Chicago (CNN) — Tony Petitti chuckled at the question, clearly amused at its bluntness if not the essence of the query. “I was wondering, Tony,’’ the reporter asked the Big Ten commissioner at his annual football media day, “is it a little bit sad that y’all have had to turn college athletics over to the federal government to save you from yourselves?”
Created to bring order to the chaos of college sports, the reality is the Protect College Sports Act was born because the people in charge had cannibalized themselves into near financial extinction.
Preferring the ostrich approach to name, image, and likeness, the NCAA and its membership were overrun when the courts forced the end of its long-standing amateurism rules, losing its collective shirt in 2021 when the Supreme Court ruled that schools could not collude to limit NIL earnings for athletes.
A year ago, the final accelerant was added to the bonfire of unrestrained spending when the House vs. NCAA settlement led to a massive wealth transfer from schools to athletes.
Absent guardrails, spending reached egregious and unsustainable levels, with no required transparency around NIL deals or even agent certification. Meanwhile, athletes challenged transfer and eligibility decisions through local courts, creating roster upheaval.
Unable to find a fix themselves, college leaders instead asked Congress to help solve their problems. If not quite the 11th hour, the whole thing might be reaching its final ticks on the clock. On Tuesday, Congress kicked the proposed bill back to college leaders, addressing language of revisions as proposed by the Big Ten and the SEC.
“I don’t think anybody expects that we get the changes and just check the box,’’ Petitti said. “There’s going to be back and forth. There’s still work to do.”
According to multiple reports, college leaders have until 9 a.m. Wednesday to respond. Except they may not have a choice.
Senators Ted Cruz and Maria Cantwell, who co-sponsored the bill, are working feverishly to get the whole thing across the finish line by August 8, when Congress leaves for its month-long summer recess. But Senate Majority Leader John Thune, who decides if the bill reaches the Senate floor for a vote, has intimated that it is not the highest priority on the Congressional to-do list.
Without an August vote, the whole thing could fall apart. When the Senate resumes, priorities no doubt will turn to the midterm elections. “Over the past 10 days there have been hundreds of phone calls discussing key aspects of the bill,’’ Petitti said during his opening remarks at media day.
“It is important to understand that this bill sets forth very specific language on how college sports will operate going forward.”
Petitti left the main interview room after his remarks and you got the feeling that somewhere behind the black curtains, he and his best frenemy, SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey, were burning up the phone lines. Petitti said at the podium that the two already had spoken five times by 11 a.m. Tuesday morning.
The two are not the only players in the conversation, with the ACC and Big 12 already having offered their stamp of approval – but they are the biggest power brokers and the hardest to please. It is their pushback on the bill’s initial language that shoved this whole thing to the wire.
So, can the two sides come to an agreement? That’s the big question. Between government and college football officials, we are dealing with the height of alphas. Neither is used to not having its way.
In the absolute height of arrogance, college football turned to Congress for help and when Congress offered its 100-page solution, leaders from the Big Ten and SEC balked, effectively saying, we want help, but not THAT help. A line item about conference realignment, for example, unexpectedly entered the equation without invitation.
“When you ask for help, it’s not going to be the perfect path that you thought you wanted,’’ Petitti said. “We preferred a much skinnier bill than this bill. That is not the reality right now. So we’ve got to work within the framework of what’s happening and make decisions about it as a totality.’’
Yet as the deadline looms, it would appear that, in a twist of true irony, the federal government has leaned into the concept of compromise. According to published reports, it has conceded to several of the SEC and Big Ten provisions.
The conferences asked for a $25 million retention cap (essentially extra money to allow coaches and institutions to pay and keep their current athletes). The current proposal includes $20 million, with an additional $5 million earmarked for women’s sports.
The SEC and Big Ten’s disappointment that the realignment rules seemed to target their leagues unjustly has been changed, lowering the threshold from $1 billion to $700 million to include the ACC and Big 12.
The government also agreed to prohibit any new entity from merging, acquiring or consolidating the assets and media rights of Power 4 schools, a direct response to the leagues’ concerns that private equity firms acquire schools to form a new conference.
The conferences, however, have also expressed concern that the bill doesn’t do enough to stop the endless lawsuits filed to circumvent various eligibility and transfer rules. “We’ve asked the Senators to include some sense,’’ Petitti said.
“These cases are so new. Can we get some protection so you help us get this system in place? I don’t know if that help is coming or not in the bill. We haven’t seen it. I don’t know if they’re going to expand the protections to cover that.”
Left unsaid and unsettled is what happens should the two sides not find their way to a resolution. A week ago, Sankey set off a furor when he intimated that secession conversations were “real.’’ The reaction wasn’t entirely deserved. The commissioner answered a direct question and quantified his response by explaining that any such talks generally stem from places of frustration.
Petitti did not throw kerosene on the conversation; he didn’t necessarily toss cold water on it, either.
“Can we come together?’’ he said. “It’s not breakaway, but is there another path where if you can’t solve it in the Bill and if you can’t solve it with your colleagues, is there some path where you have to have conference-based rules?
“That’s not necessarily breaking away. It doesn’t mean you’re not going to play anybody else. But is there a path to have rules that we can at least operate from the conference? That’s also really difficult. We absolutely have to do everything we can to prepare for every one of those things. So while we’re focusing on the bill, we have teams of people that are trying to set the groundwork of if you don’t get the bill, what happens?”
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