In as few words as possible, here's where we stand in college athletics:
1) At the big White House summit on Friday, the President opined about limiting college athletes to low-five figures per year in compensation. “I’d like to go exactly back to what we had and ram it through a court," he said, hoping for favorable judges to wind the clock back to 2019.
2) Powerful forces within the Big 12 and ACC are arguing that the solution is to amend the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961, which for the first time would allow the Power 4 to pool their media rights together rather than compete conference-by-conference. How and why Louisville-Wake Forest would become more valuable under this system remains to be explored.
3) The NCAA's authority to keep 23, 24, and 25-year-old former pros out of the college game is under attack from all sides.
It's enough for some within college athletics to opine, If this is how it's going to be, let's just breakaway and start are own full-on professional league.
USA Today columnist Matt Hayes wrote Tuesday about the hypothetical possibility of the SEC and Big Ten walking hand-in-hand into their own entity, wholly owned by their member universities and no one else. He writes:
The Big Ten and SEC could collectively bargain with players and player representatives, and have stringent player movement rules because they’ll have real player contracts. They’ll have a salary cap, and strict rules against private NIL supplementing player procurement.
The days of he with the most money wins will be long gone.
The first time a school uses illegal private NIL to secure a player, they’re eliminated from the postseason for two years. The second time: They’re out the association.
Asked about that possibility by Paul Finebaum, SEC commissioner Greg Sankey did not dismiss it.
"I'll just tell you, there is great frustration in my league that we've not been able to work collaboratively through some of the challenges and opportunities that we face. There's great frustration that, as we go through the economic transition with our student-athletes, that we haven't been able to better define the boundaries and guardrails and held people to those. We have a responsibility in that, so I'm not just casting blame. I think that's where our focus should be. How do we work with colleagues and solve problems collectively? If there's a point in which we cannot do so, I think that conversation -- Is there something that you do alone? -- I think that starts to generate more and more interest."
Of course, talking about breaking away and doing it are very different things.
For starters, politicians in the SEC's border states -- Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Kentucky, Texas, and Oklahoma in particular -- would have something to say about that. Legislators in Florida, for example, could not allow Florida to join the proverbial "big leagues" while leaving Florida State behind. Breaking away would also permanently eliminate the NCAA Tournament as we know it. March Madness needs the Butler and UMBC just as much as it needs Kentucky and Florida.
"If you're asking me my opinion, mine has been, You know what? We have relationships and responsibilities within Division I. I think you'd be quickly pulled in to hearings within our own footprint," Sankey said. "Sunday is a big day in the United States of America. It's when 360 or so universities that have all had the opportunity to play Division I basketball, 68 of them are picked on the men's side and the women's side and we have March Madness. America expects that to happen. I think there's a reality expressing that frustration, but I don't think that's something that's on the table as a top agenda item."
One could counter by saying the SEC could simply pick up a Florida State, Clemson, Louisville and the like, while perhaps adding Duke and North Carolina along the way, to form its own NFL and NBA 2.0 right there inside the SEC's Birmingham offices. Sankey, though, would rather everything stay how it is while everyone in college athletics works together to figure this thing out.
"We've built something really special. I'd be fine if every other institution in every other conference stayed right where they are. I think we've built something with our 16 members; I'll reference the (women's basketball SEC tournament championship) between Texas and South Carolina with a full arena in Greenville, South Carolina -- it wasn't that way when we went there in 2005. The TV, media interest in our games is spectacular."