College Football Gone Wild

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1:04Congratulations! You made the varsity the podcast. My name is John Aranda and I am Puck's sports correspondent and the host of this pod. And today, I am genuinely excited to be joined by Ross Dellinger. Ross is a senior college football writer over at Yahoo Sports and I can't think of anyone who breaks more stories on this beat. We're going to spend a lot of time today talking about the chaos that is the business of college sports. Lane Kiffin, James Franklin, Tony Petiti, Greg Sankey. Ross is going to tell us where they're all headed with the sport. But before we get to Ross Dellinger, today is Sunday, November 30th, and here's what I'm watching.

1:47And it's all about a resurgence of the regional sports networks. Seriously. I have spent the past decade documenting all of the problems with regional sports networks, or RSNs as they're called. As rights fees that the RSNs are paying teams continue to rise, the affiliate fees that they get from cable and satellite companies continues to fall. It's an unsustainable business. Now, Fox got out of the business. Sinclair couldn't make it work. Diamond Sports, now known as Main Street Sports, it went into bankruptcy. Warner Brothers Discovery, they got out. YouTube dropped almost all of them, so did Hulu Plus Live TV.

2:26Comcast sent them to digital tiers. It was really not a very good business, and anyone involved with them was basically responsible for managing their decline. So what's this resurgence? Well, I got my hands on a report from Antenna that showed a lot of growth in streaming services offered by RSNs. Per the report, RSN signups grew by 63 % year-over-year for the first quarter of 2025. That grew to an 81 % year-over-year growth in the second quarter. Mind you, the direct-to-consumer business is not nearly as profitable as a cable bundle. I love to tell the story of how I used to walk my dog at night in D.C.

3:05and I'd take note at what people were watching. And at times, it seemed like I was the only guy on the block who was watching the Orioles or the Nationals. All of my neighbors were subsidizing my baseball fandom, and I thanked them for that. This tracks with other findings from Antenna, which found that subscribers are staying with their streaming bundles for the most part. And again, this tracks with the rest of the business. Entertainment programming, it went to streaming long ago. Sports was the last holdout for the cable bundle. Sports and news, live event programming. But now, we're seeing evidence that even sports is starting to make that move.

3:46So my questions center around legacy media's role in this transition and whether Congress or really any federal regulators will try to show sports as a march off broadcast or try to slow it down. Okay, now let's get to Ross Dellinger. Ross Dellinger, your beat covering college sports, I can't think of anything more chaotic than what you're covering nowadays. And the thing I love about your reporting and the thing I love about just this whole beat is I have no idea what college athletics is going to look like in two years, maybe three. I don't even know what the time frame is. Certainly five years.

4:33So I think I want to give like an open-ended question to you to start. Like college sports in three years, how is it going to look and feel different than the way it looks today? Oh, my goodness. And I want to remind you, we only have like an hour for this. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think about three years ago. So fall of 2022. And we were a year into NIL. schools were trying to figure out how to do NIL, what to do, could they do it, could they pay players. They've been told for so long by the NCAA not to pay players, that it was illegal to pay players. And then, you know, I think fall of 22 was when you started to see the collectives really ramp up to another level and really spread across the country.

5:34So I think about that three years ago and where it was and now to where we are today, right, where we have where then, you know, having a five to seven million dollar roster was a lot. Now we have twenty five, twenty seven million dollar rosters. And I think in three years, I have a suspicion that what college athletics is trying to do with athlete compensation, which is prohibit boosters from being involved, despite during the NIL era, them bringing boosters back in, right, letting them back in. And now they're trying to cut them out with the new enforcement entity, the College Sports Commission and the NIL Go Clearinghouse.

6:19That's basically, you know, without getting too detail in it, just supposed to prohibit booster money. Thinking about that and the early the first four or five months of that, I just don't see how this is going to work long term. I know how they want it to work and how their intention is for it to work. I think legally it's going to be hard to work. And so in three years, by that time, you're probably going to have football rosters of at least 30, 35, maybe upwards of$40 million. dollars and you're probably going to have frustration among administrators and officials at the top level of college athletics in the fact that the clearinghouse really it maybe isn't doing what they intended it to do and you're going to have ideas that we've seen circulated now, collective bargaining, right, sort of ideas, I think start to come to fruition.

7:31And you're probably going to have football specifically, maybe men's basketball and other really high revenue sports, which really those, to be honest, those are the only two, going to be treated separately. And whether it's collective bargaining or some kind of other compensation system with some kind of other rules around it, I think I think they're going to see. What I find to be unique about your space right now, the space that you cover, is that there are so many power brokers in that space that are begging Congress to get involved and to provide a solution. And having covered sort of business, I live in D.C., so I'm adjacent to regulators.

