With college sports in limbo and key issues coming to a head, the spotlight is on the SEC: ‘It’s going to get heated’

MIRAMAR BEACH, Fla. — This used to be more of a vacation.

For four decades now, each Memorial Day weekend, university presidents, athletic administrators and football and basketball coaches from the SEC escape to this jewel. From the Sandestin Hilton, along the white sandy beaches of the Florida panhandle, they gather here for their annual spring meetings.

Advertisement

Back in the day, this thing was four days of mostly monotonous legislative meetings. Lots of golf. Plenty of poolside cocktails. And bunches of beach time.

Through the years, the list of items tackled here are fairly trivial compared to today’s ills. Remember the controversy around football satellite camps? How about the uproar over alcohol sales at conference games?

Heck, even the heated, NIL-fueled squabble a couple years ago between Nick Saban and Jimbo Fisher pales in comparison to what now stands before the most powerful college football brand in America.

Nowadays, SEC meetings are three days of intense policy-making discussions oozing with heavy subject matter. There is little to no golf. Few cocktails. And an absence of beach time.

Advertisement

SEC leaders begin meetings here this week in the midst of a proverbial battle over the future of college athletics: its football (and basketball) postseason championships; the NCAA’s governance role; and the inception, for the first time ever, of direct revenue sharing with athletes.

SEC old-timers believe it to be the most consequential gathering in the history of the conference.

Their decision on the future format of the College Football Playoff, if one comes at all, stands not only to remake the sport’s postseason but, perhaps, reshape the college sports landscape in perpetuity.

Their idea on the future of NCAA governance could be the next step in a long-predicted breakaway from the association.

Advertisement

And their path on confronting the growing dissension among the league’s own schools to abide by the new NIL clearinghouse and enforcement arm could make or break this impending revenue-sharing model.

“It’s going to get heated,” quipped one SEC school administrator.

State of college sports

The college sports ecosystem is in a state of rapid change and financial stress unlike any in its history.

Conflict is everywhere. There is a fight for more control around every corner, a drive for more money around each bend.

Much of it is rooted in the newest monetary pressure point: the impending onset of direct revenue sharing with athletes — a concept that will alter college sports and grow the schism between the NCAA’s richest members and everyone else until, most believe, it ruptures completely.

Advertisement

“The way the economic forces in college sports are going it’s going to exacerbate the gaps between the haves and have-nots,” says Jay Hartzell, the former Texas president who helped bring the Longhorns into the SEC before leaving for SMU. “I do worry about schools below a certain threshold and I do worry about how they are going to keep up and keep competing.”

Schools, searching to find millions of previously unbudgeted dollars to pay players, are expected to distribute, at the power conference level, around $20 million each to their athletes next academic year — new money flooding into the hands of mostly 18-22-year-old football and basketball players.

This is college football’s seminal moment. It is, begrudgingly, shedding its decades-old amateurism facade, forced through court rulings and state laws, to morph into what it truly is: professional football tethered to higher education.

The true, chaotic and unstable state of the industry can be summed up in one stunning fact. College executives avoided sharing their wealth directly with athletes for so long that they are now in an uncomfortable place: awaiting a decision from a 75-year-old California judge to learn how exactly to move forward.

Less than 40 days before Division I athletic departments are scheduled to begin paying out what will be more than $1 billion to athletes next academic year, there is no decision in a consolidated antitrust settlement (House) that is supposed to usher in this revenue-sharing era. The formal establishment of the new enforcement entity, the College Sports Commission, remains on hold.

Advertisement

And this billion-dollar industry — the engine that educates the youth of America and develops our next great Olympians — remains in limbo.

Speaking last month at the World Congress of Sports event in Nashville, SEC commissioner Greg Sankey, often viewed as the most powerful person in college sports, suggested that people who refer to the industry’s “chaotic system” forget how it arrived here: state laws that, while granting athletes compensation, are made to offer schools advantages and cripple the NCAA’s national regulation system.

“Chaotic system,” he said. “That’s way too simple a definition.”

CFP format controversy

Disagreement over the future format of football’s postseason — an annual $1.3 billion enterprise — has turned into something much more serious.

Advertisement

Discord and distrust lingers among the four power conferences as the two most valuable leagues, the SEC and Big Ten, assert their authority over the CFP format. The Big Ten and SEC — two leagues that have financially and intentionally separated themselves from the others — are supporting a 16-team playoff format that grants each four automatic qualifiers, twice as many as reserved for the ACC and Big 12 (two each).

A year-long simmer of format negotiations has reached its boiling point. There exists serious pushback in the proposed format from not only the ACC and Big 12 but from Notre Dame and some of the other FBS Group of Six conferences.

