(Illustration by Sportico, Photo by Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images)Michael McCannTue, December 2, 2025 at 10:55 AM UTC·8 min readGordon Gee, a longtime college administrator who did two tours as president at Ohio State, recently penned an op-ed for The Hill that recommends colleges unify in the sale of media rights. The idea is based on sound reasoning, but its execution would prove problematic and highlight why the businesses of college sports and pro sports are so different.
Gee points out that college football is leaving a lot of money on the table. The sport has twice the viewership of the NBA but “brings in only half of the NBA’s media revenues,” Gee stresses.
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He also questions why college football “is America’s second-most popular sport by viewership” but “ranks only fifth in revenue.” The core problem, the piece contends, is that media rights are sold in an “outdated, fragmented system.” Gee posits this problem could be mitigated if conferences and schools unify “the sale of their football media rights.”
Gee is a formidable figure in higher ed. He recently retired as president of West Virginia University, and in addition to his tenure at Ohio State, he previously served in that capacity at Vanderbilt, Brown and Colorado.
Gee’s rationale also enjoys both historical and empirical support.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementIn the early 1960s, NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle convinced owners in large markets that pooling their media rights with teams in medium and small markets into a national TV package would be worth more than each team’s rights sold individually. Put another way, the “sum was greater than the parts.”
Networks bid to buy the rights to all teams, which created a premium: the ability to exclude other networks.
Rozelle correctly predicted that sharing would ensure NFL teams in medium and small markets were financially viable in a sports economy that was becoming increasingly reliant on broadcast income. He wisely sensed that a sports league with teams spread out nationally and having legitimate chances to compete would prove attractive to broadcasters, sponsors and fans.
Analogously, colleges bundling their football games into one package could be worth more, since the winner of the bidding would exclude others. Also, if the revenue is shared evenly or based on need, the bundled package might especially benefit colleges with football programs that fall outside the top tier.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementThe timing is right, too, for colleges to explore ways to generate more revenue.
The feared “enrollment cliff” is now hitting universities. The cliff—which refers to a drop in U.S. birthrates beginning in 2008, with children born that year turning college age in 2025 and 2026—is expected to last until around 2041, with an overall decline of about 15% U.S. college-age students. This will have potentially drastic impacts on universities, as they compete for fewer students and a shrinking pool of dollars.
Worse yet for schools, the cliff is hitting as the Trump Administration has pursued policies making it harder for international students, who often pay full tuition, to attend U.S. colleges and for university researchers to obtain grants.
Colleges that have opted into the House settlement are also seeing athletics costs rise. They can pay their athletes up to $20.5 million a year, which reflects a share of up to 22% of the average power conference athletic media, ticket and sponsorship revenue. More than 300 Division I schools opted in, a number that far exceeds the 67 schools in power conferences and includes athletic departments that generate modest revenues and consistently lose money.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementBut implementing Gee’s idea is fraught with hurdles.
For starters, there is an antitrust problem. Colleges and conferences are competing businesses, so when they join hands to restrict how each competes in the marketplace, they can run afoul of antitrust law. If Duke, Alabama, Notre Dame, UCLA and other universities with valuable media rights individually sold their rights, networks and streaming companies would compete to sign each school. In theory, this would be a more competitive market, and fans and sponsors might benefit, too. All it takes is for an antitrust lawsuit to test that theory for it to become a legal concern.
Universities agreeing to limit how they compete has been at the heart of antitrust challenges to amateurism rules that restrain competition for recruits. Through the NCAA and conferences, universities have agreed to limit the financial compensation some would otherwise offer. If Texas and Clemson could get into a bidding war for a top football recruit without violating NCAA rules, that recruit would be offered millions of dollars. But under NCAA rules, that can’t happen over the table.
Granted, in recent years recruits have been offered millions of dollars through university-aligned NIL opportunities. However, the College Sports Commission is attempting to prevent NIL deals cloaking pay-for-play arrangements.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementIt’s also true that by allowing for revenue share, the House settlement increases the ways in which colleges can compete for recruits. But the revenue share is capped, and in a free market, some schools—as the Justice Department under President Joe Biden argued in January—would offer more money.
Rozelle’s plan to pool teams’ broadcasting rights ran into antitrust problems. In July 1961, U.S. District Judge Allan Grim sided with the Justice Department in finding the pooling to violate antitrust law. Two months later, President John F. Kennedy signed the Sports Broadcasting Act into law. The SBA held that antitrust law doesn’t apply to football, baseball, basketball and hockey leagues whose teams pool their broadcasting rights for sponsored telecasting of games.
Gee argues that Congress should “provide college sports with the same limited antitrust protection that pro leagues have” for the sale of media rights.
That sounds logical, but there’s a problem: The “same limited antitrust protection” offered by the SBA would not be an antitrust solution for college sports. The SBA currently accords minimal protection to pro leagues, and it is a protection that has become less valuable over time.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementRemember, the SBA only applies to “sponsored telecasting” of games. That phrase means free and over-the-air broadcasts of games, which was the method used to broadcast games in the 1950s and 1960s where homes relied on antennas to pick up TV signals.
Although 19% of American homes can access live TV channels via an antenna, free TV is generally not how people in 2025 watch TV including live sports. As multiple federal judges have expressed over decades, sponsored telecasting does not mean cable, paid satellite, pay-per-view or streaming.
Yet to fulfill Gee’s vision of maximizing revenues, colleges uniting to sell broadcasting rights would presumably rely on some combination of cable, paid satellite, pay-per-view and streaming—none of which would be protected by the “same limited antitrust protection that pro leagues have.”
Aside from the antitrust problem, which wouldn’t be remedied by extending SBA protections to colleges, universities and pro franchises are very different creatures.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementUniversities are multitiered operations set up as nonprofits, typically with layers of administrators, faculty, staff and student groups that play important and sometimes overlapping roles in decision-making. The institutions also have numerous objectives, primarily educating students.
Sharing media rights of students who play sports might draw the interest of several of those constituencies, especially since those students might eventually be recognized as athlete employees who form unions.
Sports franchises have a much simpler objective: provide entertainment that induces fans and advertisers to spend money. Pro sports, at the end of the day, is merely an entertainment product. If pooling media rights advances a franchise’s business interests, the franchise will likely agree to share those rights in a pool.
Something else Gee doesn’t address: Even if colleges could pool media rights without hurdles, would they?
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementTake the 16 universities in the Southeastern Conference. They enjoy the fruits of a $3 billion media rights deal with ABC and ESPN, and the enviable status of feeding more players to the NFL than any other conference. Several SEC schools are academically prestigious institutions with large endowments. It’s not clear why they would want to pool their media rights with other schools, particularly those from smaller conferences or that have limited institutional reaches.
The analogy of pooling college football media rights in the same vein as NFL teams falters here, too. Rozelle could convince New York Giants owner Wellington Mara, whose team generated more from media rights than other NFL teams, to share revenue, because the NFL’s viability as a national league was predicated on teams in different markets being economically viable.
SEC schools are different. They could operate a successful and profitable league that attracts huge TV deals without most of Division I football existing. SEC schools don’t need them.
Pooling media rights might make more sense for non-power conferences, although it’s unclear how aggressively networks would bid for such a product. After all, networks most want the media rights of power conference football, not other conference football.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementCollege and pro sports are fundamentally different, built on different foundations: education and entertainment, respectively. College sports will need to evolve, as Gee rightfully asserts, but cutting and pasting from the pro sports playbook isn’t the way to go.
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