8:18There's no other business that is begging Congress to get in and try to save the business from themselves. When you talk about the next three years or the next five years, where are these changes going to be pushed from? Is it going to come from D.C.? Is it going to come from the SEC Big Ten? Or is it going to come from some other area that I'm not quite up on right now?

8:47Well, you know, yeah, Congress is, as you mentioned, right, no other entity really wants Congress involved in their affairs. And five years ago or six years ago now, I guess. That's crazy, isn't it? Yeah, it is. It is. It is. And I guess it was six years ago. Now, that was the first sort of lobbying effort that Mark Emmert, the then NCAA president, came up here to D.C. and lobbied. So six years, six years, it's taken six years for a bill to finally pass one of the chambers. And it should next week. The SCORE Act, this college sports legislation that is jam packed with everything the NCAA wants.

9:25Right. Antitrust exemption, state law preemption, anti-employment provision. It's probably going to pass the House. It's going to get to the Senate. And as often is the case with House bills that get to the Senate, they open the door and they just throw it right out. I would expect that something similar to happen. But it's taken six years to get to this point, which tells you how slow Congress moves and how sensitive of an issue that this is. So I think you will continue to have Congress, especially leading Republicans, be at the center like a Ted Cruz of trying to get something done in the Senate once they get the SCORE Act from the House.

10:13So it could come from Congress. I think Congress will be involved in that. You mentioned the SEC and Big Ten. Let's be honest, you know, they sort of make all the big decisions right now in college athletics. If they're not both on board with a decision, usually a decision does not happen. so um you know in about a year ago they had a the two leagues had a really good relationship they were meeting often that's changed um i don't know that they're in the same position that they were a year ago i don't think they see things uh in in the way together like they did this time last november um so i think that hurts any kind of decision among the two to do something different with college athletics.

11:04So it feels like we're going to be sort of continuing down this road and trying to continue Congress to act until finally, as I mentioned in my prediction of three years from now, a group gets together and says we have to have better rules and regulation. So we have to create some kind of collective bargaining with the athletes. And I think that unless we get some kind of miracle bill, right, that feels like what's going to have to happen. In your mind, who is in that group? Is it just those top two conferences or does it expand beyond that?

11:45I think that everybody wants to be in the group, right? And we all know that is not going to happen. Like everybody's not going to get in the group. All of Division I is not going to get in the group. all of the 130 FBS programs aren't going to get in the group. So is it the 70? Is it the four of them who can really afford it, the Big Ten, Big 12, ACC, and SEC? Those are the ones that make enough money on football, men's basketball, that stuff, where they can maybe afford to – I don't want to break away is sort of the wrong word, but they can pay athletes in the way that others can't. Or is it the top 30 or 40, the Big Ten and SEC together and some mixture?

12:29I have a hard time believing that in three years or maybe even in five years that you're going to have a college sports Super League division just with 30 or 40. I have a hard time believing that. But politically, that's going to be really, really difficult. um to convince is that like all the cody campbell stuff like like you think about yeah sure right you're disenfranchising everybody else you know if you if all the big brands got together and did a 20 or 30 team sort of super league and created their own rules and did more professional collective bargaining you're cutting out everybody else and there are state senators uh huge political and boosters and donors and school donors and Congress, other House members that are from all these states and are affiliated with these schools who have been cut out of this.

13:27And so at the very least, you'll have a ton of lawsuits that probably you'll lose. And just politically and getting anything from Congress is going to be an issue, right, after you do something like that. So if you need protection to do this Super League or whatever you're going to plan on doing, Think about it. Like if you're disenfranchising the senators and congressmen, their state schools, they're not going to they're not going to support any anything that that helps you. So it's hard politically to see that happen. And that's why I say it feels to me that it will be the four leagues, you know, and the 70 of them, at least the first step.

14:09Right. I feel like college athletics, I often say, right, college athletics is like Congress. Right. It it it doesn't run or walk. It crawls in making decisions. It's very slow. And so I think one of the one of the steps in this is what we've seen. We've seen different steps toward this path over the last few years. We've seen the power conferences get their what they call the autonomous powers where they can control legislation. That was sort of a step. We see the NIL era as sort of a step that's grown the gaps between some of the haves and have nots. We saw a new step recently with the Big Ten and SEC getting more control over decisions, especially with the college football playoff and all that stuff.

15:00So we're on like this step, step by step of where the last step is maybe some kind of Super League or 30 or 40 team division of the biggest brands. But we're I feel like we're a ways away from that. And I think everybody, a lot of people in college athletics are trying to avoid that step by getting Congress involved right there. They're running to Congress to if you don't get involved and protect us and protect these compensation rates and the rules and the transfer policy, there's going to be a quicker, a quicker move to some kind of super league or super division. So they want Congress to help to sort of prevent this move.

