How the DOJ's investigation of the NFL could affect college football

Six days after President Donald Trump released an executive order that claims to “save” college sports but probably won’t result in many actual changes, we learned the executive branch is doing something that might unintentionally have a profound effect on college sports. 

The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that the Department of Justice is probing the NFL’s media rights agreements. Essentially, the league is about to squeeze Paramount/CBS, Fox, Amazon and other broadcast rights holders for more money. The DOJ, with the support of some legislators, is examining whether the NFL should be afforded the antitrust protections it and other pro leagues enjoy thanks to the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961.

Utah Sen. Mike Lee posted on Thursday that he urged the DOJ to look into the SBA and whether it’s applicable to the current landscape. If the DOJ determines it isn’t, a potential outcome is a rewritten, modernized version of the SBA. That likely would include college sports, and the result could seriously affect conference realignment and school revenue. 

In 1961, Congress enacted the Sports Broadcasting Act, granting limited antitrust immunity to allow professional football teams to collectively license the “sponsored telecasts” of their games to national broadcast networks.

Courts have recognized that “sponsored telecasting”… https://t.co/EI5bzHVuFY

— Mike Lee (@SenMikeLee) April 9, 2026

College football fans probably recognize the law. We’ve discussed it a lot over the past six months as conferences try to maximize future revenue. College sports aren’t included in the SBA, which grants a slim antitrust exemption to professional football, basketball, baseball and hockey leagues so that league members can pool their broadcast rights and sell them as one package. The law acknowledges that while competing clubs are economic competitors in most cases, they are partners in this case. It doesn’t specify the NFL, the NBA, Major League Baseball or the NHL, but those were and still are the dominant leagues. Without the exemption, any competing league likely could have sued, claiming collusion and won, which would have made it difficult to build elite pro leagues.

Much has changed since 1961 in the sports business and in the broadcasting business. The NFL is now the purveyor of the most popular TV shows in America. In 2025, 89 of the 100 most watched shows on TV were NFL games. Also, there are more buyers in the market than the three broadcast networks that existed in 1961. Cable television was born, peaked and has now settled into a declining state. Streaming services such as Amazon and Netflix buy games and put them behind paywalls. Networks such as NBC broadcast games on free TV but also pay extra to put some games exclusively on their own paywalled streaming services.

Meanwhile, the most watched college sports (football and men’s basketball) have evolved into essentially the same businesses as the ones the NFL and NBA run, just with different viewership numbers. But the rights to those broadcasts are sold differently because the schools and conferences don’t enjoy the same antitrust protection the NFL and NBA do. They’re parceled out piecemeal, conference-by-conference. The lucrative postseason tournaments are sold separately from the regular seasons. This is why the NBA makes more in broadcast revenue than college football even though by any metric college football is the more valuable television property. The schools aren’t allowed the same monopoly power the NBA franchises are.

What makes this even more interesting is that a group of leagues and at least one large private equity entity have taken up the cause of getting the SBA rewritten to include college sports. They’ve been actively lobbying members of Congress for more than a year with this specific goal in mind. Meanwhile, the Big Ten and SEC — the two richest, most dominant leagues — have pushed back against that idea. They claim — occasionally with a straight face — that all the FBS leagues selling their regular-season and postseason rights as one wouldn’t make more money when it almost certainly would.

Those two leagues fear a version of the SBA that ties the entire FBS together. That might diminish how much power the Big Ten and SEC currently wield over the other leagues. But what makes this situation so fascinating is that the change the parties in college sports keep arguing about may happen in spite of them rather than because of them.

What does the DOJ investigation into the NFL mean for college sports? It could mean that no matter what any of the college leagues want, college sports may be along for the ride if the law gets rewritten.

The DOJ investigation is happening for a couple of reasons. First, it’s politically savvy for elected officials to go after the NFL as a champion of the consumer. The league is about to grab a huge payday as networks scramble to rework deals before opt-out clauses in their current agreements hit. The league has increasingly spread games across a variety of services, and while  the NFL has a higher percentage of games broadcast on free, over-the-air TV than any other pro league, the league can’t deny that it has become more difficult and more expensive to watch the NFL. That likely will continue if more streaming services win rights. This makes the NFL look greedy, and of course the viewer ultimately shoulders any price increase. So it’s an easy political win to challenge the shield.

The more conspiratorial theory is that the two networks that will get squeezed first are CBS and Fox, which each are run by people with lots of friends in the executive branch. Skydance just acquired CBS parent company Paramount. It’s run by David Ellison, the son of Oracle founder Larry Ellison. Fox is run by Rupert Murdoch and his family. Both families are extremely politically connected, and both are about to see their annual bills for NFL rights rise from the low $2 billion range to the low $3 billion range. 

No matter why the investigation is happening, the SBA probably was due for a refresh. And if college sports get included in a rewritten version, it could change what the future looks like.

If the law is written as vaguely as the original — without specifying which leagues are protected — it opens the possibility of a super league that contains only the biggest brands. This is the fear not only of Group of 6 leagues but of programs in the ACC and Big 12. 

If the law were written more specifically, would the power conferences of the FBS (ACC, Big 12, Big Ten, SEC) still be tethered to the other six leagues (the American, Conference USA, the MAC, the Mountain West, the Pac-12 and the Sun Belt)? All of these issues would need to be hashed out while legislators also dealt with lobbying from the NFL, NBA, MLB and NHL to get the most advantageous version of the law for their leagues.

If college sports were included, conferences almost certainly would combine forces to sell their rights as their media rights deals expire. Though the years aren’t synced, every major college sports media rights deal expires between 2030 and 2036. This includes the College Football Playoff and the NCAA men’s and women’s basketball tournaments. 

Imagine a package that included the college football regular season, the CFP, both basketball regular seasons and both basketball tournaments. It probably wouldn’t be sold to one network but instead parceled out to a group of high bidders. This is how the NFL and NBA use the SBA to keep their prices high, and it would create a revenue surge for the schools lucky enough to be in the club if such a consolidation happened. 

But that’s the thorny part. Who gains membership into the club if this happens?

While the NFL and the DOJ hash out their beef, the leaders of college sports will jockey behind the scenes to put their conferences in the most advantageous position should the SBA get rewritten. Only now they may have little control over what that new version looks like.