Inside the making (and future) of the latest bill to 'save' college sports — and the major sticking point that's rankling SEC and Big Ten officials
· Yahoo Sports
MIRAMAR BEACH, Fla. — On Wednesday afternoon, Trev Alberts, the Texas A&M athletic director, wheeled around toward a reporter.
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This time, he was asking the questions.
“Have you read all 111 pages?” he said with a smile before dashing away down the hall.
Amid the conference’s annual spring meetings along the Florida panhandle, SEC administrators and coaches learned, while quite literally in their meetings, of the introduction of perhaps the most comprehensive, bipartisan congressional legislation yet to reform college athletics.
The bill — the Protect College Sports Act — is a cool 111 pages long.
And while much of the legislation satisfies requests made by the Big Ten and SEC during their now-seven-year-long lobbying effort, the bill also takes particular aim at the two richest conferences in a way that is obvious.
It hasn’t gone unnoticed. One administrator quipped that the bill “targets” the two leagues in an uncomfortable way. Asked about that afterward here, SEC commissioner Greg Sankey sidestepped the question and affirmed the league’s position in a statement, one that mirrored all of the other power league statements: We are thankful for the work of lawmakers and will review the legislation before publicly supporting the bill, or not.
Folks here, at least privately, are caught between noticeably cautious and downright skeptical about the bill. After all, the Senate legislation bars the SEC and Big Ten from expanding beyond their current membership, prevents them from merging to form the long-discussed “super league,” and includes a concept to permit conferences to pool their media rights. Despite the latter being a voluntary option only, the pooling of rights is a divisive topic in which SEC and Big Ten leadership are so against that they released a joint white paper in February detailing why such a move would not solve the financial issues facing the industry.
And now, here it is, thrust upon them in actual text within congressional legislation — a clear sign of lawmakers at least attempting to close the rapidly expanding financial gap between the two leagues and everyone else.
They’re not afraid to acknowledge that either.
In an interview this week with Yahoo Sports, Sen. Maria Cantwell, the primary bill sponsor with Ted Cruz (R-Texas), described the reasoning behind these concepts.
“Obviously,” she said, “we're trying to make sure that nobody runs away with the eyeballs or a certain amount of revenue and hijacks the rest of the system, leaving it short changed.”
Will the SEC trade their satisfied requests — one-time transfer limit, five-year eligibility standard, agent registry, strict revenue-share cap — for the items that they wish weren’t in the text?
It remains to be seen. And while the bill’s announcement was less than ideal for administrators here — it dropped squarely as Sankey met with his university presidents — it’s unclear how the legislation impacts the high-level discussions here around a self-governance, breakaway model.
One official said the bill renewed hope in congressional action to save the day and regulate the industry — what many describe here as “Plan A.” But another believes the league’s presidents are barreling toward at least a framework for Plan B: a self-governance model that sets conference-wide rules around eligibility, transfers, athlete compensation, tampering, etc, while still holding a commitment to the College Sports Commission.
Athletic directors and presidents meet again on Thursday to complete the three-day gathering.
But back to that piece of legislation - a 111-page tome detailed in this Yahoo Sports story on Wednesday morning.
Does it have a real chance of passage? Hurdles are already forming. Some, like Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), say it goes too far in “protecting” college sports leaders and “limiting” the athletes. Others, like Republican Congressmen Brett Guthrie and Tim Walberg, believe it doesn’t go far enough: The bill, they say, should prohibit athletes from being deemed employees.
On Wednesday evening, in another sign of the difficulty in passing legislation, leaders of the National Urban League and several college players associations, held a call with Cantwell — many of them critical of the legislation and its antitrust protection bestowed on the NCAA. The call featured more than 40 people and lasted over an hour.
This will not be easy.
The bill needs the support of at least seven Democrats — if all Republicans vote for it — to reach the 60-vote threshold for passage. A House vote may pose an even bigger problem, even though passage is by majority. The Republican margin in the House is only three.
Meanwhile, SEC and Big Ten legal counsel will likely spend several days poring over those 111 pages in determining what they like and don’t like in the legislation.
The concepts targeting the SEC and Big Ten — prohibiting merging and expansion and the pooling of rights — is part of a larger movement from many external forces emerging in the college sports space recently.
For instance, in her interview with Yahoo Sports, Cantwell said she got “a lot of input and help” from two men who are leading the presidential committee on college sports: Yankees president Randy Levine and Texas businessman Cody Campbell, each close allies to President Donald Trump.
In a fact worth noting, Campbell led an advertisement campaign last fall that put in the crosshairs the SEC and Big Ten and their resistance to pool media rights.
Another force with influence over the development of legislation: Jack Swarbrick, the former Notre Dame athletic director now working for Smash Sports, the private equity-backed movement whose operatives have moved mostly in the shadows for three years now socializing a model to reshape college football by — you guessed it — consolidating media rights.
“It’s interesting in Washington where the voices of influence come from,” Sankey said on Wednesday. “I think that bill speaks to the voices of influence.”
Who are those voices?
“You guys can figure that out,” he answered.
The pooling of rights is especially a topic of division among the 10 FBS conferences. Many within the Group of Six leagues, Big 12 and ACC are supportive of at least an exploration into the concept, and some of their university presidents participated in presentations from Smash executives.
Those in the Big Ten and SEC — which make up more than 60% of the media value in the college sports market — seem hell bent against pooling rights, presumably against any sharing of their wealth and, according to their white paper, they doubt that a pooling of rights holds much more overall value.
According to the Senate bill, 75% of the 138 schools in FBS — or 34.5 programs — would need to opt in to trigger the pooling mechanism (the other 25% are not forced to join). That means the SEC, Big Ten and Notre Dame — a total of 35 schools — hold the keys to the consolidation. Notre Dame is, sort of, the “swing vote,” one might say. Irish athletic director Pete Bevacqua, in past comments, has signaled that he is against the consolidation of rights.
As the two biggest revenue generators, the SEC and Big Ten — and Notre Dame, for that matter — would need to participate for projected media values to “work,” Cruz acknowledges. According to Smash Sports’ presentation, as well as comments from Campbell, those values exceed three times what college sports currently generates. The other conferences must “negotiate” with the SEC and Big Ten in striking “an agreement that would be attractive to them” to garner their inclusion in pooling rights, Cruz told Yahoo Sports.
Cantwell believes that Campbell and Levine will continue to work with the FBS conferences to “get together and capture the revenue opportunity” of pooling rights, she said. The senator believes it to be a critical step in filling budgetary holes to help protect women’s and Olympic sports as more cash goes to football and men’s basketball programs in this revenue-sharing age.
Will the SEC support her bill?
Cantwell chuckles at the question from the other side of the line.
“They didn’t support the first bill [to pool media rights],” she said. “I don’t expect them to support the second one.”
But college athletics — the SEC included — made this bed.
What happens when you ask the federal government for help?
“You never know where it goes,” Sankey quipped.