Michigan, Penn State, Maryland, USC, LSU, and TCU reps present at College Football restructuring pitch
· Yahoo Sports
Michigan, Penn State, Maryland, USC, LSU, and TCU reps present at College Football restructuring pitch originally appeared on The Sporting News. Add The Sporting News as a Preferred Source by clicking here.
College Football is going to change in some way, shape, or form in the coming years. Between Texas Tech University superbooster Cody Campbell’s “Saving College Sports” push and Donald Trump’s federal government’s push to tightly govern collegiate athletics, the current way of doing business has little chance at survival.
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On Tuesday, a meeting was held in Dallas by Smash Sports, a company that advertises itself as “Working with America's colleges and universities to address the financial and structural challenges in college athletics,” which met with representatives from several universities who allegedly weren’t explicitly representing their schools.
Those schools included the University of Michigan, Penn State University, the University of Maryland, USC, LSU, and TCU.
“Tuesday’s meeting was an effort to gather potential stakeholders from across the country to exchange ideas and confirm interest in the plan. The attendees included board members from 15 schools, including Michigan, Penn State, Maryland and USC from the Big Ten, according to multiple sources familiar with the meeting. Board members were not acting as official representatives of their schools and attended in individual capacities, according to one of the people familiar with the meeting. Yahoo Sports reported that LSU president Wade Rousse and TCU president Daniel Pullin planned to attend the meeting,” The Athletic’s Ralph D. Russo relayed.
“The Big Ten and SEC, the wealthiest and most powerful conferences in college sports, have shown no interest in the Smash plan or others like it. But the idea of pooling college football broadcast rights has gained traction in Washington with lawmakers as the NCAA and conference leaders have lobbied for a federal law to help them govern college sports.”
Smash Sports’ plan “would take all 138 schools competing at the highest level of Division I out from the umbrella of the NCAA, pull the management and negotiation of media rights contracts away from their conferences and hand those rights to another entity that could have some government backing.”
Michigan is in the best position to become an independent
There’s simply no way these university board members weren’t representing their own schools’ interests at this North Texas meeting. Russo was holding water for all of them in reporting that they weren’t.
If the writing is on the wall and College Football is heading towards mass wealth distribution, Michigan is the likeliest school to consider gridiron independence. ESPN’s Dan Wetzel believes the Ohio State University and Penn State could both consider going independent, along with the Wolverines, at some point in the future.
"If you had this one game as independents or in a little group, and then we throw in the Ohio State-Penn State game and the Michigan-Penn State game, and maybe we add a couple of these others... and then you take all your others [and] you go play in the MAC for your other leagues or do whatever you want to schedule out," Wetzel said.
"If you took that thing out to bid and let everybody from Netflix to ESPN, Fox, CBS, whatever, and said, 'There's $150 million [just for The Game]...' that's $75 million a school. That's the same amount you're getting for everything right now. Now you got all that, you got all your other home [games]... you can play eight home games a year... that pot of money is sitting there. And the more you expand... at some point, it's just fiscally irresponsible for those schools not to look at it."
College sports’ future will have many twists and turns. We’ll see if schools take matters into their own hands as they stare down the barrel at potentially having to fork up profits to their fellow universities across the country.