After the House v. NCAA Settlement: Expiring media rights deals set to reshape college football by 2035

Bob Bowlsby learned long ago not to be shocked by anything in college athletics. But even he didn’t see the knife coming.

In the summer of 2021, the longtime Big 12 commissioner was locked in private talks with SEC boss Greg Sankey, quietly crafting the future of a 12-team College Football Playoff. Their work was so discreet, so tightly guarded, it barely made a ripple in the media.

But Sankey wasn’t just building a postseason format. He was also quietly gutting Bowlsby’s league.

The bombshell came when news leaked that Big 12 cornerstones Texas and Oklahoma were secretly plotting a move to the SEC under Sankey’s guidance. OU and Texas went silent, refusing to return the commissioner’s calls until four days after the story broke. The decisions had already been made. There was no turning back.

“I had sat in a room with Sankey for a year and a half while those discussions were taking place,” Bowlsby told CBS Sports four years later. “At a practical level, it’s hard to share information like that, but that’s the sort of thing colleagues do.”

In college athletics, the biggest moves often unfold behind closed doors. In a billion-dollar industry built on secrecy, the warning signs are there — if you know where to look. At the heart of it all is money. Media contracts, the pursuit of bigger paydays and the lure of stronger competition have fueled the sport’s most significant changes over the last 20 years.

Now, with schools sharing revenue with players for the first time in history, college athletics is hungrier than ever for new income streams. Stakeholders are already eyeing the next opportunity: a looming shakeup opportunity with at least five multi-billion-dollar media deals involving major conferences and postseason events set to expire over a five-year span beginning in 2030.

Such a flurry of business activity often triggers realignment — or worse. In the 2020s, TV money (or the lack thereof) effectively killed a power conference. Major Pac-12 programs like Oregon and USC defected to the Big Ten, while the Big 12 absorbed four castoffs to offset the departures of OU and Texas.

What’s next could be even more consequential. Major media rights deals for the Big Ten (2030), Big 12 (2031) and SEC (2034) are set to expire — as are the NCAA men’s basketball tournament and College Football Playoff contracts, both in 2032.

If one conference’s business decisions can shake the foundation of the sport, what happens when the entire marketplace is in play?

“It’s tough to tell,” Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark told CBS Sports.

“People are going to have to be creative and innovative,” ACC commissioner Jim Phillips told CBS Sports. “I don’t think anyone can just wait around and wait for the next television deal. You have to do some things in the interim.”

💰Sports media rights up for grabs

The Now: A mad dash for cash

To say college athletics is undergoing a significant transformation in how it does business is an understatement.

This summer’s landmark House v. NCAA settlement opened the door for schools to share up to $20.5 million annually with athletes. The ripple effects hit fast. Even before a single dollar was distributed, schools across the country began slashing budgets, shelving facility projects and eliminating sports.

At least 37 Division I programs have already been cut, according to the Knight Commission. Olympic sports at NC State, Virginia, Washington State, ULM and UTEP are among the casualties — all before the first semester of revenue sharing began in July.

“That’s not going to abate,” said Bob Bowlsby, former Big 12 commissioner and current member of the Knight Commission.

The impact extends far beyond the sport’s biggest brands. While power-conference schools will bear most of the burden, even FCS programs are on the hook. Under the $2.8 billion back-pay portion of the settlement, FCS schools owe 14%, and non-football Division I conferences owe 12%. To help cover that cost, the NCAA is reducing its annual revenue distributions to all Division I leagues.

No one is truly insulated.

“We focus on the financial sustainability for anybody below the autonomy level, but I would suggest to you the financial sustainability for those in the autonomy level may be as much at risk or more at risk than anybody else in the system, given some of the factors that are involved in the settlement,” MAC commissioner Jon Steinbrecher told CBS Sports. “Schools are going into debt to try and figure out a way to get the max ($20.5 million revenue sharing with players). They don’t have to go to the max in benefits, but many of them are, and many of them appear to be going into debt to do that.

“That’s why you’re reading so much about people looking for all sorts of alternative funding sources, and that number is going to grow, and it’s going to grow fairly rapidly.”

Athletic departments are already tightening their belts. Staffs have been reduced. Major facility upgrades delayed or canceled. Even the richest programs are bracing for more disruption.

