SBJ College: Who makes the rules?

Getting ahead of things as our biweekly summer newsletter cycle continues, I’m looking forward to seeing many of you in Las Vegas for NACDA in two weeks.

My boss, Abe Madkour, and I are hosting a slate of SBJ panels from 9am to 11:45am PT on June 9. Be sure to stop by and say hello. I’ll also be moderating a Monday panel with NoCap Sports. Swing through and check it out.

In other news, I’m playing around with a few new newsletter features/formats here starting this week. It’s been almost three years since I took over this role from my esteemed predecessor, Michael Smith, so I wanted to try a couple of ideas during our summer lull. Let me know what you think!

College football is increasingly becoming a 365-day-a-year sport — and conference spring meetings are proof of as much.

What used to be informal gatherings by the beach have become almost media day-adjacent events for reporters and administrators alike. So much for getting to enjoy the sunshine, right?

These are a couple headlines I’m keeping tabs on heading into the heat of the summer:

Do the conference offices really want to self-govern?

There’s a real conversation being had in SEC circles — and, in a less structured way, in the Big Ten — about what self-governing outside the NCAA might look like.

Those murmurs stirred in Amelia Island, Fla., early last month when ACC administrators gathered. By the time the SEC’s crew got together on the Florida Panhandle last week, it was a topic in virtually every conversation I had.

Given the lack of enforcement and effectiveness of the $20.5 million cap spelled out in the House settlement, some are ready to blow up the system entirely — Georgia President Jere Morehead and football coach Kirby Smart among them. Others are more tempered.

The question I keep coming back to is for all the groaning about the College Sports Commission, NCAA and lack of rules, why would a conference office want to get into the enforcement business?

The NCAA — and more recently, the CSC — are almost always the first to receive blame when something in college sports goes wrong. They also provide a convenient litigation shield for the schools.

Is the SEC really ready for that?

I asked SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey about it Thursday.

“We’ve had that role. Conference policies, conference governance, the ability to say no, the ability to deny waiver requests, the ability sometimes to approve waiver requests, the ability to adapt our own rules that are more restrictive than the NCAA rule — that’s been going on, in my experience, for decades,” Sankey said. “Can there be more of that, and do we accept that responsibility? We can. What are the limits? I’ll answer that then. Not now.

“But there’s kind of this notion, because there’s talk and because we’re at a time of change, that the Southeastern Conference having policies that govern the Southeastern Conference that may be different than policies that govern the Atlantic Coast Conference or the Big 12 Conference is something novel. That is not novel. We probably, in some of the areas, didn’t get enough credit for it trying to manage through things in the proper way. And we’ve shown that we can do that. How far that goes, we’ll see.”

We’ll see, indeed.

What to make of the rules and whether anyone wants them

It’s no secret the Big Ten and SEC are among those leading the roughshod spending and creative accounting that have rendered the House settlement revenue sharing cap effectively dead.

Schools in both conferences are anecdotally among the biggest spenders in the sport. Remember all the crowing over Ohio State’s $20 million football roster that won the national title in 2025? These days, that’d be a hell of a discount for that kind of talent.

Jokes aside, the question here is whether college sports want a cap at all.

As I reported last month, Power Four commissioners have kicked around a one-year amnesty of sorts — basically, a chance for schools to clean up their books after over-promising on deals now being held up by the CSC.

ACC Commissioner Jim Phillips and Big 12 Commissioner Brett Yormark aren’t in favor of such a deal. After all, the SEC and Big Ten effectively spent themselves to this point. Why give them a free pass?

Speaking with folks over the last few weeks, there’s a sentiment from some corners of the ecosystem there ought to just be no cap at all. Let schools spend what they want to spend. Some will keep up. Others won’t.

MLB is in the middle of a similar fight. Is it fun for opposing fans watching the Dodgers spend themselves into oblivion every year and win titles because they can? Not exactly. But as a lifelong Yankees fan (my dad is from Manhattan, blame him), I’ve watched enough seasons to know money doesn’t always win.

