Big Ten, SEC attack Big 12 booster Cody Campbell's Saving College Sports proposal to pool media rights

The Big Ten and SEC are taking on millionaire Texas Tech booster Cody Campbell in the halls of Congress over the future of college sports’ media rights, according to a document obtained by Yahoo! Sports insider Ross Dellenger and The Athletic’s Ralph Russo. The NCAA’s two wealthiest conferences recently distributed an eight-page memo to lawmakers on Capitol Hill that explains their opposition to Campbell’s nonprofit Saving College Sports initiative that aims to amend the Sports Broadcasting Act to allow collegiate conferences to pool media rights, specifically with the FBS.

While Campbell is not specifically named in the memo, which is titled “Preserving Autonomy and Stability in College Sports: Why Media Rights Pooling and SBA Reform are Misguided,” the Big Ten and SEC take direct aim at Campbell’s SCS proposal by describing it as a “well-intentioned but misguided strategy.” The memo also argues that such pooling would create centralized scheduling that could negatively impact cross-conference scheduling and the future of longstanding conference rivalries.

“College athletics thrives and enjoys zealous fan avidity precisely because teams and conferences have unique personalities with individual points of distinction. Homogenization of college athletics would likely diminish fan passions,” the memo reads. “College athletics doesn’t need government control and mandates. Market forces, intense competition and continued innovation are the natural drivers of the value of media rights.”

Big Ten-SEC memo argues Saving College Sports proposal won’t deliver as promised

The Saving College Sports initiative is among several proposals currently before congressional leaders that seek to take on the growing issues facing college athletics in the day and age of NIL and revenue-sharing following last Summer’s landmark House v. NCAA settlement. The Campbell-backed SCS counters other proposals such as the Republican-backed SCORE Act and the bipartisan SAFE Act that both seek to create federal guardrails for college sports — specifically around NIL, rev-share and the transfer portal — as well as provide some form of antitrust protection for the NCAA.

Meanwhile, the SCS pitches itself as “the only comprehensive, sustainable fix” to address what is ailing college sports by overhauling the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 and modernizing how college athletics — specifically college football — monetizes its on-field product through centralized media rights deals in an effort to maximize revenue, much like the NFL and NBA models. The SCS would also create a new independent governing body that’d represent an alternative to the NCAA and be led by a committee composed of former student-athletes and representatives from conferences and non-revenue sports alike to help protect women’s and Olympic sports well into the future.

“While the goals of these proposals are laudatory, the (SCS) proposal misunderstands and misstates the dynamics and operations of modern media markets, fails to take into account the market forces surrounding sports media rights, creates a bureaucracy that will unilaterally seize and administer private contract rights and strip colleges and universities of their autonomy in offering athletic opportunities for student-athletes,” the memo reads. “Claims made by these proposals, including the promise of significantly more revenue for college athletics, are not supported by any empirical evidence.”

The joint Big Ten-SEC memo specifically cites a previous attempt at centralized media rights created by the failed College Football Association (CFA) in 1984 that was “created to pool the football rights of the largest 64 Division I football schools, but produced less revenue than the previous system. Schools and conferences left the CFA because they generated MORE revenue at the conference level than as part of the CFA pool.”