In 1977, 63 schools from the ACC, SEC, Big 8, Southwest, and WAC formed the “College Football Association” with the intent of wresting their rights away from the NCAA and selling higher-priced, more flexible TV packages. The NCAA had controlled all TV rights since 1951 and exerted significant control over which games could be televised and when, only allowing coverage of about three dozen games each season and splitting the revenue equally between all appearing schools. The CFA schools felt their rights were worth more if separated from the rest of college football and sought to extract that value from the networks. The NCAA fervently denied the legitimacy of the CFA until the US Supreme Court in 1984 ruled in favor of the University of Oklahoma, which had alleged the NCAA’s control of the TV packages violated antitrust law.
The CFA was free to then sign its own TV contract with ABC and an upstart cable network named ESPN. However, in the years to come, the value of a large package of TV rights began to diminish as more cable players began to enter the market. ABC, which by 1991 owned separate contracts with the Big Ten and Pac-10, found its appetite for the CFA’s rights to be not quite as high. Notre Dame’s exit to begin its ongoing NBC deal further weakened the CFA. The final blow came in 1996, when CBS signed a deal to televise the Southeastern Conference and Big East. Much as the CFA schools were initially more valuable apart from the NCAA, the SEC schools were more valuable apart from the CFA.
Forty years later, some voices in college football seek a return to a nationally-pooled system of television rights. Advocates argue that there is more value in pooling television rights than in conferences striking deals individually. On its face, it appears a logical suggestion. But the entire idea breaks down when considering the same issues that faced the NCAA and CFA. So who would be the winners and losers in such an arrangement?
A very rough estimate of the current annual combined value of all of regular-season college football (and basketball, and all other sports) is about $2.5 billion ($1B for the Big Ten, $710M for the SEC, $380M for the Big 12, $310M for the ACC, $50M for Notre Dame, and some rounding to account for the 28 other Division I conferences). Let’s consider for the purpose of sky-high approximation that an NCAA-exclusive contract is able to double this figure to $5 billion annually (about a third of what the NFL takes in annually).
A $5 billion price tag would be untenable for any single media company, especially as the NFL is actively seeking increases of its current deals into the $3 billion range. But splitting the rights between more than a handful of partners results in too much logistical complexity for the NCAA to manage, so the bar to entry is probably about $1 billion, effectively limiting the bidders to the current NFL partners: Disney, Fox, Comcast, Paramount, Google, Amazon. All these platforms are able to handle massive audiences for big-time events, but the volume of events in an all-NCAA package would require a partner like ESPN or YouTube with the infrastructure required to stream hundreds of events at once.
Coverage of football and basketball would be split between partners by the NCAA all eager for top inventory. The synergy of a full day of “SEC on ABC” would be gone as the NCAA spread games across its platforms. Scheduling would all have to be centralized. Fans used to watching a team’s games on one platform would have to adjust to a schedule that spans any number of outlets.
Smaller media outlets have created a niche in offering in-depth coverage of college sports beyond the country’s biggest brands: Big 12 football on TNT, Atlantic 10 basketball on USA Network, even events on NEC Front Row. FloSports has for years offered coverage of lower-division conferences and Olympic sports. It’s fair to assume these niches would be lost in a massive all-encompassing media rights package. Even networks like ACC Network or Big Ten Network would not be as useful if they couldn’t guarantee a full slate of conference games.
So if the plan doesn’t make sense for the networks, is it worth it for the schools? Splitting the $5 billion rights fee equally between all 365 institutions yields about $14M annually, a non-starter for top programs. Even just splitting between the 138 FBS programs yields $36M annually, a far cry from the $45-55M the Big Ten and SEC schools are currently commanding. Providing Alabama with the same media rights revenue as Alabama State would surely result in either the departure of top teams and conferences from the NCAA or a lawsuit as in 1984. The NCAA could consider some sort of weighted revenue-sharing program to favor top programs, but that comes with questions about how to ensure fairness. Any revenue split would have to be unequal, and any metrics used to do so (viewership, team performance, attendance, etc.) have some biases built in.
Right now, two college football superpowers (the Big Ten and SEC) keep the market cooled with separate media partners. ESPN doesn’t feel pressure to overspend for the Big Ten because it’s in good position with the SEC, and the same is true of Fox and the SEC. Research commissioned last month by the SEC and Big Ten backs up the notion that a nationally-pooled college sports rights scenario is not beneficial to their institutions. The paper specifically notes the power conferences have separately increased their rights fees at a rate faster than an All-NCAA package could, a trend that is expected to continue. Specifically, the SEC, which earns 30% less than the Big Ten despite stronger football ratings, can probably expect to reset the market again when its rights lapse in 2034.
Perhaps a combined B1G/SEC package would be the easiest way to command a higher price. The current Big Ten and SEC deals, if combined and doubled as in the example above, would result in annual fees of $100 million to each of 38 schools. While catastrophic for the rest of the NCAA — networks paying high rights fees for the Super League would certainly have limited interest in the rest of college football — a consolidation of the top brands in sports would result in a massive payday, at least in the short term.
For the Big 12 and ACC, the benefits are more unclear. A packaged rights fee could be slightly higher than their current media revenue, but at what cost? They would be functionally surrendering control of their seasons to the Big Ten and SEC. They would have no guarantees to be featured in prominent TV windows as networks could pick and choose games as they pleased. And there’s no guarantee the Big Ten and SEC stick around to subsidize the rest of college sports, which would drive the price down for the leftovers.
For the rest of the leagues — including many whose national TV presence is limited to a handful of basketball tournament games — there could be financial benefit to being packaged in with the power conferences, but it’s not without risk. They would have to use already-limited resources to fight to earn a sustainable share of the revenue pool. And those conferences could be left scrambling if power conferences started to leave and the value of the bundle suddenly collapsed. Additionally, game inventory from a single conference could be scattered across multiple platforms, increasing frustration for fans used to everything in one place.
Conferences like the Big East, which have secured valuable deals for basketball content but offer no football, throw a wild card into the equation. How much value would they actually contribute to an all-sports deal, and would it be enough to support department budgets at the current level? Even schools like UConn — a perennial contender in both men’s and women’s hoops with a football team whose results have been uninspiring as of late — becomes difficult to assign value in a revenue-sharing formula.
Besides the financial questions, there are logistical and legal questions surrounding the idea. Preventing the threat of lawsuits would presumably require an antitrust exemption provided through an amendment to the 1961 Sports Broadcasting Act. That would require the agreement of 60 US senators, which does not appear likely. Sidestepping Congress, an executive order would face legal challenges, with no guarantees that it would remain in effect into the next administration – which begins less than three seasons from now.
College football has always been a regional sport, made special by its ties to regional rivalries and travel to local opponents. The market forces in the ‘80s and ‘90s showed that the value of college football (and its associated television rights) is optimized in regional conferences, and another painful period awaits the sport if it fails to remember its old lessons.