Perhaps no rules is what will actually bring stability after all.

More Capitol Hill drama is coming

College sports have struck out in about every conceivable way in getting a bill through Congress so far. And yet, the lobbying checks still keep clearing.

We might finally be in a spot to see if the millions the leagues have spent in trying to push legislation is actually worth it thanks to the introduction of the Protect College Sports Act from Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas).

I’ll keep this brief (keep reading and you’ll see why), but there’s at least some optimism that this all-encompassing bill might get through the Senate. The House? Yeah, we’ll see.

The biggest problem is timing. Congress goes on recess in August. The midterms loom upon return. That gives everyone about four months (June-July and September-October) to get this across the line. In congressional time, that’s approximately the speed of light.

Stay tuned for Wednesday’s hearing in the Senate Commerce Committee. Consider it a first test to see whether this bill has real legs.

This time of year, my inbox is flooded with story pitches on newfangled ways people are approaching the business of college sports.

I want to use this space to catch up on some of those items and highlight a couple of the interesting efforts happening around the industry.

Macron x Fairleigh Dickinson is your favorite collaborators favorite collaboration: If you haven’t seen the announcement by now, 2023 March Madness Darling FDU became the first school to ink an apparel deal with Macron.

I spoke with new AD Jason Young about the transition, how the school landed on essentially a European soccer outfitter and one of the more interesting aspects in this deal — which is significantly more valuable than what incumbent Under Armour was offering — is that it permits athletes to wear whatever shoe brand they desire.

“That is such a huge sell right now for kids to be able to come in and wear Nikes, wear Adidas, whatever they really want,” Young said. “In Year 1, we’re going to make our teams pick their branded shoes. Basketball might be Nike. Soccer might be Adidas. But I could see in two, three years, we just tell kids, ‘Here’s the website. Go buy whatever you want.’”

As one of the least-resourced schools in D-I, FDU has to build advantages where it can.

The ASUN-WAC merger that isn’t exactly a merger: Everyone is trying to rejigger the way they staff departments — and conference offices are a part of that equation.

The ASUN and WAC (now dubbed the United Athletic Conference) announced last week that the leagues are effectively merging their business operations through a consortium dubbed “Unisun Sports.”

ASUN Commissioner Jeff Bacon will serve as the organization’s CEO, and WAC Commissioner Rebekah Ray will shift into a senior leadership position. The leagues will retain their independent conference structures (eight schools in the UAC, seven in the ASUN) and automatic qualifiers for NCAA championships.

The idea in merging these operations has a few layers. For one, Bacon and Ray determined selling their media rights together was likely to be more lucrative (sound familiar?). There’s also a matter of streamlining staffing and saving costs.

Bacon describes Unisun Sports as effectively the parent company. While each conference retains its own rules, bylaws, 501(c)(3) status, etc., the organization provides a backbone of support for both leagues and helps eliminate redundant expenses.

“There’s sort of three primary tenants behind what we’re building,” Bacon said. “One coming together in a way that will consolidate and save money and resources. How do we reduce our expenses or our overhead in general? Two would be how do we increase our value in the marketplace? We think by bundling additional assets, or in this case conferences together, we increase our value.

“Then the third is, how do we control competition? It’s so hard to get games, especially in basketball, now. With what will be 17 schools under this consortium this summer, we can really control games. You’ll see the ASUN and the UAC play crossover basketball games.”

I don’t think the SEC and Big Ten conference offices are going to coalesce any time soon for roughly a million reasons. But for smaller conferences in D-I, the pooling of rights and the staffing structure here makes a ton of sense.

Credit to this group for being on the forefront of something this creative.

College sports might just have the legislative path it has so desperately sought.

The Protect College Sports Act from Sens. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas) could provide the industry with the congressional assistance many have long desired.

I spoke with Cantwell on the heels of the bill’s release to talk through some of the big ideas and better understand why she wanted to be involved in this issue.

