If you’ve watched any college football this year, you’ve seen some version of this ad, probably a million times:
I have wondered on more than one occasion what this is all about and whether I should in fact support this effort. But when I’m watching sports I’m generally not engaging my blogging brain, so I’ve never followed up on that urge.
And then, this week’s Hang Up and Listen told me what I needed to know. It’s the second segment, about 28 minutes in, if you want to listen. This USA Today profile of Cody Campbell, the Texas billionaire and Texas Tech booster who’s behind their massive NIL investments and the ads you see, has a brief explainer.
What, exactly, does Campbell want to see change?
For one, he believes the Student Compensation and Opportunity through Rights and Endorsements (SCORE) Act, which is being fast-tracked in the U.S. House of Representatives, is too narrow in scope. He thinks the legislation inadequately addresses issues facing women’s sports and non-revenue sports, as well as problems plaguing smaller schools as they try to compete with their larger, richer counterparts.
In a column he penned for USA TODAY on Monday, Sept. 15, Campbell argued there needs to be a new governing body in college sports that replaces the NCAA, which he writes has “fought tooth and nail against any rule that would benefit student-athletes and protect the most vulnerable schools and sports.”
“The NCAA’s version of the SCORE Act ensures that the powerful colleges stay powerful and relegates the lesser-advantaged schools to permanent irrelevance,” he wrote. “The SCORE Act also does not address the fact that there will not be enough money to pay for sports, like track, swimming, volleyball, soccer and softball. Through sneaky and strategic drafting, the SCORE Act does not explicitly grant the NCAA direct power, but the implications are clear — they will regain control if this bill becomes law.”
Campbell’s primary and oft-repeated solution to many of the challenges facing college sports is amending the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961.
For many, including millions of fans tuning into games and seeing Campbell on their screens, it’s a relatively obscure piece of legislation.
The law, which was passed in response to a series of antitrust cases against the NFL, gives professional sports leagues an antitrust exemption to pool together their media rights and sell them as part of a single package rather than each team or division having its own deals.
In Campbell’s view, the Power Four conferences can get together and have a single media-rights deal rather than each league having its own contracts with television networks. Those conferences earn a projected $3 billion annually from their media rights and one industry person told [USA Today Sports’ Matt] Hayes that figure could double if the four conferences had a single deal.
Still, there are significant obstacles to Campbell’s dream becoming a reality.
For one, amending the Sports Broadcasting Act would run counter to the Supreme Court’s landmark 1984 decision in NCAA v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma, which ruled that the NCAA had an illegal monopoly over television rights. That ruling allowed schools and conferences to seek their own media-rights deals, a system that’s largely still in place today.
There’s also the challenge of getting the Big Ten and SEC, the most powerful conferences with the most opulent media-rights deals, to agree to come together with the ACC and Big 12 under a single contractual umbrella when they’re so obviously advantaged in the current structure.
“Why would we share revenue when we have the product that bears the fruit, and others don’t?” an unidentified SEC official said to [USA Today Sports’ Matt] Hayes.
You should read that op-ed Campbell wrote to get more of the big picture. A bit more on the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 is here, written by Matt Brown, who was the guest on that Hang Up segment that explained this all to me. An opposing view on Campbell and his professed solution is in this Matt Florio column, which was a response to the ads and not to the op-ed.
The SCORE Act that Campbell opposes is not going anywhere right now, obviously. Campbell’s preferred bill is the Democratic-sponsored SAFE act. The Texas Lawbook has a nice overview of both bills.
Introduced by Democratic Senators Maria Cantwell, Cory Booker and Richard Blumenthal and supported by professional athlete associations, the SAFE Act takes an athlete-centric approach to establishing federal standards. It guarantees athletic scholarships for 10 years and medical coverage for five years after their eligibility expires. It caps agent compensation at 5 percent of NIL deals. And it authorizes the Federal Trade Commission and states attorneys general to exercise oversight.
As important is the SAFE Act’s silence on two critical issues. First, it does not exempt the NCAA from antitrust laws, preserving the primary tool used by athletes to challenge what some consider to be oppressive NCAA rules. Plaintiffs in the recent O’Bannon, Alston and House cases each used federal antitrust laws to secure critical athlete benefits, including the ability to receive NIL and revenue sharing income. Second, the SAFE Act is quiet on whether athletes qualify as employees, leaving the door open for future litigation and potential collective bargaining.
Two SAFE Act provisions particularly align with Campbell’s advocacy. Most notably, the SAFE Act enacts the Sports Broadcasting Act amendment Campbell has pushed, allowing the NCAA to once again bundle broadcast rights as opposed to the current mosaic of conference broadcasting deals. The move is expected to increase total revenue, with the surplus earmarked towards Campbell’s other cause: protection of Olympic and women’s sports.
[…]
The Republican-sponsored Student Compensation and Opportunity through Rights and Endorsements Act takes an opposite approach. Despite clamor for federal standards, the SCORE Act largely cedes full authority to the same institution that oversaw the current predicament: the NCAA.
The SCORE Act affords the NCAA the same ability to establish standards that the organization possesses today, ranging from restrictions on transfers to caps on agent compensation. It allows the NCAA to determine an appropriate percentage of revenue to be shared with athletes and whether that percentage should be modified in the future. And it leaves oversight of the industry to the NCAA, zeroing out a role for federal or state regulators.
Instead, the SCORE Act pronounces where the SAFE Act stays silent, granting the NCAA the two exemptions it has long sought. It largely exempts the NCAA from antitrust liability, insulating NCAA decisions related to compensation, eligibility, and transfer restrictions. And it prohibits athletes from being recognized as employees, codifying the “student-athlete” moniker the NCAA has long pushed (and at least one Supreme Court justice has admonished).
Unsurprisingly, the SCORE Act has the backing of the NCAA. In a recent letter, 31 of the 32 college athletic conference commissioners (Ivy League Executive Director Robin Harris being the sole holdout) advocated for the bill. NCAA President Charlie Baker has also expressed his approval.
So now you know. Campbell is now busy fighting with conference commissioners over the two bills, and having an ad accusing them of being greedy get rejected by Fox and ABC. The NYT and the Chron recently had profiles on Campbell if after all this you still want to know more.