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Could the NFL’s current media rights model, which may add even more players with a new deal expected at some point this year, make its way into college sports?
As both deals currently stand, the NFL has a unified structure, where it splits revenue evenly across its 32 teams. Meanwhile, college football is fragmented, with conferences such as the SEC and Big Ten seeing more lucrative deals compared to others because of its teams’ popularity and bigger budgets.
There has been debate about unifying the conferences to negotiate a single TV rights deal, but while some are for it to disperse money and help every school be competitive against the powerhouse programs, others view it as a complicated problem without a simple solution.
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Indiana Hoosiers quarterback Fernando Mendoza (15) reacts with the trophy after the College Football Playoff National Championship game at Hard Rock Stadium on Jan. 19, 2026 in Miami Gardens, Florida. (Mark J. Rebilas/Imagn Images)
Making an appearance on OutKick’s “Hot Mic,” Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., was asked his thoughts about the NFL’s potential problem as it looks to renegotiate its media rights, where streaming platforms could make fans pay more to consume the sport.
Tuberville explained why he’d rather that than a different future that has been suggested by some in college sports.
“Antitrust stepped in for the NFL back in the early ‘60s,” Tuberville said, referencing the 1966 AFL-NFL merger, which came after Congress allowed an antitrust exemption to combine TV deals. “Basically, the AFL and NFL got together with the federal government and [the latter] said, ‘You’re a monopoly. We’ll give you that opportunity. Go get you one TV contract with one or two TV providers, and you can do it all together.’ That’s the reason they’re making $300-$400 million dollars at the beginning of the year before they even snap a football. Antitrust really helped the NFL.
“So, a lot of them want to do that in college. I’d rather do that at the end of the day in the future than have people buy college sporting programs. You’re hearing that now, some of these schools are worth $200-$250 million and some of these billionaires come in and buy them and basically run everything. We don’t need to get into that. This is amateur sports, and let’s keep that way as much as we possibly can.”
Could high-profile boosters with billions in net worth, or private equity firms, get their hands on media rights in the future of college sports, especially in football? Tuberville hopes that’s not the case, but if it were to happen, big-name programs could look to become a team like Notre Dame, which serves as an independent that negotiated its own media rights with NBC through the 2029 season.
But Notre Dame is not part of a conference despite pressure to join one over the years. They reached a deal with the ACC to play 5-6 rotating games each season, but they remain outside the rest of the conference.
Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) arrives for a Senate Republican Caucus luncheon at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, DC on April 2, 2025 (Nathan Posner/Anadolu via Getty Images)
If billionaires were to come in and buy the rights to college programs, and essentially run everything to Tuberville’s point, what’s to say higher valued programs, like the University of Texas, Ohio State and the University of Georgia, won’t start driving up asking prices for their media rights with networks?
So, Tuberville would rather see the NFL model in college football, and so would prominent Texas Tech billionaire booster Cody Campbell, who serves as head of the board or regents for the university.
Campbell has lobbied Congress to amend the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961, called the SAFE Act, to allow college sports to band together and negotiate TV deals as a single group, citing self-commissioned research that showed the deal could be worth around $7 billion. In turn, it would help schools like Texas Tech and others not be heavily reliant on their high-profile boosters to compete with the finances of top programs, which can shell out bigger NIL payouts to top talent coming out of high school and the transfer portal.
But a study was commissioned by the SEC and Big Ten, which found allowing conferences to pool together media rights would generate less revenue than if they were to continue the current structure in place now. In fact, this study showed that the rising rate of SEC, Big Ten, ACC and Big 12 media rights would eventually outperform the $7 billion projection over the next decade from Campbell’s report.
Campbell responded to this report, believing that “those who first made the mess and profit handsomely from the status quo do not want to fix it.”
U.S. Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) speaks to reporters as he returns to his office at the U.S. Capitol on February 10, 2026 in Washington, DC (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
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At the same time, SEC commissioner Greg Sankey said in October 2025 that Campbell possesses a “fundamental misunderstanding of the realities of college athletics.”
While it is, and will remain, a major debate in the ever-evolving universe that is college sports, Tuberville would rather see the adoption of the NFL’s model than have independent programs running rampant for years to come.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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