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SEC Sports
College sportsā governing body let football TV rights slip away in the 1980s. Now, four power conferences effectively rule the business.
Ever since it was founded over a century ago to organize college football, the NCAA has grown into the central authority for runningāand policingā all of college sports. And for most of that time, it has kept that authority.But a radical shift is under way. A handful of athletic conferences, built around football giants, are in the process of seizing power.
On Tuesday, the NCAA gave the four richest conferencesā the Big Ten, Big 12, ACC and SECā65% weighted voting across all Division-I committees. That means they can now muscle through many changes even if dozens of other conferences oppose them.
Those four had been quietly growing their influence for years. But Tuesday's move elevates them far above their peers and gives them unprecedented sway over the future of the gameāand the billions of dollars it generates.
This group of conferences, not the NCAA, sells its own football broadcast rights and keeps the billions in annual proceeds. This group, not the NCAA, controls colleges' most valuable postseason, the College Football Playoff. And most significantly, this group recently launched its own enforcement arm, the College Sports Commissionāa forprofit organization led by the former top lawyer at Major League Baseball.
How did this happen? How did the NCAAāa nonprofit founded in 1906 to rein in the brutality of major-college foot-
ballā lose control of that sport? It all comes down to 40 years ago, when the NCAA made one colossal mistake.
It was the early 1980s, and the leaders of college sports' governing body thought that too many televised football games meant that people wouldn't buy tickets to watch in person. So the NCAA, led by an iron-fisted executive named Walter Byers, limited broadcasts to one national game a week.
A group of aggrieved schools, led by Oklahoma and Georgia, thought this was absurd. But Byers wouldn't budge. He refused to negotiate a compromise with schools, insisting on the NCAA alone controlling football TV rights.
So the schools took a risk and sued the NCAA. They won, in perhaps the biggest victory in college-sports history. The 1984 U.S. Supreme Court sided with the schools, saying the NCAA's approach violated federal antitrust law.
Control of football TV rights and the billions of dollars they would come to command slipped from the NCAA's grasp forever.
"It was subtle at the beginning. It was just television rights," said Keith Dunnavant, whose book, "The 50-Year Seduction," covers how TV shaped college football. "But in the end, when you control most of the money, you can leverage all the power."
Together, the four conferences now generate more rev enue than the NCAA itself. Broadcast rights to the College Football Playoff alone next year are reportedly worth $1.3 billion, compared with the $1 billion generated by the NCAA's prized property, March Madness.
In a recent open letter, the NCAA's president, Charlie Baker, wrote that pulling back from some enforcement efforts will let the organization focus on improving athletes' experience. The NCAA still governs
playing rules and eligibility, academic standards, and allegations such as sign-stealing or point-shaving.
But instead of maintaining a fierce grip, the NCAA is now working to mollify its most powerful members and minimize everyone's legal risk.
Football's influence is increasingly driving all of college sports. The NCAA is pushing to expand the men's basketball tournament, for instance, largely because the power conferences want more berths.
The NCAA's pivotal error was Byers refusing to negotiate on TV rights with the agitating schools in the 1980s, said Andrew Coats, the lead lawyer representing Oklahoma in that suit. And once the schools, led by the conferences, started selling rights and getting more games on TV, college football was never the same again.
"I think all of us were surprised at how quickly it became such an extraordinarily major interest of everybody," Coats said. "It had been limited, I think, because people didn't see their teams on television. Once they started seeing them, well, it made a lot of difference."
The sport exploded alongside cable TV. In the 1990s, the conferences transformed college football from a regional pastime with a smattering of bowl games to one with national stakes. They launched their own national-title game. Then, in 2014, a four-team playoff. Last season, they expanded it to 12 teams.
Even as people cut cable TV, the surging price of college- football rights drove conferences to seek larger deals by plucking popular schools from other conferences. The biggest casualty among the waves of conference realignment was the erstwhile "Conference of Champions" Pac-12. And through it all, the NCAA could do little to stop the march. "They were too powerful when we took them on," Coates said, "and not nearly powerful enough now."
