Martin Jarmond explains how recent expansion will impact the power balance in college sports

UCLA athletic director Martin Jarmond has been at the center of one of the biggest moves in recently memory for college athletics, as he and USC athletic director Mike Bohn engineered a move to take USC and UCLA from the Pac 12 to the Big Ten.

Speaking on “The Rich Eisen Show” on Thursday, the soon-to-be Big Ten administrator hashed it out with the host about what’s coming up in college sports, including congressional intervention in NIL and how the power is shifting.

“I think we’re under extreme change, right now in college athletics,” Jarmond said. “I think everything is chaotic. So when there’s chaos, it’s almost like the markets right now, you feel like anything can happen or the worst can happen. So I think if we take a breath, I really do think things are going to calm, now, in college athletics. But, I do think the rate of change is not going to. And so right now with NIL, for example, you talk about ‘Is there congressional help to try to normalize some of the rules, to try to make it consistent?’ I don’t know if that’s going to happen.”

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Eisen said he wouldn’t expect congress to be acting anytime soon on the issue, which Jarmond generally agreed to. Eisen posed the idea that a group of schools — for instance, the schools comprising the Power 5 — could create a settled set of rules for something like NIL.

The conversation also touched on the idea that college sports is professionalizing and there will soon be a separation where the Power 5 becomes quasi-professional.

Jarmond doesn’t think that’s the end game, but he does think there is a possibility of those five conferences working together to create more equal rules of engagement regarding recruiting, NIL, and the like.

“We look different than,” Jarmond said, “I don’t want to pick on a school but, but it’s different realities there. There are some realities that are different among the schools and that has to be addressed. And my hope is that we, as an NCAA, as institutional leadership, we figure it out. We can’t worry about others to try to figure out our own challenges. That said, it’s going to change, but I don’t think it’s going to be like this, you’re going to — Premier League or something. I don’t think that’s going to happen at all. I just think it’s going to change differently.

“We don’t know what it is, but I hope that the leadership in college athletics right now can take more of a step forward and say ‘Hey, this is what makes our game and makes the student-athletes best,’ and we’ll try to do it that way.”