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seconds Commissioner Greg Sankey said Saturday that selling all conferences’ TV rights outright won’t be a quick fix for college sports and may not be a fix at all.
Speaking before the Florida-Texas A&M football game, Sankey explained why he doesn’t think pooling TV rights — an idea that has gained attention recently — is a good idea. His comments are a direct rebuke of an idea proposed by Texas Tech’s billionaire regents head, Cody Campbell, who said earlier in the week that the idea of combining powers was being held back because “the conferences are represented by commissioners who are very, very selfish.”
“Just as we did for expansion, just as we did for our last media rights negotiations, we will prepare for our future as the Southeastern Conference,” Sankey said. “I also think it’s important to understand that there is no change in the Sports Broadcasting Act. The interest of the networks, the interest of the professional leagues, goes far beyond just college sports. And that needs to be acknowledged as opposed to just looking at (that) there’s a quick fix here.”
a bill in Congress Co-sponsored by Senator Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., the bill calls for rewriting the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961, which prevents conferences from combining their TV rights. Campbell supports that element of Cantwell’s recently introduced SAFE Act.
In his presentation Thursday before the Knight Commission, an oversight group, Campbell said the move could cost $7 billion, and commissioners told him “privately” they knew amending that law would generate more revenue, “but I don’t want to give up control over my own media-rights negotiations.” Campbell is also running ads during college football, touting a $4 billion to $7 billion increase in revenue that could come from pooling and would help save college women’s and Olympic sports.
Sankey has denied telling Campbell, publicly or privately, that he agreed with his theory.
On Saturday, the commissioner said the SEC makes well-informed and well-supported decisions and wants the opportunity to negotiate its own deals, not “turn them over to some unknown, undisclosed entity.”
“I work closely with a variety of people who are experts in this, who speak directly to the value and model for negotiation,” Sankey said. “These other ideas, they have numbers, they’re not actually supported by data. They’re just presented. And anyone can find one or two experts to justify their position. We like to get into the depth of things.”
The SEC recently signed a 10-year TV deal with ESPN reportedly worth $3 billion. That figure does not include the approximately $21 million the College Football Playoff receives each year, as well as the amount of money the league makes depending on how many teams make the playoff.
Bill Sankey, The NCAA And virtually all of its conventions are supported by the SCORE Act. The act, which, unlike the SAFE Act, does not demand changes to the TV-rights model, proposes limited antitrust protection for the NCAA, primarily from lawsuits involving eligibility issues, and a ban on athletes becoming employees of their schools – a development that NCAA executive Tim Buckley said would be the “budget buster of the century” for college sports.
Although momentum for the SCORE Act slowed after its introduction, Sankey said he believed it was likely to pass.
“There’s still work going on,” he said. “And I think when you look at the work, there’s an opportunity, to inform and educate Congress, for us to work with Congress from 2019-2020. This is as close as we’ve gotten in either chamber to considering legislation. So, there’s a lot there that could be helpful, and there’s still a lot of work to do.”
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AP National Writer Eddie Pels contributed to this report.