Former Ohio State, WVU president calls for media rights centralization in college football

Another prominent voice is calling for major change to the business of college sports.

Former Ohio State and West Virginia president Gordon Gee advocated for “two common-sense changes” to college athletics in an op-ed written for The Hill on Sunday. The first change Gee endorses is “unifying the media rights” for college football.

“College football is America’s second-most popular sport by viewership, but it ranks only fifth in revenue. Its viewership is twice that of the NBA, but it brings in only half of the NBA’s media revenues. How can this be? It’s not due to a lack of passion or value. College football is stuck in an outdated, fragmented system that holds back its earning potential,” Gee argues.

The former university president wants college football to sell its media rights in a similar fashion to professional sports leagues, which are granted federal antitrust protection to sell media rights as a collective. College football, on the other hand, sells media rights conference-by-conference. Gee claims, “When conferences compete for media dollars, the buyers pay less, leaving billions on the table.”

American Conference president Tim Pernetti advocated for the same change earlier this season.

Congress, it should be noted, is already considering legislation to afford college football the same antitrust protections granted to professional leagues.

Gee also addresses one potential holdup to his plan: that current media rights deals all expire at varying times, making it difficult to consolidate. “We just need to plan ahead for the next round. We can unify the rights over time starting with the first contracts that expire and then unifying all twelve deals by 2035,” he suggests.

Part two of Gee’s plan is to strategically schedule in a similar way to professional leagues, which more efficiently allocate top matchups across television windows. “Today, 136 athletic departments independently schedule out-of-conference games, resulting in a highly inefficient schedule with too many lopsided contests and marquee games being played at the same time. By just centrally scheduling the out-of-conference slate (without compromising traditional rivalries) and coordinating when conference games are played (without changing conference matchups), we will have more thrilling games that fans can actually tune in to,” Gee claims.

It is true that there are often weeks early in the season, when teams generally schedule less-competitive games, where there isn’t a truly marquee game on the schedule. Conversely, there are weeks later in the season when several good games are being played simultaneously. More efficient scheduling could unlock some value for the sport.

Gee goes on to paint these two “simple” changes as existential to non-revenue college sports, which are primarily funded through the media revenue generated from football and men’s basketball. Per Bloomberg, over 40 Division I sports programs have been cut since last May.

While the changes may seem simple on paper, there are so many stakeholders to satisfy in college athletics that even the most minor of changes can prove onerous to implement. But if Gee is right, and there are billions of dollars being left on the table, one has to imagine the sport of college football will find a way to capitalize.