As the financial disparity between the haves and have-nots in college athletics grew precipitously over the last 20 years, the SEC and Big Ten threatening to break away from the NCAA has developed into a strain of Stockholm syndrome.
Though nearly every problem in college sports can be traced directly to the largesse of those two leagues and the lack of fiscal restraint that came along with mountains of television money, they largely succeeded in convincing the rest of the NCAA that smaller schools cannot live without their captors.
No matter how many restrictions were taken off the books to accommodate the Big Ten and SEC, no matter how much rule-making autonomy the power conferences were granted, the next crisis always demanded more — or else.
As detailed by colleague Ross Dellenger, the SEC and Big Ten are running this play all over again as schools in those leagues have decided that they can’t work within the confines of the de facto salary cap they created through the House v. NCAA settlement.
For the first time, it doesn’t feel like an empty threat. Almost out of options, and perhaps coming to realize that asking the federal government to regulate your enterprise is a political snake pit they can’t manipulate as easily as their mid-major supplicants, we should expect administrators in the Big Ten and SEC over the next several months to start putting real thought into what a breakaway would actually look like.
Don’t be surprised, however, if the reaction across college sports is different than in the past. Instead of the masses prostrating themselves in front of the Big Ten and SEC to keep their dysfunctional family together under one NCAA umbrella, you’re going to hear a lot more people shrugging their shoulders this time and saying, “Good luck.”
“I said it three years ago — let them break away,” Iowa State athletic director Jamie Pollard told reporters Monday at a booster event in Des Moines. “I’d turn it around and say we should break away from them. Let ‘em go. But they have to go in all their sports and see how fun it is to play baseball and softball and track when it’s just the (34) of you. That’s what I think we should do, but I’m one person and that’s probably a little more draconian but that’s how I feel about it. Let’s quit talking about it. Quit threatening. Go do it. But if you’re going to do it, you don’t get to just do it in football and then keep all your other sports with us. No, take ‘em all. See how fun it is.”
Though Pollard is way ahead of his colleagues in terms of saying it so publicly and directly, there has been a noticeable vibe shift in the last six months.
As administrators in other leagues have watched the Big Ten and SEC come to a frustrating stalemate over the future of the College Football Playoff, fail to operate within the constraints of the House settlement and get relegated to a diminished role in the bipartisan Senate negotiations happening between Ted Cruz and Maria Cantwell on a very different college sports bill than the one they’d prefer, a clear theme has emerged.
After 15 years of threatening to leave the NCAA if they didn’t get their way, they may have finally reached the limit of their leverage. The SEC and Big Ten may have the most money, brands and championships, but when it comes to operating with the seriousness and discipline necessary to manage their own affairs, the emperors have no clothes.
‘If you didn’t want rules, why did you create this entity?’
For all intents and purposes, we already know what a breakaway would look like. A year ago, upon the completion of the House v. NCAA settlement, the commissioners of the four power conferences proudly unveiled the College Sports Commission to serve as a clearinghouse for NIL deals and an enforcement arm to make sure schools are complying with the $20.5 million revenue sharing cap.
It’s the first time the power conferences have taken a key function of self-governance out of the NCAA realm and put the responsibility on themselves. It has been, to put it mildly, a complete disaster. And the fault lies not with CEO Bryan Seeley and his 20-person staff but rather with many of the schools themselves — mostly in the Big Ten and SEC — who complied for all of about 30 minutes before looking for loopholes, encouraging their athletes to file lawsuits if their deals get rejected and arguing for the cap to be lifted entirely. They can’t even get key schools on board with signing a document that unanimously vests the CSC with the power to punish them.
Does that sound like a constituency ready to govern itself?
To understand the emptiness of the breakaway threat, just turn the clock back about 11 months to the press conference announcing the creation of the CSC. Amid grandiose pronouncements about the House settlement finally establishing stability for college sports in the NIL era — Ha! — was this gem from SEC commissioner Greg Sankey describing his meetings with coaches and administrators and the deep desire they expressed for getting things under control:
“If you want an unregulated, open system, just raise your hand and let me know,” Sankey said. “And universally, the answer is, ‘No, we want oversight. We want guardrails. We want structure.’ Those individuals don’t have the luxury to just say that in meeting rooms, period. They don’t have the luxury to just be anonymous sources. They have a responsibility to make what they’ve sought — what they’ve asked for — to make it work.”
Again, that was less than a year ago and it’s already ancient history. It’s not merely that the cap and the CSC’s various enforcement mechanisms didn’t hold in an environment where consequences are a secondary consideration to competition, but the richest schools barely bothered to try.
As Pollard said Monday, “Collectively, the four conferences created the CSC and we spent a lot of money creating it. So then to have two of the conferences not want to adhere to it is perplexing to me. Because then it’s like, why did we spend the money? If you didn’t want rules, why did you create this entity? That’s what’s frustrating to me. The same people that say they want rules only want rules if they don’t apply to them.”
Though Pollard left out that schools in his own conference are just as guilty (cough, Texas Tech, cough), he is correct about the overall dynamic. And it’s not new in college sports. For as long as there has been an entity charged with enforcing rules — rules created by the schools themselves — lack of compliance has been a feature, not a bug. The only consistent animating principle in college sports is free reign for me, strict liability for thee.
And what nobody in the Big Ten or SEC can say with any credibility is that a new structure will work better as long as they’re running it. As always, they are the problem. The problem is them.
Any other solutions on the table?
Now, with the SEC-favored SCORE Act seemingly dying on the vine in the House of Representatives this week amid machinations within the Congressional Black Caucus, there is probably no path for legislation that doubles as an NCAA wish list.
Even if Cruz and Cantwell strike some type of deal for a Senate bill — there’s still no indication yet exactly what it would include — passage is going to be difficult for a variety of reasons, many of which are political with a midterm election coming in 5 ½ months. In a perfect world, six years of lobbying Congress should not be undercut by poll numbers on the war in Iran and inflation. But when you ask for a political solution to your problems, don’t be surprised when politics get in the way of your agenda.
And if Congress isn’t going to do the bidding of the SEC and Big Ten now, why would they do it in a world where those two conferences break off to do their own thing, potentially diminishing the value of athletic departments in states like Connecticut or New Mexico where there’s no power conference football? Even in a state like North Carolina, where another big realignment or breakaway could significantly harm a major constituency like NC State, it would be a political disaster.
Suddenly, the leverage calculation flips. If the SEC and Big Ten want to hoard the money and pick off a few more schools to form their super league, they will have to do it without Congress and build the organization from the ground up.
Given that they can’t even agree on whether the College Football Playoff should be 16 or 24 teams, much less anything else, there’s probably not much for the rest of college sports to worry about.