The battle for the future of college sports is raging on. 

Texas Tech megabooster Cody Campbell and his Saving College Sports plan have the SEC and Big Ten worried enough that they commissioned a nine-page study attacking Campbell’s claims, then sent it to members of Congress.

Campbell has long had the ear of President Trump and seems to be making headway with others in Washington as well. 

The biggest issue the SEC and Big Ten have with Campbell’s philosophy is what happens with college football media rights. 

Campbell argues that amending the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 to allow all FBS schools to sell their media rights together, instead of conference by conference, would dramatically increase football revenue across the country. He cites a study projecting $7 billion in TV rights if the entire FBS pool sells together.

Proponents of Campbell’s plan say it would preserve Olympic sports and women’s sports in athletic departments across the country, at a time when they’re at risk because of the football and men’s basketball arms race in the NIL and revenue-sharing era.

As you might expect, the SEC and Big Ten’s study has plenty of holes. The leagues clearly have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, where they have a stranglehold on power and money in college sports. 

As Louisville Board of Trustees Chair Larry Benz put it, allowing the SEC and Big Ten to spearhead a study about the future of college sports media rights is like “asking Coca-Cola to commission research on whether Pepsi tastes better.” 

Of course, they’re going to suggest keeping things the way they are.

Even some of the SEC’s major allies are pointing out major flaws in the paper.

Two examples the SEC and Big Ten used in the paper to refute Campbell’s claim that pooling TV rights would make everybody more money are the College Football Association in the 1980s and the NBA’s most recent TV deal. 

In the 80s, the College Football Association packaged media rights together for college football, and it created less total revenue ($43 million) than existed before ($69 million). But the paper conveniently leaves out the fact that the CFA didn’t include the Big Ten, Pac 10, or Notre Dame. 

It’s also completely apples to oranges to compare the streaming and TV environment of the 1980s to 2026. Everybody wants to be in the football game these days. Just look at how many streaming and TV partners the NFL has. 

And the NFL is a great example here. They pool their rights together because it works. Every major pro sports league pools its rights for a reason.

The paper argues that the NBA TV deal was only successful because of how “deftly” it was packaged, not simply because the rights were pooled together. It’s a hilarious explanation that doubles as an admission.

They’re admitting that pooling the rights together and effectively packaging them to different partners is a profitable way to do things. Campbell isn’t proposing pooling the rights and then doing a terrible job packaging them. The idea is, of course, to strategically (deftly, if you will) distribute them across multiple partners.

The most infuriating part of the paper was the assertion that "decentralization also helps preserve the unique character of college sports -- an incredibly important brand attribute."

They’re arguing that keeping college sports segmented instead of homogenized is key to the sport. And you know what, they make a good point there. 

College sports should have a strong foothold in each region of the country, with each area sporting different idiosyncrasies that make it unique. Yet the Big Ten and SEC themselves have done more irreversible damage to this concept through conference realignment in the last five years than we saw in the last five decades. 

You’d have to have Stockholm syndrome to believe it’s something the SEC and Big Ten genuinely care about at this point. It’s frankly insulting that they would even put those words into writing. 

Also at issue here is Campbell’s insistence on creating a federally appointed body that would administer media contracts and manage scheduling.  

In a vacuum, I can understand hesitancy over handing over some level of college sports control to the government, but we don’t live in a vacuum. 

We live in a world where the SEC and Big Ten have spent millions lobbying for government intervention in college sports over the last handful of years. It’s the peak of hypocrisy for them to be the ones objecting to government involvement now.

Ultimately, I can’t say it any better than Benz, who penned an excellent response to the SEC and Big Ten on behalf of Louisville’s university president and AD. He nails the framing of the battle we’re in. 

FTI (who executed the study paper for the SEC and Big Ten) claims that at current growth rates, conferences will outperform the $7 billion pooling projection on their own. This conveniently ignores that the current growth trajectory is wildly uneven — it's great for the SEC and Big Ten, and disastrous for everyone else. The ACC is locked into a deal through the 2030s at rates far below market. The Big 12, despite adding teams, still lags significantly. If you only measure the winners under the current system, of course the current system looks fine. The pooling argument is about maximizing total value across all of college sports, not just for the two richest conferences. FTI is essentially saying "the system works" while half the system is financially drowning.

The SEC and Big Ten want to keep the good times rolling, even at the risk of killing the golden goose by eventually squeezing out the Big 12, ACC, and Group of Five.

Cody Campbell wants to keep that from happening. 

And the battle now appears to be moving to the White House, as President Trump invited 40 college sports dignitaries, including four from the Big 12, to the Saving College Sports roundtable this Friday. 

Sources told On3 earlier today that it’s still only a 50/50 shot that the roundtable actually happens, so I’m in wait-and-see mode on that. 

Either way, the future of college sports is on the radar in Washington, D.C., and the Big 12’s very own Cody Campbell is on the radar of people with real power.

That has the SEC and Big Ten nervous about what comes next.

What You Need to Know

• Here is a full list of who is invited to the White House for the Saving College Sports roundtable, including the four invitees with Big 12 ties. 

• A week after ESPN’s Dick Vitale told us that KU should cut ties with star Darryn Peterson, CBS’s Seth Davis has an equally wild take about Peterson and the Jayhawks. 

• Texas Tech head coach Grant McCasland let Field of 68’s Jeff Goodman have it for saying that the Red Raiders are a 10-seed without JT Toppin. 

• Four Big 12 teams are on the bubble in Joe Lunardi’s latest update. 

• Heartland College Sports has a nice update and scenarios for Big 12 tournament seeding heading into the final week of the regular season. 

• A Colorado quarterback tragically passed away in a car accident this weekend. Here are the details.

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