I think that’s a no.
College football’s media rights framework is under immense pressure these days. With NIL payments to athletes driving up costs some lawmakers and sports reformers have floated a bold fix: pool all conferences’ TV rights into one centralized package, sell them together, and redistribute the proceeds across college sports.
The proposal envisions a centralized body taking charge of selling pooled media rights, generating more total value than the current conference-specific deals. What’s the selling point for big dollar-generating programs like Georgia? Well, ideally revenues distributed in a way that lets the biggest brands (like the SEC and Big Ten) keep a larger share while still lifting smaller conferences and funding women’s and Olympic sports, both of which have been imperiled by the decreased profitability of athletic departments as a whole.
The SEC and Big Ten, however, aren’t buying it. A study they jointly commissioned concluded that pooling media rights would actually generate less revenue than the current system, where each conference sells its own games independently.
There are some other related problems bound to arise as the details get ironed out on this kind of proposal. For one, giving up the media rights to a third party means schools would likely lose at least some degree of control over how their images and content are used down the line. While many schools (including Georgia) currently have digital content deals and licensing partnerships galore, this would add one more layer of bureaucracy to those agreements.
The grant of rights would also come with certain requirements designed to safeguard the value what the third party trust is buying. Put another way, it would be yet one more party in addition to the conferences and TV networks with its finger in the scheduling pie. Currently there aren’t a lot of things keeping a school like Georgia from scheduling Ohio State then replacing them with Tennessee Tech. Why give someone the power to suddenly veto that kind of change?
Ultimately it feels like we’re getting closer and closer to the SEC and Big Ten breaking away from the smaller/less football-centric conferences. It remains to be seen if a solution can be crafted prior to the ties that bind being completely severed. But the root problem remains that there are definite haves and have nots in the college sports landscape, and the haves now have less than they did before. The have nots are, in some cases, barely hanging on. Either college sports needs a bigger life boat or fewer passengers. And the ice berg isn’t getting farther away.
Go ‘Dawgs!!!
