#CUT FINGERS WITH STAPLES TV#

The NCAA still stages a basketball tournament worth almost $1 billion in annual media rights. This isn’t as simple as picking the best football brands, though. But the difference is this time the schools involved would be willing participants and disinclined to sue, and the people controlling the sale of the rights would actually understand their value and get the most money possible.īut how would the leagues do that? By keeping the members they have - sorry to those who think Vanderbilt or Rutgers might get booted - and by taking all the others they deem valuable enough. Wasn’t that stranglehold broken by a 1984 Supreme Court decision after the universities of Georgia and Oklahoma sued? Yes.

#CUT FINGERS WITH STAPLES TV#

Isn’t this like the monopoly the NCAA had on college football TV rights for decades. I know what the historically inclined among you are thinking. One entity controlling the supply of all of the best college football could drive up the price considerably. Multiple entities control the supply of top-shelf college football, which gives the networks a little leverage. Why? Because one entity controls the supply of NFL football. The cost per viewer for NFL rights is significantly higher than the cost per viewer for college football rights. And if the Big Ten and SEC were to expand to 20 schools apiece and then shop their media rights together - parceling them out in pieces as the NFL does to various networks - they probably could make an obscene amount of money. At this point, nothing feels off the table. It’s difficult to imagine those two leagues agreeing on enough points to ever fully work together, but five years ago it was difficult to imagine Texas joining the SEC or the Big Ten driving a stake into the heart of the Pac-12. Will they function separately like the AFL and NFL of the 1960s and then have their champions play at season’s end? Or will they merge under a single umbrella and act more like the AFC and NFC do in the current NFL structure? The operative question now isn’t whether the Big Ten and SEC will pull the programs they deem worth having into their orbit. We’ll get to the part where we make educated guesses as to which schools make the cut in a moment, but first, we must ponder one thing: Will it be one super league or two? The super league doesn’t feel like a theoretical concept anymore. The ACC is hanging on for dear life with a grant of rights agreement that tethers its members together around a more-terrible-by-the-day media rights deal that doesn’t expire until 2036. It was a matter of the Big Ten schools choosing to expand. If they aren’t Notre Dame, a member of the SEC or a member of the Big Ten, they’re willing. This wasn’t a matter of finding willing partners. And if it isn’t finished, I’m also not convinced the SEC is finished. So far, the Big Ten has taken only one-third of my advice. I suggested adding Cal, Oregon, Stanford, UCLA, USC and Washington. A few days after the Oklahoma-Texas-SEC news broke, I wrote that the next logical move would be for the Big Ten to raid the Pac-12. The question was whether the Big Ten - the only league that can compete with the SEC on the balance sheet - would be willing to use its own gravitational pull to take programs from another league. We knew the SEC had created its own gravity by adding Oklahoma and Texas. But that concept doesn’t feel so hypothetical now. Last year, when international soccer clubs actually tried to form such a league and after Texas and Oklahoma announced their intentions, I took cracks at figuring out which programs would populate a hypothetical college football super league. That includes college football’s version of a super league. Anything you can imagine feels possible at this point. USC and UCLA deciding to move to the Big Ten opened the hole through the center of the earth. Texas and Oklahoma deciding last year to move to the SEC shook the ground. In fact, the only thing that sounds impossible is college football’s structure bearing any semblance in 2030 to the sport at the turn of the century. “That SEC football tournament idea doesn’t sound so crazy now, does it?” the AD said.Īt this point, nothing sounds crazy. An athletic director called a few moments after the news broke Thursday that USC and UCLA were finalizing a move to the Big Ten.

Cut fingers with staples