It could be an elevator, a hallway or a hallway this weekend at one of the Final Fours, in the men’s game in Arizona or the women’s game in Cleveland. Greg Sankey, commissioner of the SEC, has a team in each, so he will no doubt be in both. Len Perna, meanwhile, has an idea, and if he sees Sankey, he might do everything in his power to get a minute.
At most, Sankey will smile politely, nod, and keep the conversation short. For now, the chances of Sankey and his conference wanting to go along with Perna’s idea are about as good as the SEC abandoning football as a college sport.
Because that’s essentially what it would do here.
The idea of a college football “Super League” has been floating around for some time, and one idea was finally made public Wednesday, when Athleticism reported that a number of power men, including the presidents of Syracuse and West Virginia and Perna, the CEO of TurnkeyZRG, were pushing for a permanent group of 70 teams, employing athletes as players, establishing its own rules and leaving sports unrelated to football. existing conferences, as is.
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Publicly, the reaction among SEC influencers was crickets: Sankey and the presidents of Georgia and Mississippi State, two of the SEC’s longest-serving and most powerful school leaders, declined requests to interview. Like the story in Athleticism pointed out, Sankey and other members of the SEC avoided meeting with Perna and others involved in the effort, called College Sports Tomorrow.
The reason for this stiffness is not difficult to understand.
The SEC and Big Ten currently hold the most power in college football. They are also the ones who earn the most money. There is little reason to cede this power to a third party, and even less reason to share this money with everyone.
The CSE plan would involve the SEC dropping its 16 football programs and becoming part of a permanent group of 70 members. It would also involve the SEC, Big Ten and other power conferences ceding authority over the College Football Playoff to the CST. Good luck with all that.
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Then there are the television contracts: The SEC is tied to ESPN through 2034, just as other conferences also have long-term extensions. It would appear that the window for this has passed. Everyone would have to be willing to break their agreements, come together and start again.
This part, although improbable, is not entirely beyond the realm of reality. In case you haven’t noticed, things are pretty crazy when it comes to rules in college sports, in the sense that there aren’t many rules anymore. That’s because courts are increasingly looking at all the NCAA rules and saying: No, you can’t do that. And as many have written, myself included, it increasingly seems that the only way for college sports to establish and enforce rules, even reasonable ones, is to go the route of collective bargaining among employees, unions and labor unions. Perna and his CST group provide the opportunity for football programs to break away, form their super league, professionalize and establish these rules on NIL, transfers and other things. Tired of players jumping into the portal every semester in order to get a better NIL deal? So here’s your answer, the Super League people argue.
So why wouldn’t the SEC, Big Ten and others jump at this opportunity? On the one hand, they do not give up being able to establish their own rules. Realists no longer rely on Congress and federal legislation. (They never should have.) But that doesn’t mean that power conferences can’t find a way to do it themselves, however uncomfortable it may be.
This brings us back to the power and control aspect. Do the SEC and Big Ten want to agree to operate under the umbrella of another organization, or retain as much power and control as possible?
Ah, but what about the money part? What happens when the NCAA loses its next case – maybe Home vs. NCAA, the class action in which the organization and power conferences could have to pay a billion or more in damages for athletes who played before the dawn of NIL freedoms? What about when revenue sharing happens and schools have to pay athletes directly, costing their budgets several million dollars a year?
This is where private equity comes in, and many within the SEC, who speak off the record so they can speak frankly, are very wary. They see private equity firms coming in and dictating things, like setting subscription prices, or even non-financial issues. Why take money from a private equity firm when you can always get it from a bank?
And so the CST group, even with familiar faces like Perna involved, ran into a brick wall with the SEC: canceled dinners, unscheduled meetings, unreturned calls. This won’t happen anytime soon, if at all.
But it’s not bad that it exists either. In fact, this is progress.
College sports are at an inflection point. Something has to be done, which is why the SEC and Big Ten announced in February their partnership to discuss “a sustainable future of college sports.” A number of the stated goals of Perna’s group are on track. It will take creative, perhaps radical, solutions to bring college sports to this sustainable model that succeeds in the courts.
Too many power players in college sports, including the SEC, were slow to realize the changes that were coming. There has been too much resistance and not enough creative thinking about how to move forward. It’s good that someone is thinking radically and putting this on the table.
Sankey spoke of visionary thinking, without bad ideas. That would be a bad idea for his conference. This is not a solution. But the more ideas that are rejected and the more influential people associated with them, the closer we get to real solutions. Those who have a chance and those who will last.
(Photo: Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images)