The two richest conferences are not exactly the most neutral observers, but the Big Ten and SEC have reportedly laid out their arguments for why pooling college football media rights is a bad idea.
The Big Ten and SEC reportedly distributed a white paper to lawmakers this week arguing against proposals advocating for the centralization of college sports media rights, saying that the plans put forth by groups like Saving College Sports and some members of Congress are lacking in detail, “dangerously unworkable,” and could “ultimately destabilize the college sports ecosystem.” The paper and an accompanying executive summary were both publicized Thursday, the former by Ross Dellinger of Yahoo Sports and the latter by Ralph D. Russo of the Associated Press.
The two conferences average a combined $1.9 billion/year from their current media rights deals.
The paper raised concerns about who would negotiate a centralized college sports media package — noting that the proposed “SAFE Act” in Congress would result vest power in a “federally established panel with little or no sports media experience” — and argued that the large number of FBS teams (136, compared to 32 in the NFL) renders a centralized model impractical.
Citing the “sheer number of games to be produced and distributed,” the paper argued that any consolidated television packages would “far exceed the capacity of current broadcasters” and that the “complexity” of scheduling so many games would result in most of them being “relegated to streaming services or local broadcasters in some yet to be disclosed scheme.”
Though football differs from other college sports in distributing most of its FBS-level games through linear television (and broadcast networks in particular), there is already plenty of precedent for college football games airing exclusively on streaming services, particularly Big Ten games on Peacock and even the occasional SEC game on ESPN+. In addition, it is hard to imagine any centralized college football media rights negotiations that would not involve enough packages, bidders and platforms to sustain the current linear-heavy distribution model.
The conferences picked apart comparisons to the NBA’s recent $77 billion media rights deal, which centralization proponents apparently view as a model. In particular, they noted that the NBA does not actually centralize all of its rights, selling only a portion of its games in its national rights deals and reserving the rest for local broadcasters. But that may change in the coming years as both the NBA and MLB are reportedly looking to consolidate local media rights into a single national package.
In addition, the conferences argued that the NBA’s massive rights deal was not simply the byproduct of pooling its media rights, but of “market dynamics and deft packaging of media assets.” The league came to market at an ideal time — linear (ESPN) needed to retain existing programming and streaming (Peacock and Prime Video) needed to build up sports content — and had enough excess inventory to sustain all interested parties.
Neither document went into detail about other leagues’ media rights deals, but one does not need to stretch the imagination to think of a major pro sports league that has thus far failed to maximize its media rights. MLB makes less than a third of the NBA’s annual media rights fees, and after devaluing its rights with bargain basement streaming deals now faces the challenge of heading to market after the NFL will have likely drained most networks’ coffers.
A consolidated college sports rights package would likely be attractive enough to overcome any headwinds — and potentially more resilient to broader trends than a single conference-level deal — but it might go without saying that simply consolidating rights does not guarantee maximizing revenue.
But even getting to that point would be impractical, the conferences argued. Because of the varying length of the existing college sports media rights deals — from those of individual conferences to the various NCAA championships and College Football Playoff — any immediate centralization plan would require the conferences and networks to voluntarily exit their ongoing deals or have those contracts being terminated against their will. That, the conferences said, “would be tantamount to nationalizing the college sports media market.”
