SBJ College: Taking the ACC’s spring pulse

Hello from rainy Amelia Island, Fla., where the ACC kicked off its spring meetings Monday.

Spring-meeting season is one of my favorite times of the year. Always nice to get to see a bunch of old friends and gather in a nice locale to litigate whatever mess college sports finds itself in at that given moment.

Good thing there’s nothing to discuss this week. ...

AMELIA ISLAND, Fla. — Spring meetings tend to be mixed as to whether anything actually gets accomplished, but considering the existential crises facing college sports these days, there was plenty of depth to conversations around the Ritz Carlton the last few days at the ACC’s annual gathering here.

These were a few things I picked up on Monday and Tuesday:

What’s next for the College Sports Commission?

Concern is growing among college administrators about whether the College Sports Commission can function as envisioned when schools agreed to the House settlement. Those frustrations were expected to be voiced during Monday afternoon meetings with CSC CEO Bryan Seeley.

By Monday night, the CSC had an important win to point to. A neutral arbitrator upheld the commission’s rejection of NIL deals between Nebraska football players and Playfly Sports, the school’s multimedia partner, affirming the CSC’s authority in that case to treat Playfly as an “associated entity” under the House settlement. While the decision doesn’t set a precedent, it does confirm the commission’s oversight powers at a moment when just about everyone in the industry is challenging or questioning the reach of its authority.

There’s also a matter of figuring out the cap. Schools are largely spending well above the $20.5 million spelled out in the settlement. How can that be rectified? TBD.

How to make the CFP expansion math work

CFP expansion continues to be a pressing topic among administrators and executives. In my conversations this week, the ACC has largely come around on the idea of a 24-team field — a stance mirroring the Big Ten and Big 12.

Of course, there’s the ESPN of it all. The network, along with the SEC, remains adamantly opposed to doubling the field size. Why would the network want to pay more for the exclusivity it already enjoys?

There’s also the math behind the move. Conference title games would likely be eliminated as part of CFP expansion. Experts suggest the Power Four nets about $200 million combined (SEC: $100 million; Big Ten: $50 million; and Big 12 and ACC: $25 million each) for those championships.

If the eight games added in a 24-team format are worth somewhere between $400 million to $500 million (which may be optimistic), there’s really only $200 million to $300 million of new money coming in for doubling the field while compensating the Power Four for eliminating title games. Spread that across a couple leagues and is the money really there to justify the move?

Meetings galore in the Ritz-Carlton lobby

ESPN met with Octagon representatives here this week as the parties are in the latter stages of discussions for new media rights deals for the West Coast Conference and the MAC. Both league’s deals with ESPN end after the 2026-27 academic year.

Octagon’s contingent in Amelia Island included EVP/Global Media Rights Consulting Daniel Cohen, SVP/Global Media Rights William Mao and Director/Media Rights Consulting Justin Beitler.

ESPN, too, was well represented. Execs spotted included SVP/College Sports Programming and Acquisitions Nick Dawson, Senior Director/Programming and Acquisitions Dan Margulis, Senior Director/Programming and Acquisitions Kurt Dargis, Senior Director/Programming and Acquisitions Jeramy Michiaels and VP/ESPN Events Clint Overby.

NCAA men’s and women’s basketball tournament expansion is now official, as the governing body finalized its plan last Thursday.

We’ve written plenty here about expansion. Finally, we have more details about what it will entail.

A couple of the finer points include:

• A new 12‑game opening round will feature the 12 lowest automatic qualifiers and 12 lowest at‑large teams, with winners advancing to the Round of 64.
• The men will play their opening-round games in Dayton, Ohio, plus a second city. The women’s tournament will have opening round games on 12 of the top 16 seeds’ campuses.
• The expansion increases postseason access from 18% to 21% of D-I teams, and the NCAA projects this will generate over $131 million in additional revenue distributions over the next six years.

From a business perspective, the changes to the NCAA sponsorship program are perhaps the most fundamental and dramatic.

The NCAA noted explicitly that it will open the previously restricted categories of beer, wine, spirits and hard seltzer as part of its Corporate Champions and Partners Program.

Other modifications provide for an expanded territory in which the NCAA may sell local sponsorships “that are materially differentiated from the NCAA Corporate Champions and Partners Program and limited to the designated market area where a championship is held.”

The NCAA may also pursue limited, sport-specific sponsorships with equipment companies whose products are being used with applicable championships (think STX and men’s lacrosse or Bauer and hockey).