In this street brawl, it is two (SEC and Big Ten) against at least four other conferences, plus Notre Dame, the most valuable and independent college football program in America.

During their meetings last week in Los Angeles, Big Ten administrators solidified their support for the so-called “4-4-2-2-1” format: SEC (4 AQs), Big Ten (4), ACC (2), Big 12 (2), Group of 6 (1), plus three at-large spots. This week, the SEC has a chance to do the same.

Advertisement

And what if they do?

“I guess we’re going to war,” said one Big 12 athletic director.

At the center of this brewing battle is a memorandum of understanding that the 11-member CFP governing board — the 10 FBS conferences and Notre Dame — authorized last spring. The document grants format decision-making powers starting in 2026 to the SEC and Big Ten — a move to keep the two goliaths from separating to form their own playoff.

According to most who have viewed the memorandum, the agreement grants the Big Ten and SEC control over the format but directs them to have “meaningful consultation” and collect “input” from the other conferences and TV partner, ESPN.

Advertisement

Have they satisfied the agreement’s language to hold “meaningful consultation?” Some do not believe so and have sought legal counsel over the validity of the document.

The SEC’s decision on format is a pivotal step that may ignite a chain of moves within the conference itself. With four guaranteed spots in the postseason, SEC administrators are more willing to (1) add a ninth conference football game, (2) eventually strike a scheduling agreement with the Big Ten and (3) remake conference championship weekend with on-campus play-in games pitting their third, fourth, fifth and sixth-place finishers against one another for the final two CFP automatic qualifying spots.

All of these moves match up more big brands in additional games for — no surprise here — more money at this financially stressful time.

Advertisement

But there are other playoff formats in consideration, including a 16-team bracket with a single qualifier for each power conference champion and the best Group of Six champion, plus 11 at-large bids — a concept supported by the Big 12 and ACC and one that Sankey has kept in the conversation.

There is one problem with that format.

“It doesn’t allow us to do the play-in games,” said one SEC school administrator, “and I’m not sure we’d have the votes for a ninth conference game either.”

The flip side: With the 4-4-2-2-1 format, there is a risk of alienating a large swath of college football fan bases, triggering unwanted intervention from congressional lawmakers and adversely impacting relationships with the two other conferences.

Advertisement

“I think you should earn your way into any playoff,” Pitt coach Pat Narduzzi said earlier this month. “It comes down to the image of the Big Ten and SEC. There’s a lack of respect for the ACC. I don’t like it.”

NCAA governance

The long-discussed breakaway from the NCAA feels closer than ever.

The discord that exists among the power conferences over playoff format is not unlike the growing dissension between the four and the other 28 Division I leagues over future governance.

The NCAA is remaking its governance model to align with the July 1 implementation of the athlete revenue-sharing era. The proposal, socialized with member schools over the last two weeks, grants the power conferences as much as 65% in weighted voting power within rule-making committees. These groups make key decisions on topics such as when to hold the football transfer portal, who to assign to the basketball tournament selection committee, how to remake the football calendar and, perhaps most notably given recent lawsuits against it, a player’s collegiate athletic eligibility.

Advertisement

In Destin this week, SEC administrators are expected to examine the governance proposal and the possibility of separating football completely out from under the NCAA. During its spring meetings last week, the Big Ten swung its support for doing just that — bifurcating football governance.

In an unreported and little-known fact, SEC presidents in March quietly authorized their commissioner, Sankey, to split from the NCAA if he deems that the right move.

There are gripes over the NCAA’s new governance proposal from both the power leagues (believing that 65% is not enough) and many of the other 28 Division I conferences (believing that 65% is too much).

At least three commissioners of non-FBS conferences have publicly criticized the model, at least one of them fearing that the Big Ten, SEC, Big 12 and ACC will use their voting bloc to restructure the men’s basketball tournament — the NCAA’s only real money-maker — by impacting automatic qualifiers and revenue payouts for the lower leagues.

Advertisement

“Absolute power corrupts absolutely,” says Big Sky Conference commissioner Tom Wistrcill. “There’s going to be no checks and balances for them. There’s going to be no limit to what the Power Two can do if you give them any more.”

The power conferences have their own issues with the model. At 65%, all four of the leagues must vote the same way to pass an issue — a potential impediment to legislation given the growing schism between the big two (Big Ten and SEC) and the other two (ACC and Big 12).

The divide among the four power leagues is more evident than ever.

The latest example was a recent clandestine call that several ACC and Big 12 school presidents and high-ranking athletic administrators held with leaders of a private-equity backed super league. The call, earlier this month, was had without the involvement of ACC and Big 12 commissioners and was the second such Big 12-ACC joint meeting since December with those from Smash Capital, a venture capital firm proposing a super league model that features a $9 billion promise of cash infusion to college sports.