To stay ahead of the financial squeeze, schools and conferences are racing to diversify their revenue models. Kentucky has formed a limited liability company to manage its new financial structure. The American Athletic Conference launched an in-house business unit to oversee commercial ventures and media rights.

“The reality is it’s a mission-driven business,” said American commissioner Tim Pernetti, “but everybody needs more revenue.”

That reality has led some conferences to explore private equity funding — though the idea of giving up control to outside investors expecting 18% returns has proved unpalatable so far.

Still, the hunt for fresh income has sparked bigger, riskier conversations.

The Future: Big ideas but little cohesion

Pernetti wants FBS commissioners to consider bundling their media rights and going to market in the 2030s. Studies commissioned by Pernetti show such an alliance among the 10 FBS conferences and Notre Dame would allow more flexibility in scheduling, meaning more high-quality games such as this year’s blockbuster Texas-Ohio State matchup in Week 1. That translates into a more enticing product for media partners to bid on. He believes broadcast revenue could more than double from the current cumulative rate of $3.5 billion annually.

“It’s in no way designed to have certain conferences take from others,” Pernetti said. “This is about creating a larger pie. If there was a way for all media rights revenue to be rolled up and then potentially doubled or tripled, I’m not sure what conference wouldn’t sign up for that right now.”

But there’s a catch: the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 prohibits college sports from bundling rights in this way. The law allows the NFL to package its media deals, but not the NCAA.

There are early rumblings of change. Sen. Ted Cruz raised the issue at a Senate Commerce Committee hearing in May. Texas Tech booster Cody Campbell, recently appointed to President Donald Trump’s council on sports, is circulating similar ideas. Campbell is expected to bring the concept to lawmakers this fall as they consider the SCORE Act, a bill that could codify the House settlement and shield the NCAA from antitrust suits.

Pernetti said the concept needs to be explored before the next round of contracts expire starting with the Big Ten in 2030. 

“While it’s provocative, it is a potential solution,” he said.

The pitch is simple: the more revenue, the more likely college sports as we know it survives. Smaller schools can stay afloat and stop making cuts, including the suspension of entire sports programs. 

In theory, more shared revenue could help stabilize smaller schools and stop the wave of team cuts. But old habits die hard.

“Essentially, we just need to get with the times,” one industry executive told CBS Sports. “There’s always tribalism and that’s a challenge. They confuse on-field competition with the fact that we’re all in it together in growing the popularity of sport. What’s good for one is good for everybody. The NFL figured that out. [A conference] will give up $2 just so that their rival doesn’t get one extra. It’s silly.”

Not everyone is eager to team up. Conferences have historically protected their turf. 

“Do they really think the folks who run the Big Ten and the SEC want to lose control?” said Patrick Crakes, a business media consultant and former FOX Sports executive. “No. That’s just one of the problems with all this thinking. There is no incentive for the top college football teams.”

The numbers bear that out. The SEC is pulling nearly $1 billion a year from ESPN. The Big Ten is cashing $1.1 billion annually in a multi-network deal. Over the next decade, those two leagues are projected to double the revenue of the ACC and Big 12.

But even modest efforts at cooperation among conferences have been shaky.

Though conferences work together on NCAA committees and conduct meetings to discuss shared challenges, business partnerships rarely last. After the SEC snagged Oklahoma and Texas from the Big 12, the response from three major conferences was to form a group they called “The Alliance” in August 2021. The partnership was meant to slow conference realignment, even though its purpose seemed ambiguous. It fell apart less than a year later, when the Big Ten picked off the Pac-12’s Oregon and Washington, effectively eliminating the Pac-12 from the ranks of power conferences.

While some ideas are unconventional, there are tried-and-true roads conferences could explore before deals expire in the early 2030s. They could pursue early renegotiations with TV partners to get ahead of the market. That’s especially important with the NFL’s $110 billion media deal set to expire in 2033 — with a possible opt-out in 2029. MLB and NHL contracts are up in 2028.

Whether the Big Ten (2030), Big 12 (2031) or SEC (2034) can renegotiate with their partners before the end of their current contacts is unclear. 

What could trigger the need for an earlier negotiation is the format of the College Football Playoff. 

Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti is a proponent of a 16-team playoff that would reward his league and the SEC with four automatic qualifiers. Why? It allows the Big Ten to schedule playoff play-in games, which increases game-day inventory that can be sold to media partners at a premium.

“The media landscape is continuously evolving. It’s changing a lot, and you have to be ready to understand what that means and how that impacts you and your access to resources,” Petitti told CBS Sports.

“There’s always pluses and minuses to those decisions,” said Nick Dawson, ESPN’s vice president for college sports programming and acquisitions. “What the industry is wrestling with right now is the balance between access and providing pathways for more teams balanced against making sure you don’t cross that fine line to devalue the regular season, which is a concern.”

Expanding the playoff could also provide the needed push for the SEC to move from eight to nine conference games. That additional inventory could allow for negotiations before the SEC’s deal expires in 2034. One more conference game could fetch at least $50 million more annually from ESPN, sources told CBS Sports.

“Theoretically, you can take that and go to your media partners early,”  said Bob Thompson, a former FOX Sports executive and co-founder of the Big Ten Network. “If they’re coming to me, I’m saying, sure, I’ll listen and pay, but I want an extension. I’ll add these additional events, I’ll pay you more money. I’ll also pay you more money for the out years on the extension, and what that does for the TV guys is the package doesn’t get to the open market. It gives the FOXs and ESPNs of the world the ability to potentially alter, amend and extend their deals before anybody else even gets a chance at it.”

The 10 FBS commissioners and Notre Dame’s athletics director are negotiating the CFP format for 2026 through 2032, and they may not reach a resolution until Dec. 1.

Thompson said college football would be wise to move up its schedule into August to increase visibility and further avoid the NFL, which has already encroached the sport on Thursday nights late in the season and cannabalizes the audience during the College Football Playoff in December. Sprucing up broadcasts with alternative feeds, similar to ESPN’s popular Manningcast for the NFL’s Monday Night Football, could also increase value.

Enhanced viewing options may not be far away, particularly in the ACC and SEC. ESPN’s upcoming direct-to-consumer platform is expected to usher in new personalized feeds, live stat overlays, gambling prompts and tailored SportsCenter content.  

The Reality: New distribution models

New alliances seem far-fetched in this landscape, but what seems more likely are changes in how conferences divvy media revenue to their membership, say analysts surveyed by CBS Sports. The ACC recently insittiuted an uneven payout structure with its schools, primarily because of the threat of Clemson and Florida State leaving the conference. 

The model is complex, but boiled down it is simple: winning programs drawing the best TV ratings get more money. That figures to help the blue bloods like the Tigers and Seminoles, while hurting the lower-tier programs like Wake Forest substantially, with annual payments reduced by as much as $7 million, according to ESPN.

“There are Power Four schools currently that are lucky they got the last boat out,” a power conference executive who wished to remain anonymous told CBS Sports. “They would have a hard time in 2025 selling themselves to the Power Four. Every conference has one of those.”

All it may take for uneven revenue sharing to appear in the Big Ten or SEC is for programs such as Ohio State, MIchigan, Alabama and Texas to speak up. In many ways, the power is in the hands of the schools, as demonstrated by Texas and OU’s clandestine meetings with the SEC in 2020 and 2021.

“Texas made $44 million the last year they were in the Big 12,” Bowlsby told CBS Sports. “If they came and said, we think we deserve two shares or a share and a half, they probably would have gotten it. But they never asked and there wasn’t a process. It is what it is, and as I say, institutions are always going to act in their own best interest.”

For now, commissioners are circling the wagons and protecting their own herds. 

“The way to best protect is to do the things you need to do,” Petitti said. “One, to keep the membership together, and then secondly, be as like-minded as best you can. Provide them with the resources they need to make great decisions like they have in the past.”

Most of their energy is directed toward navigating the early days of the new revenue-sharing model and the creation of the College Sports Commission, its new governance model to oversee revenue shares and NIL payments.

“We’ve entered into a period of stability,” Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark said. “I’m not sure collegiate athletics, at least from where I sit, needs to be reimagined.”

The big shift in college sports may not come overnight, but as the next round of media negotiatoins draw near, more turbulence is expected.