15:49And I think in that regard, you know, they're kind of right. Like, I think there's enough frustration with the current environment that if Congress doesn't do something to sort of protect things or if they don't all collectively bargain. Right. Because it's one or the other, John. Right. It's you're either collectively bargain. If you want rules and regulations and all that, you want caps, you either collectively bargain or you get Congress involved. And if neither of those things happen, you're going to have this unregulated system and frustrated, angry, angry administrators where they are going to separate.

16:24And they're going to say, we're going to go over here and do our own thing. You know what story I love pursuing, not just in college, but really everywhere is like I try to identify who the power brokers are. and uh and in college i've always said okay yeah it's tony petiti and it's uh greg sankey right now that the commissioner of the big 10 and commissioner of the sec uh over the past couple of months like and i'm not sure why i think i think it might be because the sec kind of it moves forward with one voice and greg sankey seems to be running it you know really well the as you've reported like especially with the you know private equity and the big 10, you know, the Michigan is upset and USC is upset.

17:11Now, you know, half the big 10 seems to be in revolt. Am I right in thinking that if I'm trying to pick a power broker in college, it certainly would be Greg Sankey and not Petiti or does Petiti still have as much power because he does run the, you know, one of the two biggest conferences. Yeah. I think that's fair. I think Greg has been in college athletics so long. He's a lifelong college athletics administrator, 40 years. And so he has that institutional knowledge. He's a little more or maybe a lot more diplomatic than how they've been in the Big Ten. He seems to work more in a way, more for keeping everything sorted together in more of the status quo.

18:10And Tony Petit and the Big Ten seem to be more progressive in a way or aggressive, you might say, in the shift to the next evolution of college athletics. So I think plain and simple, Greg Sienke has more friends in college athletics, right? He has more friends in the industry. And I think that Tony has come in with some of his ideas. And I think he's probably angered and frustrated a lot of people. And so I don't see the college athletics sort of power brokers getting behind him as much as I would see them getting behind Greg. I think that's probably fair. And honestly, Tony Petiti probably feels the same, right?

19:06He probably agrees that he knows how he's approached certain things. And it's been received differently than how Greg goes about his business. Well, the Big 12 is certainly not one of the top two, but Brett Muermark came in much like Tony Petiti. He has a business background and he broke a lot of eggs, but you don't see the Big 12 schools stepping out of line nearly as much, it seems. I'm not sure if that equates to what you said of having friends, but it's just something that I've noticed. Yeah, it is these conferences in the dynamic with these conferences from presidents to their athletic directors to then the commissioner.

19:57And then we forget sometimes I know you don't, but the TV partner, right, is so important and so big. And it's so interesting. Each league just has a different set of values and interests and the way they approach things. And Greg, I think when you look at his history in the SEC and his relationships in that league, I just think he's sort of got a better grasp, not just in his league, but in some others as well, how he handles himself, how diplomatic he sort of is. But you mentioned Brett. You know, Brett came in a lot like Petiti, right, from outside of college athletics. And he's aggressive with a lot of stuff, especially revenue generation.

20:52And, you know, not everything is sort of worked right that he's he's suggested. Same thing with Tony. But they keep on going and trying at it. And I think that's that's important. But I do think. as much as the lack of friends maybe that Tony doesn't have throughout college athletics, it seems like those in the league, especially his athletic director room, really appreciate what he's done, the aggressive nature of what he's done with some of these things. I think that they appreciate him. And, you know, to him and probably to a lot of commissioners, that's the most important thing. Ross, let me take a quick break and I want to come back and you've been all over this big 10 private equity snafu that's been going on and I'm dying to know just what exactly it means, but we'll be right back.

22:02With more than 200 episodes, you can binge your way, decade by decade, defining event to defining event, from the founding into the 20th century. Join me, Professor Greg Jackson, for History That Doesn't Suck, an Odyssey podcast, available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. I love this story. The Big Ten trying to get a private equity deal that was off again, on again, now off again. irritated two of the marquee teams in the conference. My first question to you, that was to Michigan and USC. My question to you is, what exactly, look, I'm a Maryland guy, and how would that private equity affect the University of Maryland, one of the Big Ten teams?

22:55Yeah. Well, they would get an immediate infusion of$110 million is the kind of infusion, $110 million for the bottom 13 schools,$145 million, I think, for the USC and Oregon. They're in the second tier. And then the top tier is Michigan, Ohio State, and Penn State. They would get$190 million. That was the proposal, right, of the upfront infusion. So that's what a school like Maryland and those in the 13 would see. That's the benefit they would see immediately. Then there's the creation of the Street Ten Enterprises. Let me just interrupt you for a quick second. With that money, that goes to what?