Advertisement

The ACC and Big 12 schools are not alone in their foray into this world.

While they are against these super league ideas, both the SEC and the Big Ten are exploring a private equity or private capital infusion. Big Ten administrators received presentations last week at their spring meetings from four firms jockeying to purchase a piece of the conference.

SEC officials are using Goldman Sachs, a multinational investment bank and financial services company, to further examine the concept.

Even the richest need financial help.

House settlement

The lack of trust among major college athletic departments can now be measured in a formal document.

Advertisement

As part of the sport’s new enforcement entity to police revenue sharing, schools in the power conferences — and others opting into the settlement — are required to sign an “affiliation agreement” binding them to rules and waiving their right to sue over those rules.

The gist: You don’t sign, you don’t play.

The document itself, while understandable, is an indictment on an industry of stakeholders that, because of competitive reasons, are constantly scrambling to bend, break and shatter rules to gain even the slightest edge. This festering, decades-old problem — booster and board influence — is at its peak, most athletic administrators claim.

Under pressure from state lawmakers, the NCAA lifted its prohibition on NIL rules in July of 2021, cracking the door for boosters.

Advertisement

They’ve since kicked it in — with help from their schools, at that.

“I identified to our membership what we were losing is shared values,” Sankey said last month. “So I can put people in a room and we can all agree we want regulation, we want oversight. And then when they leave the room, things happen.”

During a speech before the Knight Commission in 2023, Damon Evans, the former Georgia and Maryland athletic director now presiding over SMU, identified those things that happen.

“A lot of times, administrators and presidents go in with the right intentions and then we have trustees that get involved, which are donors, boosters and alums. And then somehow, magically, we change the direction we want to go in,” Evans said. “We say we want to do one thing, but we allow donors and boosters to get control. It becomes a decision about your own job security.”

Advertisement

The House settlement-related enforcement arm is a test for major college football and basketball. Can schools follow the rules? The biggest of which is for universities to remain under the new quasi-salary cap. The cap is a way to legislate competitive equity. In many ways, it handcuffs college football’s biggest brands with the richest donor bases, like Texas, Ohio State, Texas A&M, Tennessee, Oregon and Miami — six of the top spenders in the NIL era.

Will these programs remain under the cap? Or will they support their booster collectives in flooding the new Deloitte-run NIL clearinghouse with multi-million dollar deals for their athletes as a way to circumvent the cap?

And what happens when those are rejected? More lawsuits?

“We have to decide if we want to be governed,” Illinois athletic director Josh Whitman said.

Advertisement

One year ago, even before the settlement was formally adopted by NCAA members, several booster collectives in the SEC, specifically, began making plans to evolve from their current form into marketing-type agencies with intent to specifically circumvent the cap and continue supplying athletes with millions of dollars. Meanwhile, university athletic departments plan to use multimedia rights partners, apparel companies and corporate sponsors to fuel rosters with above-the-cap NIL deals.

Will the clearinghouse stop these agreements or will it, like many suspect, be sued into oblivion?

“That is the 100 million-dollar question,” Baylor athletic director Mack Rhoades said. “I’ll say this, it has to work. For this to be a good settlement, that component has to work and I think it is the most important.”

Many college leaders struck the settlement to (1) limit the role of booster collectives and third-party influences; and (2) avoid future litigation. It’s clear now that neither is expected to happen — a reason that so many within college athletics privately believe the settlement, though a necessary step to potential collective bargaining or employment, is a farce.

Advertisement

“But isn’t college sports worth saving?” rebutted one SEC athletic director.

Saving? Many would call this capitalism — athletes finally earning their cash, even if many of these deals are phony payments for recruiting purposes.

Does the sport really need saving?

Yes, Sankey says.

“There’s a reason the professional leagues are 30 and 32 (franchises), because you can fund those. They are not 70. We’re at 360 in Division I,” Sankey said in April. “If what’s happening now just continues for years and years, you will quickly see a diminishment of the number of sports offered. That’s why there needs to be national standards, because its impacts are geopolitical.”

Advertisement

Without it, experts contend, college sports is on the path to full professionalism — a concept that may put in jeopardy an athletic department’s broad-based, Olympic sports structure and eventually sever major college football from a university completely.

That day, most believe, isn’t far off.

“We are approaching an irreconcilable position between the academy and college athletics,” former Duke and Notre Dame athletic director Kevin White has said in the past. “That is frightening.”

Here at the Sandestin Hilton, golf, cocktails and beach are mostly replaced by heavy, consequential and, perhaps even, historic decisions.

There is serious business at hand for an entity that, more than ever, is exactly that — a business.