There Are No Good Guys Here

The headlines tell you things like college-sports-texas-tech-congress/90458466007/">“Congress may finally fix college sports.”

The actual substance, though, is not what I would call a “fix.” It is the people who broke the sport — and there are many, many involved here — telling you that we have to “fix it,” but where the “fix” looks nothing like what you grew up with. It is the AI guys threatening everybody with large-scale unemployment and then proposing a new social contract to make up for them rendering humanity obsolete and poor, entirely on their terms and completely ignoring the obvious question of “why on earth did we need this?”

Since Congress is involved here, this is the new generation of politicians telling you we have to move forward and if you just want things to go back to the way they were prior to about 2016 or so, fuck you, you can’t have that because we said so. That’s where college sports are at in 2026. As the debate rages about how we fix college sports, every single person involved in deciding what the future of college sports looks like is a villain. There are no good guys here.

The cartoon villain in charge of the Big Ten. Would really, really like to create a “super league.” Would settle for simply stripping the ACC for parts and calling it a day.

One of the obnoxious things about the way the media covers this whole ordeal is accepting at face value the excuse of “we have to pay the players now,” a meat shield to ignore that the biggest brands trying to clean their hands of smaller players (who they think they’re “subsidizing”) is something that’s happening across sports for reasons that few in the media want to explain. Pettiti is mad that some portion of the money the Big Ten brings in to college sports goes to the MAC in a variety of ways, because now the Big Ten needs that money to pay the players. Credulous media members don’t notice that the European Super League was proposed in spite of the fact that Barca was paying its players long before 2020, so that’s not it.

Anyway, somehow Pettiti has probably passed Greg Sankey (more on him in a minute) as the arch-villain in college sports, which is an achievement in and of itself. Also wants to expand the playoff to 24 teams and is the loudest voice behind guaranteeing multiple bids to the Big Ten. Pettiti wants to make college sports into Temu pro sports.

In the past, I thought Sankey got somewhat of an unfair reputation. Sankey cares only about the SEC, which de facto meant that he was arguing for a lot of toxic stuff simply because it would favor the SEC; but where the Big Ten is threatening additional consolidation, Sankey mostly seems uninterested in raiding the ACC. Of the two of them, I’ve always thought that Sankey understands the diehard college football fan a lot better, and the SEC does in fact tend to be more geared to the diehards living across the South than to the NFL fans who casually tune in on Saturdays but only if it’s a “helmet game.”

In the present, though, Sankey increasingly seems like he’s getting dragged around by Pettiti. Lately you’re hearing more and more of the threats by the SEC to “break away,” and not to form a “Super League” with the Big Ten but simply to do their own thing. Supposedly this allows them to hoard more of the money they’re generating, though I suspect that for both the SEC and the Big Ten, this relies on the LIV Golf Fallacy: while it sounds like a nice money grab to wall off the biggest brands and just have them compete with each other, in practice the only reason we know they’re the best is from routinely beating up on everybody else. Forming your own fishbowl within a larger ecosystem that nobody else is allowed to play in only works if you can guarantee yourself the attention of the larger ecosystem, and let’s just say that if Vanderbilt is not in the SEC, I literally do not give a shit about watching the other 15 schools.

And that’s the flaw in “why don’t we just break away from the NCAA?” The 104 schools in the FBS that are not members of the SEC or Big Ten have real fans, who probably do not care about the tiny fishbowl in the larger ecosystem if their teams are not included. You can draw them in to the current iteration of the College Football Playoff, sort of. You cannot draw them into the SEC/Big Ten Circle Jerk. Do people actually think that if you break off the rest of the SEC from the NCAA as an “elite” league, Memphis State fans just pick an SEC school to root for? Have you even been to Memphis?

For a while, Campbell, the Texas Tech billionaire megabooster and de facto Big 12 commissioner (again, we’ll get to the actual titular Big 12 commissioner), seemed like one of the few people who cared about the sport as a whole. Campbell’s big thing is wanting the NCAA to get an exemption to the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 that would allow the entirety of FBS to pool their media rights, which would mean a single entity negotiating television deals for all 138 FBS teams instead of the current system that ensures the conferences are at war with each other. That’s actually a good idea, and the fact that Tony Pettiti and Greg Sankey hate it suggests that it’s a really good idea for maintaining the health of the sport writ large. You have to keep the fans of the other 104 schools (never mind FCS and Division II and NAIA) engaged somehow.

