One Conference To Rule Them All?
Sometimes I get an idea for something to write about in this newsletter and then, in the course of researching it, I realize it’s a bad idea. Sometimes I get bored with the idea before I can finish writing about it, and I abandon the idea. Sometimes I just forget what the idea was before I can write it down.
So today I’m going to try something new: I’m just going to outline a very basic, incomplete thought, and see if it goes anywhere. If it does, I’ll try to pick the subject up somewhere down the road; if not, I won’t. If this works, maybe I’ll make this type of post a recurring feature and give it a goofy name like “Quick Thoughts” or something…
Anyway, in this case, the idea is the sum of two ideas I’ve seen dominate college sports discourse over the last few years:
The first is the idea I wrote about last week: The lack of transparency and consistent rules around Name Image and Likeness (NIL) payments. Ever since a series of court cases forced the NCAA to change its rules around NIL payments in 2021, it has been common to call for some type of guardrails or standards on the system. But there’s not really anyone in position to do that. The NCAA has no credibility, the federal government is unwilling and unable to take action, and no individual state has jurisdiction over all the schools and organizations in question. So the wild west remains…
The second idea was one I’ve heard in a lot of college football podcasts and such over the last few years: That eventually the Big Ten and the SEC will withdraw from the NCAA and start their own playoff/bowl system, since they seem to have nearly all the marquee programs and they won’t want to share the revenue with lesser schools.
When I thought about these two points together, it occurred to me: Why not just make one giant college football conference out of all the public research colleges in the US? If the SEC and the Big Ten were to merge or split off, then you’re most of the way there already: Together, those conferences now include 34 schools, almost all of which are public universities.
And, crucially, there are already unions that represent public employees in a lot of those states. Often, they represent employees that work at those exact same schools! This means there are organizations that could represent and protect the interests of players in negotiations with a large conference.
Now, there are some kinks in this plan: There are private universities, like USC and Notre Dame, that you probably wouldn’t want to leave out of any college football realignment. And many of those SEC schools are in places where public employees are actually prohibited from collective bargaining, thanks to the union-busting laws in Republican states. Plus, there’s the larger problem of how to get players considered “employees,” which is still being legally contested in the NIL era. But I think there’s something here…