibly important brand attribute,” the study said.
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