Then, two things happened. First, everybody collectively found out that his plan involves something called Smash Capital, which even by the standards of the private capital/private equity vulture morass sounds especially problematic. Of course this guy wants to give away the sport to private equity, because he’s affiliated with a Big 12 school. Nobody ever bothers explaining why we want private equity to get involved, but we all know where that leads. And then there was the whole Brendan Sorsby saga, where Texas Tech’s transfer portal acquisition quarterback did the one thing you can’t do (bet on your own team’s games) and… somehow, he’s still allowed to play college football after sitting out games against Abilene Christian and Oregon State? Yeah, this isn’t a good guy, either.

The titular commissioner of the Big (sic) 12 (sic). Wants private equity to get involved, and also a proponent of all the dumbest ideas you can think of. If having a conference that extends from Arizona to Florida wasn’t dumb enough, Yormark also decided to use a court made out of glass for the Big 12’s basketball tournament, which was exactly as dumb as it sounds. But we still had to suffer through a lot of gullible media claiming this was “the future of basketball” and dipshit fans insisting this was “sick,” all up until the Big 12 unceremoniously yanked the LED court and reinstalled an actual wood court for the semifinals and finals of the tournament after too many players slipped and fell on the glass court. As though that wasn’t an incredibly obvious thing that would happen.

The commissioner of the ACC. Settled with Clemson and Florida State to amend the ACC’s grant of rights to speed up the timeline for the ACC to get raided. Somehow kept his job as commissioner of the ACC after doing that.

Somehow, this is the least bad of the four power conference commissioners. It’s still really bad.

Is Congress.

I mean, who knew we’d ever reach a point that the fucking NCAA is the closest thing we have to a good guy in college sports? The NCAA keeps making an attempt to enforce its rules. Is asking Congress for an antitrust exemption to allow the NCAA to have rules, since a combination of courts and lawyers has made this impossible. Is getting drowned out by other interested parties in this effort.

If they’re not daydreaming about a Super League and comparing this to European soccer, they’re telling you we can’t go back to the way things were, for reasons they don’t want to explain. The media used to not be so toxic, then sometime in the 2010s they flipped and decided that actually athletes need to be able to play at four schools in four years because “freedom of choice,” or something. The worst offenders are mostly interested in this for gambling.

Were arguably the good guys back when the initial round of lawsuits were coming up challenging the NCAA’s restrictions on athletes getting paid came up.

And then once those decisions started coming down, some of them decided to show us that the slippery-slope arguments that were popular in the 2010s in opposition to this were not being made in bad faith and in fact are exactly what’s happened. Allowing athletes to profit off their “name, image, and likeness” did in fact legitimize the bagman. Undoing the NCAA’s one-year residence rule for players transferring schools did in fact lead to athletes going to four schools in four years. Compensating football and basketball players for the revenue they bring in is in fact threatening nonrevenue sports and athletics at smaller schools. Somehow, any time you bring any of this up you get a load of media members and Twitter sports lawyers telling you that the beatings will continue until we get a collective bargaining agreement, at which point the sport becomes unrecognizable because the thing they really want and haven’t gotten yet is to stop pretending to have to go to class.

The NCAA was made to relax its rules at exactly the time that a generation was coming along that thinks staying with the same company for five years, never mind 20, is for suckers.

It exists. It is allowed to advertise its product right below tweets about Brendan Sorsby getting ruled eligible, somehow.

Are still mad that James Madison got included in the College Football Playoff. Quickly turned that game off to go watch the NFL. For some reason, this is who the entire ecosystem caters to.

Somehow, all the complaints about ESPN’s coverage of the sport led FOX to announce itself as a much more toxic actor.

The only thing we can really call a “good guy.” Being completely ignored in this conversation.

So… I don’t know. I guess we’re getting Temu NFL. Why not go watch the real NFL if that’s what we’re gonna get?