Sunday Column: Power Conferences Laying The Groundwork For Power Move

Friday’s announcement of the Big Ten and SEC joining forces for an “advisory group” didn’t sound like so much of a declaration of all-out war against the NCAA as a mere reminder of the massive amount of firepower those conferences wield in the grand scheme of college athletics and college football in particular.

Commissioners Tony Petitti (pictured above next to NCAA president/frenemy Charlie Baker at a Senate Judiciary Hearing) and Greg Sankey used carefully parsed language in the press release, which also included phrases like “address the significant challenges facing college athletics and opportunities for the betterment of the student-athlete experience” and the group “will engage with other constituencies as necessary.”

Loosely translated, the 259-word release said, “Figure your stuff out, NCAA, or we’ll figure it out ourselves.”

It does make you wonder, though, if the commissioners and university presidents and athletic directors who will ostensibly make up the advisory board are the ones who should be figuring — or will be able to figure — out the big issues in college athletics right now: namely, NIL/revenue sharing, the transfer portal, and the ever-shifting landscape of the conferences themselves.

Considering, you know, that they’re the ones who helped make this mess in the first place.

I mean yeah, this advisory group (we’ll call it the Big SEC) could meet for a few months, determine that the NCAA wasn’t moving on enough issues or moving on them fast enough for its liking and then decide to go nuclear, breaking those two conferences off from the rest of the country and holding its own regular season, own playoff, and own national championship in football. Unlike the ongoing PGA Tour-LIV Tour split, in which some of the best players are being siphoned off from the herd, this would entail the bulk of the biggest brands in the sport — especially given how both conferences have been going Highlander by adding from and weakening other conferences — and the recruits and TV ratings and the money (oh, the money) would follow.

And let’s continue with this hypothetical and say this new, relatively exclusive league decides to enact collective bargaining and revenue-sharing among the players instead of the current NIL model, which is consistent only in its inconsistency. The nation’s best players, which are likely going to wind up in those conferences anyway, now have more incentive to join a Big SEC program, and the scales tip until the mid-tier programs in what’s left of the other conferences decide to join the group or clean up in what would essentially be a minor league version of the rest of FBS football, with reduced ratings, dollars and prestige.

In this not-unthinkable scenario, would you trust Petitti, Sankey, and other Big SEC decision-makers to treat the players fairly? Would you trust those representing them at the collective bargaining table to ensure that they received the best deal? Would the fans benefit from a more competitive slate of regular season and playoff games or would they be gashed by skyrocketing ticket prices and TV subscription fees? Would administrators consider the ramifications that branching out would have on the rest of college sports, on the universities themselves, and on the professional leagues they feed?

It’s easy (and, admittedly, kinda fun) to blame the NCAA for the current flaws of collegiate sport (especially for Penn State fans, for whom the phrase “Mark Emmert” remains a four-letter word), but the conferences, particularly these two, need to take ownership for their share of the mess, too. While Petitti and Sankey can talk about the “betterment of the student-athlete experience” all they want, their jobs have been and will remain to make their conferences and member schools as profitable as possible. In some ways, that’s important, because the health of those two conferences is essential to generate the money to support the rest of college football, which is essential to support all of the other NCAA sports.

But in other ways, the threat that this advisory group poses — to take the game’s biggest ball and go find another metaphorical playing field — is just a differently packaged version of the same product college football has been putting out for years, professional athletics thinly masked as amateur athletics. Do players potentially stand to receive more of the profits in this new world? Perhaps. It’s a little tough to believe that the people who have been willing to pocket and distribute those profits elsewhere for decades, though, are going to go out of their way to give the lion’s share to the athletes in the arena, and that the short-sightedness that the NCAA displayed to get us to this point won’t also lead to new problems down the road for this advisory group and whatever super conference or breakout league results from it.