The Big Ten and SEC form an 'advisory group' that feels like a takeover

Earlier in the week, we spent time on my show trying to find a suitable replacement for the phrase “Power 5.” With the Pac-12 finished, that term simply isn’t accurate anymore.

But “Power 4” doesn’t work either, because the Big Ten and the SEC are quite different now from a financial standpoint than the ACC and the Big 12. As I sought advice, a friend suggested we just limit the power descriptors to the Big Ten and SEC and call it B1G and Rich.

Friday, that relationship was codified. B1G and Rich are going to decide the future of college sports.

The Big Ten and the SEC intend to join forces to — as their leaders put it in a news release —  “take a leadership role in developing solutions for a sustainable future of college sports.” They claim this is just an advisory group that has “no authority to act independently and will only serve as a consulting body.”

This probably isn’t true, because if that were the case they’d have invited some others into their clubhouse. But it’s probably best for everyone if commissioners Greg Sankey (SEC) and Tony Petitti (Big Ten) do just go ahead and try to reshape the college sports landscape. Because everyone currently trying to govern college sports — a group that includes Sankey and Petitti — is simply spinning their wheels. The truth is the Big Ten and SEC have the biggest programs that make the most money. They are the economic engine that drives college sports, and they are fundamentally different from the leagues at the bottom of the FBS and noticeably different from the ACC and Big 12, which were once considered their equals.

The cynical approach is to just assume this is a prelude to a 40-or-so team college football superleague and the rest of the FBS will have to reorganize itself. Sankey and Petitti probably don’t actually want that, but in truth that might be the best possible solution.

Their job now is to find real, workable solutions that allow the massive business their schools have created to run smoothly without breaking federal antitrust law. They need to stop whining to Congress, earn their seven-figure salaries and solve their own problems. That will require creativity and a willingness to toss decades of NCAA dogma in the trash where it belongs. 

This doesn’t feel like The Alliance 2.0. Remember The Alliance? The ACC, Big Ten and Pac-12 joined forces after the SEC took Oklahoma and Texas from the Big 12. The Alliance was going to do…something. But there was no real plan. The commissioners of the leagues looked one another in eye, they said. 

In reality, then-Big Ten commissioner Kevin Warren (Petitti’s predecessor) was playing ACC commissioner Jim Phillips and Pac-12 commissioner George Kliavkoff for suckers. The only thing The Alliance accomplished was delaying the expansion of the College Football Playoff to 12 teams, which conveniently allowed the Big Ten to finish the monster TV deal it was working on without a competing product in the marketplace. Now, the Pac-12 has been ground to dust. The ACC is suing and getting sued by Florida State as the Seminoles try to leave the league. (With Clemson and North Carolina waiting to bolt behind them.) The Big Ten only got bigger.

And richer.

While The Alliance oversold its mission, it feels as if this pairing has undersold it. This feels like a takeover. And again, maybe that’s necessary.

Perhaps these particular commissioners are the two to do it. Sankey and Warren would sooner have walked on hot coals than work together. But Sankey and Petitti are not rivals. Sankey, with his decades of college sports experience, is the higher ed policy wonk who became a king. Petitti, with his experience as a television executive and Major League Baseball executive, was thrust into a role where the past items on his resume could help him generate ideas for a path forward. One can balance the other. If Sankey veers too hard into the old ways of thinking, Petitti can remind him he runs a pro sports league now. If Petitti suggests something too nakedly corporate, Sankey can remind him that they’re dealing with a sport attached to universities that still relies on a heavily grassroots fanbase.

They’ve been pushed here by a number of factors. This union has been in the works since at least December, when NCAA president Charlie Baker shocked administrators by rolling out a reform plan that had been run by nearly zero stakeholders before it was announced. The titans knew they’d have to work together at that point.

This week brought another alarm bell. With the NCAA investigating Tennessee for violations of name, image and likeness rules that currently are being violated by every member of their two conferences, the attorneys general from Tennessee and Virginia sued the NCAA in federal court claiming that rules forbidding NIL payments to recruit are illegal under the Sherman Antitrust Act. A hearing is scheduled for Feb. 13. If a judge grants the temporary restraining order the AGs seek, those rules may never come back.

Combined with the injunction granted in federal court in December invalidating the NCAA’s transfer rules, we could be less than two weeks away from all of the key regulations governing player compensation and player movement in college sports being declared illegal. 

And they should be. Because they are illegal. A group of competitors (schools) colluded to unilaterally impose rules that suppressed the compensation of a giant subsection of the people who participate in the enterprise. It’s price-fixing. It was illegal when Apple, Google, Intel and Adobe tried to do it, and it’s illegal now.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 9-0 in favor of the plaintiffs in Alston v. NCAA in 2021. In the majority opinion, justice Neil Gorsuch declared that all of the NCAA’s rules were open to antitrust scrutiny. In a concurring opinion, justice Brett Kavanaugh minced fewer words, essentially saying that any of the NCAA’s rules that appeared in the federal court system likely would get declared illegal. 

“Nowhere else in America can businesses get away with agreeing not to pay their workers a fair market rate on the theory that their product is defined by not paying their workers a fair market rate,” Kavanaugh wrote. “And under ordinary principles of antitrust law, it is not evident why college sports should be any different. The NCAA is not above the law.”

Sankey has been one of the college sports leaders fighting the hardest to get Congress to pass a law that would turn back the clock on NIL laws — imposed by states beginning in 2021 — and allow schools to continue suppressing players’ compensation again. He needs to stop. If he and Petitti think Congress will save them, they’re wasting everyone’s time.

They need to develop a system that shares revenue with the athletes. And if they’d like to stay out of federal court, they need to find a way to bargain with the athletes. School presidents don’t want athletes to be deemed employees, but that designation might be forced upon them by a few different cases currently in the pipeline.

NFL players aren’t constantly suing the NFL because the NFL has a collective bargaining agreement. So does the NBA. So does Major League Baseball. A CBA would allow for rules on compensation, player movement and tampering that would rein in all the issues college coaches and administrators currently can’t stand. But the players would get a say in how those rules are written. Those rules also would be essentially lawsuit-proof.

That would require a radical change in the way the people in charge of college sports think. Conveniently, the Big Ten and SEC are running a radically different business than most everyone else in college sports.

Sankey and Petitti probably would love a restructuring where all the schools can make rules that don’t get them sued and they can sing Kumbaya while counting College Football Playoff and NCAA Tournament revenue.

That’s probably not what’s going to happen, though. If B1G and Rich feel they’ve been pushed to the point where they have to act together, everything probably is going to change.