By James Sutherland on SwimSwam
A study commissioned by the SEC and Big Ten found that the Power conferences would likely be better off financially by continuing to sell their media rights separately rather than pooling them together.
The idea of pooling media rights has been a key topic among lawmakers in negotiating the new era of college sports as prices ramp up in the wake of the House settlement that will allow schools to pay student-athletes.
Cody Campbell, the head of the board of regents at Texas Tech, believes pooling media rights would result in an extra $7 billion in revenue over the next decade. Both Campbell’s “Saving College Sports” nonprofit organization and the Democrat-backed Student Athlete Fairness and Enforcement (SAFE) Act want to rewrite the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961, which does not provide antitrust protection for conferences to combine their media rights.
However, the SEC and Big Ten commissioned study estimated that at the current rate of increasing value of the Power conferences’ media rights, they would outperform Campbell’s $7 billion projection.
The SEC and Big Ten are distributing the study, part of an eight-page memo titled “Preserving Autonomy and Stability in College Sports: Why Media Rights Pooling and SBA Reform Are Misguided,” to lawmakers this week, according to Yahoo‘s Ross Dellenger.
In an extraordinary move from the SEC and Big Ten, the two conferences are distributing to Congressional lawmakers this week a white paper taking aim at those arguing for the consolidation of media rights, specifically targeting Cody Campbell’s “Saving College Sports” movement. pic.twitter.com/AqIk7G41HD
— Ross Dellenger (@RossDellenger) February 26, 2026
“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, according to Dellenger.
Campbell has argued that pooling media rights together would give the conferences more inventory and thus more leverage in negotiations. He pointed to models we’ve seen in pro sports, such as the NFL and NBA, but the study finds it’s not that simple in college athletics.
For one, it would require unwinding and restructuring all of the current media rights deals that eexpire at different times. Campbell has acknowledged that it would take years to sort them out, though Saving College Sports has proposed the creation of an “independent entity charged with maximizing revenue, with options to sign on to what could be a reworked Sports Broadcasting Act within 12 years,” Dellenger noted.
KEY POINTS FROM THE PAPER
Courtesy of Ralph Russo of The Athletic
Centralizing college sports media rights is a well-intentioned but misguided strategy. It would not save college sports but would actually introduce bureaucratic and legal chaos, and projections show it is likely to reduce revenue over the long term. The strongest drivers of growth, including media renewals, digital expansion, and competitive bidding—are already embedded in the existing system. The current conference structure is projected to provide revenues that surpass the increases that SCS claims are necessary to the future of college athletics. SCS proposes a federal oversight committee to run college athletics instead of the schools and conferences themselves. Colleges and conferences would lose control over scheduling, rivalries, and brand stewardship. Control at the conference-level preserves flexibility, distinctive identities and a commitment to targeted fan engagement while continuing the already strong trajectory of growth of media asset values. The NFL schedules 272 games a season. Centralizing scheduling and production for thousands of collegiate matchups under a monolithic organization will introduce insurmountable operational complexity while possibly diluting the product and disheartening fans. College athletics thrives and enjoys zealous fan loyalty precisely because teams and conferences have unique personalities with individual points of distinction. Homogenization of college athletics would likely diminish fan passion. College athletics doesn’t need government control and mandates. Market forces, intense competition and continued innovation are the natural drivers of the value of media rights. SCS proposals incorrectly assert that recent NBA media gains are based on the aggregation of their games and should provide a model for pooling FBS media rights, but their increase in revenue was not based on the pooling of rights but rather market dynamics and deft packaging of media assets. Also note that 80% of games are distributed locally by teams. This pooling approach to licensing college football media rights was attempted in 1984 and failed. The College Football Association (CFA) was created to pool the football rights of the largest 64 Division One football schools but produced less revenue than the previous system. Schools and conferences left the CFA because they generated MORE revenue at the conference level than as part of the CFA pool.The study argues that the NBA’s $6.9 billion per year deal was driven by strategic packaging and competition, not simply because of pooling media rights. aggregating games. It also mentioned the fact that the NFL (32) and NBA (30) have fewer than a quarter of the number of teams as in FBS football (136).
The study also referenced a legal case from the early 1980s, when the Supreme Court ruled that the NCAA’s pooling of media rights violated antitrust law, leading to the creation of the College Football Association that generated less revenue ($43.6 million) than the NCAA package did ($69.7 million).
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