23:44Paying the players? It goes to the facility? It goes to pretty much everything? Yeah, whatever they want to do with it. I think right now in the Big Ten, everybody's under financial stress in college athletics because it's a 20-plus million dollar hole for the players and all that. But I think specifically in the Big Ten, they have built some facilities or are building some facilities that cost a lot of money. And so I think a lot of the capital infusion would have been used to offset a lot of that. But in places where it wasn't, you certainly could put it somewhere and let it grow. And it would be, you know, help you as part of your revenue share with the players.

24:37Or it could pay, I don't know, a coach that you fired and owed, you know, 30, 40, 50 million dollars. So, yes. Yeah. So I don't part of me doesn't think it's super coincidental that you had Wisconsin and you had Maryland announced that their coaches would be returning after it seemed that the Big Ten deal was dead or dying. Not to say it had that much of a role, but you could see that there were a lot of people in the Big Ten, I think, counting on this to go through and happen. I think they were really close. There were just a few board members at Michigan away, basically, from this thing happening.

25:24And there was a lot of people counting on that money. You said it's dead or it's dying. Which one is it? I think to a degree they're keeping it alive. It would be hard for me. It's hard to say that it's never going to happen. Right in five years it might happen or something. But it's hard for me to see in the next year it happening. I don't think that Michigan's board is really moving on it. But, you know, this needs the vote of all the presidents. It needs the unanimity to extend the grant of rights with everybody, all 18. And all the presidents, from what I understood, were pretty much on board.

26:13And all the athletic directors except one were pretty much on board. But the Michigan Board of Regents and some other boards around the country, when they started to find out more and more about the deal, they were told that they didn't have authority to vote on the deal, that this was a presidential decision. And that was that. And that certainly just frankly pissed them all off, right? I mean, there were a lot of them very angry that they didn't have any voice in an extension of the grant of rights with a conference for a$2.4 billion deal. As several of them have said publicly now, we approve things that are much less.

26:57Like, why are we not approving this? So Michigan's Board of Regents, and they have an interim president, and so is USC. The two schools that were against this publicly both have interim presidents. I think that's important to know. So Michigan's board, obviously, they basically told their president, you know, you are not to vote on this. And I think USC's athletic director was the one athletic director in the room against it. And she was aligned with her board in voting against this, telling the president to vote against this. There was a thought the Big Ten would go forward with just 16. And they issued to Michigan and USC sort of a document, an email of like, here's what would happen if you don't vote for it.

27:48You know, here's our tentative date of voting for it. Sort of, uh, some would take it as threats. They did. They took it sort of as a threatening, um, and, uh, that really ended the deal, right? Cause that got out publicly. How could you not know that it's going to end the deal? Cause those are two of the, two of the premier schools. I mean, you're going to threaten to what, kick them out of the conference? Like all of a sudden that Fox deal is going to drop by, that makes more money. John, I'm not convinced that Ohio State was going to go through with the deal if it was just 16. I'm still not convinced that that ever really would have happened.

28:30The Big 12 has also in the past, Brett, you were marks talked about looking into private equity. I haven't really heard it with the SEC or ACC, but if two of them are talking, you would expect others are too. So where does this stand in terms of college sports? Are the conferences kind of united now saying like, boy, that looks like something that's not going to be able to get rammed through? Or is this something that's still out there for other conferences? No, I think it's still out there. You know, the Big 12 is down the road sort of for a third time trying to get something done. It's nothing like the Big Ten deal, right?

29:10I don't know that we'll see anything like the Big Ten deal again or anytime soon. The amount of money and how the whole construction and framework of it. So the Big 12 deal is going to look a lot different. The money is not going to be the same. It's probably got an opt-in, opt-out for schools where you're not required to be a part of it or whatever. The American Conference is down the road on something similar. Tim Pernetti, he's been pretty aggressive. So I think, John, there's a half a dozen to a dozen schools. Another guy who comes from the business side of things coming in and taking a look at it.

29:46Yeah. I mean, there's a common denominator there, right? Right. Absolutely. I think the SEC and most of the SEC schools are – this is a non-starter. They don't want anywhere near this. They don't want to do PEC. They don't want to do PE. Their presidents have been very clear with Greg Sankey about that. They hired Goldman Sachs, I don't know, maybe a year ago or so, to start studying and exploring the possibility of these deals. When they found out the Big Ten was doing it right, you want to see what's out there. And let's just be honest, if the Big Ten can get$2.4 billion, the SEC can probably get$3.4 billion, based on viewership.

30:28If that's the value, it's based on viewership, that's probably it. But they're not interested in it at all. And I don't get the sense the ACC is real interested either, but there are individual schools. I think there's a dozen or so individual schools that are down the road on a private sort of capital, private equity sort of deal for them individually. Ross, as you reported this Big Ten private equity months long, as you were reporting, were you surprised? Were you gobsmacked by what was happening? Or did you foresee the problems that were – how foreseeable were the problems that Petiti ran into on this?