Fixing College Football Part 5: Media rights

Isn't it a little too complicated to watch college football?

And just like that, we’ve reached the final installment of our Fixing College Football series. It’s been a great week sharing my thoughts with you all and I hope you’ve learned something or thought about something that you hadn’t before. After all, we’re trying to be educational here.

But, we’ve covered a lot this week. We’ve redrawn all the conferences. We’ve set up a 24-team playoff and moved the bowls to the beginning of the year. We’ve completely scratched the old calendar and moved things around, including fully killing Spring Ball. We’ve limited the transfer portal - with some conditions - heavily penalized tampering and made agents register. We even had a CBA signed.

Today is the big money day. After all, it’s media deals that bring in the most cash. And it’s time to fix those.

Media on Capitol Hill

We’ve gone a long way without talking about Congress, haven’t we? Well, we mentioned it yesterday, but that was an aside. Now they get their own header.

That’s because, more than any other part of college football we’ve discussed, media rights and the rules governing them come from the federal government. The NCAA can make as many rules as they want, but if it doesn’t abide by federal laws, it won’t matter.

That means it’s time to change laws! Hey, I promised a wide-ranging overhaul of college athletics, didn’t I?

We’ll take a look at a few legal issues, but the most of if lands in the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961. This Act was monumental in the sports broadcasting scene, allowing leagues to pool media rights to sell instead of individual teams having to negotiate with local networks. That paved the way for league-wide deals like the ones the NBA and NFL have earned billions and billions of dollars off of. Only MLB still has teams hold their individual media rights. Well, that and college athletics.

Currently, college programs hold their own media rights. It’s why Notre Dame has a deal with NBC to hold their broadcasts on the network. All non-Notre Dame teams pool their rights with conferences as a part of their membership, with the deal stipulating that the league’s media package be sold together.

But the NCAA can’t go further with making those deals. If they did, the organization would be open to a massive antitrust suit from whichever network, streaming service or broadcaster was left out in the cold.

And that’s where the Sports Broadcasting Act comes into play, because it exclusively granted those media pooling rights to MLB, the NBA, NFL, and NHL. The NCAA and its member schools were not included in that antitrust exemption, so they have to play by the old rules.

There’s been a lot of talk about reforming the Sports Broadcasting Act in recent years, simply because it is so out-dated. It’s based around TV in 1961, long before the advent of cable, RSNs, and, more importantly, streaming. Plus, some people are seeing dollar signs when looking at potential revenues.

Texas Tech booster, billionaire and constant commercial presence Cody Campbell has been calling for an amendment for the SBA to pool all 136 - now 138 - teams’ broadcast rights into one package. He and his group claim up to $6 billion of additional money could come from these pooled media deals.

But, as always, there’s strife in the sports world, as the Big Ten and SEC sent a letter to Congress saying they don’t need the SBA amendments and are actually doing quite fine on their own, as they’ve nearly matched the NBA’s media deal between just the two leagues.

And, of course, there’s the always present and somehow on life support SCORE Act that includes provisions that amend the SBA - and outlaw college athletes being seen as employees. That, however, seems to be dead in the water and Tommy Tuberville of all people has a sensible bill to follow.

Long story short, there is a lot to consider, and that’s not including just plain old antitrust law.

The solutions

I think we can agree on one thing: it’s incredibly difficult to watch all the college football you want. And increasingly small number of games is available on network television and more and more games are being put behind paywalls with ads and questionable viability.

Something has to give.

In our new ecosystem we’ve pieced together the last four days, there’s been a lot that’s been fixed. But this might be the hardest issue we’ve tackled simply because of its scope. We’re talking billions of dollars that will completely fund all the athletic programs. We can’t mess this up.

So, after plenty of consideration, I am not going to have the SBA amended to include college athletics. I feel like that level of antitrust exemption can pose a problem for such a large organization like the NCAA. After all, I have the final say in any decisions in this hypothetical.

We’re going to pool the media deals on the conference level still. But, each conference can only have one media partner.

Just look at the Big Ten’s media deal. It sends games across FOX, CBS and NBC’s networks and streaming platforms. An Ohio State fan, like my family, may one day be on FOX’s Big Noon Kickoff, then next week play a Peacock exclusive, then on CBS the next week, all for a daytime battle with Northwestern to be placed on Big Ten Network. For our fans with cable access, the FOX and CBS games aren’t too bad. If you don’t have cable and rely on streaming, that’s three different subscriptions to watch three different games.

And that’s not going into how hard it is to see a Group of Six game.

Here, we’re going to have one media partner per conference. Boom, all the Big Ten games are on FOX. Easy, right?

As more media companies get involved with sports, we have a wide range to choose from. We have the old reliables - CBS, NBC, FOX, ESPN. They’ll be big players. Streamers like HBO/Turner, Amazon Prime and Netflix are trying to get more sports. Even other networks like The CW are getting in on it. For those at home, that’s eight different media partners that already carry live sports.

With 13 conferences and a host of independents, we can limit networks to have two conferences at most, that way they don’t dilute the market too much. Or, if we keep one conference to one network, more inventive things like the Mountain West’s partnership with Kiswe, or YouTube, which dipped its toes in broadcasting in recent years, could be beneficial.

To boil this down into one list, here’s the rules for conferences:

• Conferences can get one media partner

• All the league’s games are streamed on that media partner

We’ve also got some rules for media partners, just to make things even:

• Media partners can sign one FBS conference. If they want to add more sports content at lower levels, by all means.

• For non-conference games, both media partners will be made available.

Yes, that last point is going to be tough. Especially as an SID, having two broadcasts being run at the same time has disaster potential. But, a simulcast is a possibility where the home team’s media partner produces the broadcast and the visiting team just sends their commentary crew.

Either way, those games need to be made available for the visiting team’s fans on their media platform.

This should make watching your team’s games super easy. I would love for a all-inclusive college football subscription, but I don’t see how that won’t violate antitrust laws unless we amend the SBA.

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Check out the rest of the Fixing College Football Series!

Part 1 - Realigment

Part 2 - The Postseason

Part 3 - The Calendar

Part 4 - Governance

Part 5 - Media Rights

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