Expansion is an expensive proposition. Funding the additional flights, hotels and host sites is something the NCAA needed covered, even if CBS and Warner Bros. Discovery/TNT Sports were not obligated to raise media rights fees as part of this. Consider the sponsorship the financial fix.

Will any of this appease fans or detractors? Probably not. Little in college sports these days happens with the fans’ best interests in mind. Expansion is just the latest example.

Then again, we’ll all surely be tuned in when the first-ever 12-team opening round tips off next year.

Monday brought with it some serendipity for the gathered reporters in Amelia Island.

A ruling in the arbitration case between the College Sports Commission and 18 Nebraska football players came down roughly one minute before CSC CEO Bryan Seeley met with media members.

The win marks a major moment for the CSC, and while (as I noted earlier) it doesn’t create precedent, it provides at least some proof of concept that its rules can hold up. Does that mean this is the last challenge we’ll see? Far from it. It’s hard to imagine Nebraska won’t look at other avenues like state court.

There is also the matter of a coming hearing between the plaintiff’s counsel in the House settlement in which Jeffrey Kessler and Steve Berman are seeking to effectively rewrite the terms to make it more difficult to apply the “associated entity” standard to MMR companies like Playfly.

But that’s a fight for a later day. Monday, Seeley seemed notably relieved in discussing the case. Here were a few of his thoughts:

His reaction to the ruling and what it means

Bryan Seeley: “Obviously, we’re pleased with the arbitrator’s ruling in the decision [Monday]. This case was never about whether the student athletes can get paid. It was about whether they can get paid in this way, and our determination was they could not get paid in this way — and the arbitrator agreed with us on that.

“We hope and expect that these student athletes will submit new deals that comply with the rules. I have committed to Nebraska that we will expedite review of any deals from these student athletes that are submitted in the coming weeks and months. And my hope is we get to a point where we can approve them, but the deals that were submitted simply did not comply, and so we could not approve.

“What [Monday’s] decision also shows is that the arbitration system works. Student athletes submitted deals. We made a decision about those deals. There was a robust hearing in which witnesses were called, arguments were made. There was a lot of briefing, and the arbitrator made a decision based on the facts. The place for decisions that are based on the factual record is in arbitration under the settlement. It is not in court in California. What the plaintiff’s counsel in the House litigation have tried to do is remove these kinds of issues from factual grounding and put them in court when they previously agreed in the settlement that the issues will be decided in arbitration.”

Is this validation for the CSC and the system it has put into place?

“It’s not about me, right? It’s about a system, and I want to thank all the people from my team who worked hard on review of these deals and in the arbitration itself. There are growing pains with any system. There have been a lot of growing pains in this system, but we came from a system where there was no enforcement of the rules for a couple years. There are going to be growing pains to get to a system with real rules enforcement.

“It certainly feels validating to have an arbitrator agree with your decision. On the other hand, I was going to speak to the media, and we were going to make this decision public even if we lost. We made that commitment already. So, I am very happy that the arbitrator agreed with the decision. I think it hopefully instills some faith in this system, but we still have a lot of work to do to get to where the schools want enforcement to be.”

What should the average fan take from this ruling?

BS: “It shows that fact-based issues of enforcement coming out of the settlement can be decided in arbitration in a way that takes into account all the facts and allows the parties to move forward.

“Again, it is not precedential, but ... I hope and expect that people at schools, people working in college athletics, will look at this ruling as a positive development to bring enforcement to this space. And I do think most people working in college athletics want robust enforcement — not everyone, but most people. And so even if it’s not precedential, the fact is it’s influential and it’s influential in people’s minds about how they feel about the [system]. So to me, it was a good day.”

• This week’s magazine profiles the five nominees for Athletic Director of the Year: Indiana’s Scott Dolson, Texas Tech’s Kirby Hocutt, Vanderbilt’s Candice Storey Lee, Utah’s Mark Harlan and Western Michigan’s Dan Bartholomae. SBJ will announced the winners at May 20’s Sports Business Awards in NYC.
• Fairleigh Dickinson named Jason Young as its next AD. Young most recently served as assistant VP and deputy AD at FDU, where he oversaw the marketing, media relations and the business offices. He was instrumental in FDU’s landmark signing of Italian outfitter Macron as its apparel provider.
• The SEC is introducing its version of MLB’s automated ball-strike system at this year’s baseball tournament on an experimental basis, reports SBJ’s Joe Lemire.
• UNC Charlotte Athletics introduced a “fanshare” donor campaign with a $100 entry point that packages contributions as stock purchases while offering exclusive perks to expand its base of supporters, notes SBJ’s Mary Gaughan.