Answers have been lightly edited for clarity and length:

SBJ: One thing that stands out in this bill is the flexibility to allow the cap to grow. Can you explain how that works?

Sen. Maria Cantwell: “We definitely need new rules and new tools, right? No one’s going to question the fact that while we have emerged in an era of NIL rights guaranteed by the courts and revenue sharing in a settlement agreement — those are solidly here, that day is here — we also have the impact of that on the rest of the ecosystem. The 90%-plus of athletes who basically aren’t going to go on to college and yet represent so much of what is a kind of human infrastructure of our college education system, that we really like. We really like the fact that we’re [teaching] and training 500,000 athletes. It’s great in competition and athletic endeavors. We thought that getting these federal NIL rights on the table and trying to control costs while preserving those rights for women and Olympic athletes was worth getting done.

“If somebody wants to propose some better idea down the road, because we basically say this cap is in place for nine years, which is what the settlement agreement said, you can definitely come back and we have a commission in here. They can go look at collective bargaining or other tools, and they can come back and tell us, ‘Hey, this is what we think.’ But we also preserved within the bill. If the parties to the Grant House vs. NCAA agreement want to come back and say, ‘Hey, we think that revenue share should be 50%, not 44%,’ we also preserve that option.”

SBJ: The Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 and the potential for pooled media rights is also addressed in this bill. Why?

MC: “One, because we need more money for those women in Olympic sports and two, because we’re leaving money on the table. What we thought was important is as you are going to meet this new era of NIL and revenue sharing of media rights, then make sure that you also are keeping the rest of the ecosystem healthy. By us saying you have to keep your scholarship levels at the same level — whatever the highest year you’ve had in the last three years, that’s the level that you have to keep — we thought that was a way to emphasize how important the whole system is, not just those 1% that go on to the pros or can earn big NIL contracts today.

SBJ: There’s some fairly targeted language in here directed at protecting against a super league. Can you explain why that was included?

MC: “Well, you’ve heard of too big to fail, right? This is too big for your own good. How could you have a super league and then eight teams that basically, those are the eight teams that make it every year? No one wants to see that. How is that true competition? I mean, we could have named the bill ‘True Competition.’ It’s just as much about how are you going to keep a level playing field among schools and not just have the billionaire boosters basically run the show. This is about saying, ‘We’re not going to let you get too big.’ You just can’t.”

SBJ: One other major point the bill sort of hand-waves at is the idea of athlete employment. The language seems to be relatively neutral on the subject. Why was that the case?

MC: “In the bill we anticipated that this discussion could happen, and we create a commission and they can look at this future landscape. I think it’d probably be pretty determinant based on whether they do execute on the SBA portion and whether the individual schools and conferences think they can move ahead successfully under this existing structure, or whether they think it gets — with that much money — it gets too complex or the parties come back to the table and say, ‘We really do want 50%.’

“It’s probably a myriad of things, but we have built flexibility by putting rules and tools in place to help get more revenue and guarantee athletes their due. We’re also saying, ‘This helps stabilize the system for now, while you consider these questions for the future.’”

• The SEC’s stakeholders departed last week’s meetings with no decisions and, more pressing, no deeper understanding of the CFP’s real question — whether there’s actually enough new money to justify a jump from 12 to 24 teams. That question sits at the center of a CFP stalemate, as my SBJ colleague Austin Karp and I report in this week’s magazine.
• Altius was born in the early days of the NIL era. While that remains a key part of the company’s operations, Altius has made a recent and intentional pivot toward broader college sports consulting.
• Yankees President Randy Levine, a leader of President Trump’s Council on College Sports, told SBJ’s Mike Mazzeo the feedback he received from his committee and others was that the Protect College Sports Act covers 80% of what is needed to solve the problems caused by an NCAA system that is broken and unsustainable.
• Utah DE Lance Holtzclaw is slated to be among those in D.C. this week to provide an athlete’s perspective during a Senate Commerce Committee hearing into college sports.