Proposed 'Super League' approach remains financially viable despite pushback
Could college football be headed for a complete overhaul including the development of a super league with the power conference schools? The Athletic’s Andrew Marchand explained to Andy Staples on Thursday morning’s On3 YouTube show why such a move could make sense financially.
Right now, the NCAA and Power 5 Conferences (SEC, Big Ten, ACC, Big 12, Pac-12) are facing a whale of a legal battle, with a few former student-athletes seeking a class-action lawsuit that would retroactively pay back athletes in certain sports for money they missed out on since 2019 (the beginning of the four-year statute of limitations window on the 2023 lawsuit) prior to a ruling in 2021 that allowed the student-athletes to be paid “Alston payments” of up to $6,000 a year. If the student-athletes win this case, projections are they could be paid out anywhere from $1.4 billion to over $4 billion based on legal specificities.
“During the reporting, the big thing I learned, when you look at the lawsuits and how much money these universities might owe in back pay because of NIL and that decision, and the courts are going to decide and there are probably going to be settlements, it’s possible they’re going to owe billions of dollars, and at that point, all these schools are going to have to figure out what’s next,” says Marchand.
If that the NCAA and conferences do have to pay that billion-dollar figure, a change in the model could certainly be the best option to maximize revenue, and Marchand believes college football could find a model that more closely resembles pro sports leagues.
“The SEC and the Big Ten, they very well might try to figure out things together. We know that they’re working together, they have their own coalition, there’s other groups as well. But in terms of, if there’s a solution for all of college football, I think this group has a lot of good ideas because they’re borrowing from the best leagues around the world. You look at promotion and relegation, that’s a way to make the second-tier school have something to play for and there’s financial incentives for everyone involved.”
Andy Staples commented that a TV consultant explained to him that the super league model could be the best method for doing so, based on the NFL’s success. With so many different conferences, there’s bidding on multiple entities that provide college football at the highest level. With the NFL, that isn’t the case. So, per Staples, the move to a super league could give college football the exclusive commodity the NFL has always had, which is one league, one organization, operating the sport’s highest level.
Marchand offered his thoughts on that possibility, noting that there may not be a ton of wiggle room financially with the long-term TV deals in place.
“Well there’s two things there. Could they generate better ratings with this system? Yeah, they probably could. The issue right now is all the major conferences and the CFP are locked up into the 2030s. So the TV networks have no incentive to do new deals or to rip any contracts up, and to create a new system is not really in their best interest at the moment. So I think that’s an issue.
“Somebody involved told me they’re going to have to bring the networks in and they’re going to have to buy in. How do you get them to buy in? Well, if you’re ESPN, FOX, you say, well, give us a 10-year extension, and you have rights into the 2040s. Maybe, you know, you figure out the pay structure there.”
And if the class-action lawsuit wins, forcing the billions of dollars in damages paid out retroactively, Marchand believes power could be shifted towards the media rights holders, who would have the more stable financial situation.
“It’s all about leverage and power and money, when it comes down to it. We might be talking about intercollegiate amateur athletics, but at the end of the day, the people who have the gold make the rules. The media, they have the gold now. Into the 2030s, the digital players like Amazon, maybe Apple finally gets really into sports, and so there could be a lot of gold out there from other places.”
The media rights deal is college football’s financial security blanket and a primary source of income. So, per Marchand, if the power conferences and NCAA were to be forced to pay out billions, the rights holders would have to come in and essentially save the conferences whose football games they pay so much for.
“Those contracts are tied up right now and if you try to break them, which they’re not going to try, that’s not part of the plan; that would just result in lawsuits. At some point, if this were to go forward they’d try to bring in the networks to see if there could be some understanding with them.”
As Marchand lays out, ultimately the TV companies want their product to be worth the investment, which could mean they need to help out the conferences with a new deal.
“Because if you have a distressed asset and they claim that bankruptcy is on the horizon after these lawsuits go through and the settlements go through, then that’s not valuable to anybody if it can’t function.”