SEC and BIG Joint Advisory Group

[ChromeDomeGopher]

 

[Out State Gopher]

A 1,000 mile journey starts with the first step.

 

[MplsGopher]

There are a lot of things that will need to happen to allow the Big1G & SEC to basically take over the college football world and its playoff system. First, on the list for the conferences/schools is to take back control of the NIL process in terms of who is running the show. To make this work, I hate to say it, but they will end up having to make the players employees. This will then be followed by the players organizing to form a union which will be followed shortly thereafter by a collective bargaining agreement. Just like the NFL, you can't have the players running the show when it comes to escalating prices/compensation (NIL), and by making them employees the schools (owners) will take control and put a pay structure in place. In the NFL there may be some players at the QB level that can garner huge contracts, but for 98% of the players in the league, the owners pretty much control most things with an iron fist as we have seen players get frozen out of when the owners choose to do so. However, at that point college football will no longer be the same.

If things were to go that way, I don't think it goes very long before the football operations at those schools is privatized and they bring in a President and GM to run football operations like a franchise. The money will be too big at that point and you will need to have experts managing player's contracts and legal matters, which the University isn't setup to handle. So then, you have some type of agreement with the schools on the payout they receive and the AD can be left to manage the rest of the Athletic programs for the school that they still have the money to fund. Hopefully, we all aren't sitting here 10 yrs from now discussing how they managed to kill the golden goose that was college football and what it ended up doing to the rest of the college athletic programs.

Will be interesting to see how it all plays out for sure.

It will be a lot of baby steps. There’s a ton of money and TV ratings at stake, and they’re terrified of killing the golden goose and ending up with triple A minor league baseball.


I think an interesting workaround would be to make just football and men’s basketball players (to start) be employees of the conferences. Not the schools.

I think that could help bypass/alleviate possible Title IX issues. Maybe not. We’ll see.

Also the main TV money goes into the conference first, before it ever gets to schools. So that might also make it simpler to just shunt X% of that revenue to players before it ever gets to the schools. Players union and collective bargaining at the conference level as well, again simpler.

 

[hungan1]

Didn't the Big Ten, Pac 12 and Big 12 form some kind of group right before the Pac 12 went poof?

Makes sense for these two conferences to get on the same page with things since football is kind and those two conferences are the clear power conferences in college football.

Let's hope they are not gridlocked like our Congress. Money and power can poison the well.

 

[GopherTheJugular]

Let's hope they are not gridlocked like our Congress. Money and power can poison the well.

If you have a problem with Congress, can you bring it up on the OTB? There's no good in injecting your snark here, it'll just derail the thread.

 

[Goldmember]

I could also see a world where the big moneymaker programs of the SEC and Big Ten for example combine and leave behind their old conference members with poor fan and media support. It’s only a matter of time before the Ohio States, Texas, etc., get tired of having an equal media payout as programs like Indiana, etc. that the TV network execs could care less about and aren’t generating an equal share of the television revenue.

Indiana football is great for Ohio State. It’s what makes Ohio State what it is. And the smart people who actually run shit know this.

The “helmet” schools aren’t special anymore if they don’t have 2-3x as much revenue as about 66% of their schedule.

 

[50PoundHead]

The major conferences have to get in front of this. Given the changes of the past few years, I think the balance between amateur and semi-pro has become more delicate and tenuous to some extent.

The NFL doesn't want to run a minor league system similar to MLB. NFL owners are only going to support changes that line their pockets and making massive investments in changing a system that currently works for them doesn't make sense. Further, local fan bases are still tied to their "Pigskin U's" and there would likely be an erosion in fan interest if the system is no longer tied to university programs.

That said, there have to be changes at the college football level to create greater stability given the recent changes with transfer rules and NIL. Whether that is putting players under some measure of contract beyond the signed letter-of-intent or pooling NIL money within conferences to prevent poaching may be some angles worth investigating. I could see the conferences negotiating with the NCAA to remove the big revenue programs from Title IX considerations.

However it proceeds, the conferences have a full plate in front of them. At base level is the definition of student/athlete that has underpinned the entire notion of college football (at least in the past half century). If that notion is discarded, it's everyone for themselves.