If you want to ruin college sports, have the federal government run them.
Apparently some Members of Congress believe the federal government is handling all of its current responsibilities well enough that it now has both the ability and capacity to implement wage and price controls in college athletics and even negotiate media rights on behalf of college programs across the country.
The misnamed “Saving College Sports (SCS)” plan would replace private sector negotiation of the media rights for college athletics with a newly created panel overseen by the federal government and empowered with “decision-making over permissible pooled media rights,” a practice that would only be permitted by Congress amending the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961.
Implementing such a plan would be a gross overreach of government power with ruinous consequences for college sports. Americans for Tax Reform urges lawmakers to reject the Saving College Sports plan.
Unmanageable, Bureaucratic Nightmare for College Sports
The creation of such a federally appointed panel would create a bureaucratic nightmare for college sports. The government-appointed panel would be responsible for dictating the schedules of 26 sports across 136 FBS colleges. The amount of games the panel would be responsible for managing would far surpass the tasks of the MLB, NFL, NBA and NHL combined. The federal government as no experience managing such a task and no justification for exerting such authority over the existing private sector framework.
Markets and Competition Work, Government Collectivization Fails
Currently, conferences are in competition against each another to sell their media rights to broadcasters. This competition drives innovation in packaging, streaming, and content delivery that results in a better product for fans and greater revenues for college athletics.
Government negotiation of pooled media contracts would be a significant disruption to existing private contracts with broadcasters that would lead to decreased future investment, resulting in less revenue for schools and a worse experience for fans of college sports.
The idea of collectively pooling college sports’ media rights is a tested and failed idea. The SEC and Big Ten conferences recently released a study that concluded collective pooling of games would generate less revenue than current practices, pointing at college football’s failed history with pooled media rights. Below is ESPN’s summary of the study:
“The study also took a historical perspective, including a reference to a seismic shift in college football TV rights in the early 1980s. After the Supreme Court declared that the NCAA’s pooling of games violated antitrust laws, schools formed the College Football Association to package games. The study said that arrangement produced less revenue: $43.6 million, compared to $69.7 million under the NCAA package.”
Wealth Redistribution in College Sports Should be Opposed
Proponents of the SCS plan argue that smaller schools are at an insurmountable competitive disadvantage to colleges comprising major conferences like the South Eastern Conference (SEC) and Big Ten due to the significant revenue they generate.
This would be surprising news to universities like UConn, whose Men’s basketball team is currently projected as a #1 seed for the upcoming NCAA tournament, paired with the top-ranked women’s basketball team in the country. This occurring despite UConn being a member of the fractured Big East Conference. Other obvious examples include James Madison University and Tulane both making the College Football Playoff last season, or basketball powerhouses such as Villanova and Gonzaga.
Proponents of the SCS plan are ultimately less concerned with maintaining fair competition as they are with redistributing the roughly $2 billion in revenue generated by the SEC and BIG Ten’s TV deals to smaller schools.
However, as former Trump senior economic adviser Steve Moore points out in his Townhall op-ed, smaller schools benefits from the success of the larger conferences:
“The legislation also ignores the reality that, as the kingpins in the SEC and Big Ten have gotten really rich, the other leagues have seen healthy returns and profits as well, at roughly the same pace. The better the power conferences do, the better the mid-America and Big East conferences do, just at a lower scale.”
In contrast, redistributing revenue away from the schools that generate it would distort incentives and harm the public interest, threatening funding for olympic sports and non-revenue generating college sports as the incentive to invest in high-quality teams and facilities would decline overall.
SCS Plan Seeks to Replace the NCAA with the Federal Government
Backers of SCS plan themselves make it clear that their end goal isn’t to maximize revenue for college sports, but to ultimately replace the NCAA with the federal government. Here it is straight from Saving College Sports’ own website:
“Just for a few seconds, imagine if the NCAA did not exist. And in its place is the government. What if a federally commissioned corporation governed college athletics, with the power to create rules, such as transfer limitations for college athletes, and enforce recruiting policies, including prohibitions on tampering and inducements? Even more significant is this new entity’s ability to reorganize conferences, negotiate consolidated media rights for all schools and control the distribution of those revenues.”
This isn’t a fix for college sports, it’s an effort to expand the size and role of government to control college sports.
