SBJ College: Commissioners' Corner

SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey has an influential role on the NCAA’s constitutional committee but he was slow to reveal what changes might be coming. Sankey said he “won’t overpredict” whether there will be a subdivision out of D-I and that he is “more interested in perspectives right now that inform our decision-making.” Sankey: “I have a responsibility to lead this effort. Now, what are the concepts? Conceptually, everything should be on the table, period.”

Regarding CFP expansion, Sankey doesn’t regret coming out with a working plan for a 12-team model in June, even though it has been hard to get to the finish line since. “There are no secrets about the work that was done to bring us to this 12-team format.” And what has he learned during the pandemic? “It's been 19 months of uncertainty,” he said. “You can earn a master's degree in 19 months on many campuses. So, we have a graduate degree in managing through uncertainty. We should take those lessons and use them.”

ACC Commissioner Jim Phillips took his share of the blame for the currently unlegislated NIL space in college sports. “We didn't get it done before July 1 and shame on me," he said. "My fingerprints are on that." And while Phillips sees the positives in student athletes' ability to monetize their likeness, he believes there must be uniformity. "It's created chaos and it's going to continue," Philips said. "And it's unsettling when you don't have a national legislation when you play a national schedule.” Phillips: “It's created inequities amongst the schools, amongst men's basketball and football and the Olympic sports, and is exactly what we didn't want to have happen. ... We have now something that we're not able to monitor. And one interpretation at one school or one state is different than another school or another state.”

Before Phillips' time on stage ended, session moderator Mike Golic couldn't let one ACC-specific issue go untouched: Will Notre Dame ever join the conference? “Notre Dame got a chance to see what the ACC was all about last year,” Phillips, who worked in South Bend from 2004-08 and has a daughter at the school, said when asked by the Fighting Irish alum. “The ACC got a chance to see what Notre Dame was like. … It was a mutually beneficial relationship.” But he made it clear he knows the school’s priorities well. “Independence and Catholicism are the two things that they love (most) at Notre Dame. And sometimes Catholicism is second,” Phillips said.

Big 12 Commissioner Bob Bowlsby spoke candidly about the departure of Texas and Oklahoma to the SEC, making his disappointment in the move evident. “I can't say that I've gotten any sort of precise description of why they took the action that they took, but they don't necessarily owe us that explanation,” he said. “There's a personal element to it,” Bowlsby added of his relationships with Oklahoma and Texas ADs Joe Castiglione and Chris Del Conte. “I've been close to Joe and Chris for a long time and you would be denying human nature if you didn't admit that there were some of the feelings that come along with that. But on the other hand, you got to move on.”

Despite speculation the schools will move to the SEC sooner than planned, Bowlsby was confident the Big 12 can stay intact for the time being. “We own their media rights until 2025,” he said emphatically, referencing the conference’s grant rights and bylaws on institutions entering and exiting. “That's not to say that others may not have other ideas, but we feel like we have strength in those two documents.”

One of George Kliavkoff’s first moves as commissioner of the Pac-12 was starting the Alliance with the ACC and Big Ten this past summer as the conference landscape was up in the air. “There's nothing about the Alliance that doesn't mean we won't continue to work with the other two conferences,” Kliavkoff said of the reasoning for the three leagues not partnering with the SEC or Big 12. “But one of them just announced adding teams and one of them was losing teams and it was not clear at the moment that we were talking about the Alliance that the Big 12 was going to continue as an entity.” Kliavkoff said the Alliance wanted to “add some stability to a collegiate athletics atmosphere that was incredibly unstable.” He feels that the three conferences deciding to not add any members helped “quell what was going on” and allowed the Big 12 to remain intact for now.

Meanwhile, Kliavkoff was bullish in Olympic sports, saying, “I hate referring to (them) as non-revenue because I think those are opportunities. … These are all revenue opportunities. These are growing sports.” As for the Pac-12 media deals, which still have several years remaining, Kliavkoff is encouraged by the conference owning all of its rights. "We don't have an equity partner in our media rights," he sad. "So we'd be able to start from scratch, slice and dice the content distributed on many different platforms."

Big Ten Commissioner Kevin Warren believes the conference’s new sports data and analytics department will help foster a better relationship with its fans, saying “it was time” to start innovating. “Data, analytics, research is king right now,” Warren said. “And there's so much more that we can do in the collegiate space from a fan activation standpoint -- knowing about our fans, being able to target them from a marketing standpoint, opportunity to increase revenues.” Warren: “Just to be able to provide better communication information. So, this is one of those projects … I am really excited about.”

The new department is just one of many ways the Big Ten is preparing for media rights negations for contracts that are set to expire in ’23. Warren said that prep began about six months ago. “I feel very good, very fortunate, very blessed where we are in the overall market,” he said, referencing lucrative deals in the pro realm like the recent NFL and EPL agreements. Warren: “One good thing about COVID is the fact it reiterated the point of how much people love live sports.”

Regarding CFP expansion, one idea Warren wants to see implemented is opening the broadcast rights up to "multiple media partners." He says because there are so many entities who "want in," it's the "right thing" to do. "ESPN has been a phenomenal partner of the CFP," Warren said. "They deserve to be involved. But I think there are so many people who want to carry college football forward." Warren made it clear he wants to give "other media partners an opportunity to be able to bid on this."

Amid widespread conference realignment this year, the Mountain West found itself in the position of having to recruit its own member schools to stay on board, Commissioner Craig Thompson said. “It all came together at the end,” Thompson said of the MWC retaining all of its member, including Boise State, and opting against expansion.” We have a very good conference, very solid conference. We've got some people, Wyoming-Colorado State for example, have been playing each other since the 1890s.”

That familiarity, Thompson believes, is one big reason the conference’s dominos fell the way they did. “We have nine institutions that have played football for over a hundred years -- very, very familiar with each other. And I think that was a part of the decision-making that they determined to stay."

Big East Commissioner Val Ackerman is pleased with the conference’s media position as the end of its 12-year basketball-centric deal with Fox Sports nears expiration in 2025. “Fox has been great. They don't cover everything,” Ackerman noted, mentioning the Big East is “all over the place” with other partners like CBS Sports, SNY and FloSports. “We're very widely distributed,” she said. “And hopefully when our deal expires with Fox in the next couple of years, we will have hopefully good options.”

Ackerman has been pleasantly surprised with new partner FloSports. “We weren't sure what it would be like to go behind a paywall because we've been on free digital for the last six years,” she said. “But we've actually grown our audience in part because of this community of subscribers, for Olympic sports in particular, that Flo has been able to attract.”

When it comes empowering student athletes, Ackerman is an advocate of more voices in the NCAA system, she says. “Our athletes are not employees,” Ackerman said. “They're not represented by a bargaining agent.” Ackerman: “They are asking us to pay attention to issues around mental health. … They want more education around NIL, because it's dawning on them how complex it is to do an NIL endeavor. They want more education around financial literacy.” So, what’s the solution? “It's incumbent upon all of us to listen to what their needs are,” she said, “to divine them on our own and then be responsive in the appropriate ways.”