This episode first analyzes some additional issues that I left on the table in the last episode, including how so many crucial in-system stakeholders could have been caught off-guard by the SEC’s courtship of Texas and Oklahoma. In that regard, Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby has said little since the Texas/Oklahoma defections were made public. Why is that? Then I turn to where (and whether) the NCAA fits into a restructured football landscape. The NCAA is in the process of rebranding itself into a kinder, gentler NCAA. But to what purpose? I also discuss the implications in Congress of Power 5 infighting.

The rumors are confirmed: Texas and Oklahoma are indeed bolting the Big 12 for the SEC. Is this the end of college sports as we knew them? We can only hope so. What appears to be the beginning wave of another shake-out in the big-time college football sweepstakes is neither revolutionary nor unforeseeable. Instead, what we are witnessing is perhaps the logical endpoint of an imperial march by SEC football powerhouses through the rest of the South/Southwest territory that began in earnest just after WWII. From the Seven Sinners’ defiance of the NCAA’s “Sanity Code” in 1950, to the formation of the College Football Association in 1977, to the University of Georgia’s and Oklahoma’s landmark Board of Regents lawsuit against the NCAA in 1981, to Autonomy legislation in 2014, and dominance in the College Football Playoff since 2015, Southern Football has pushed brazenly for superiority and market dominance in college football for nearly 70 years. In the process, it has made enemies in other regions and fostered a relationship with the NCAA built as much on mutual suspicion as mutual interests. Now, in the aftermath of the Alston decision and the NCAA’s failure to deliver on its promises of favorable protective legislation from Congress, big-time Southern football is doing what it does best: forcing structural change by brute force. This episode begins an analysis of Southern football’s imperial aspirations and the latest chapter in the 70-year battle between college football’s “haves” and “have nots.” The inevitable game of musical chairs in this iteration of football-driven realignments will have ripple effects for all downstream market participants. What does will this mean for the NCAA, big-time basketball interests, and the rest of college sports? And more immediately, what does this mean for the NCAA’s/Power 5’s campaign for federal protections and immunities in the Senate? This episode frames the issues for a broad-based discussion of how the perfect storm is evolving into the most consequential era in college sports history.

In Mark Emmert’s July 15th “interview” with a “small group” of reporters, he alluded to the possibility that university presidents and chancellors may assert their authority and interests in the remaking of college sports. Emmert’s discussion implied that university presidents are marginal stakeholders in the business of big-time college sports. In fact, college presidents—and college presidents alone—are responsible for the conduct and control of intercollegiate athletics. The campaign for presidential control of college athletics dates back to the 1920s and the Carnegie Foundation’s 1929 Carnegie Report. Through the work of the Knight Commission in the early 1990s, the concept of presidential control of intercollegiate sports was rekindled and formally woven into the NCAA constitution and governance structure. This episode is a reprise of Episode 3: “Presidents in Control?”

In a stunning “interview” with a “small group of reporters” on July 15th, 2021, NCAA president Mark Emmert erased seventy years of NCAA history. He made a case for returning the structure and governance of college sports to the “home rule” era of the early 20th century. Emmert claimed the mantle of reformist and visionary, stating, “[t]he new environment is one that creates some pretty remarkable opportunities for the schools and the Association to rethink and reconsider a lot of the long-standing components of what college sports has been about.” Emmert advocated a decentralized, deregulated structure that delegates NCAA national power to conferences and individual institutions. Emmert said, “[t]his is a real propitious moment to sit back and look at a lot of the core assumptions and say ‘If we were going to build college sports again in 2020 instead of 1920, what would it look like.’ What would we change, what would we expect or want to be in the way we manage it? This is the right time.” Emmert, for the first time in his 11 years presidency, acknowledges that “[w]e have had this tendency to be as homogenous as we can in treating every sport identically, and that doesn’t work. We need to say field hockey is different from football and not get so hung up on everything being the same.” Lost in Emmert’s newly-found religion of reform is that he has been the point person behind a two-year campaign in federal courts and Congress—particularly the Senate—to ensconce into federal law the exclusive authority for the NCAA to impose its uniform, national agreement to fix the cost of athlete labor at the value of an athletics scholarship. Since 2019, the NCAA and Power 5 conferences have asked the Senate to eliminate all external regulatory threats to their business model through an exemption from federal antitrust laws, federal preemption of state laws that conflict with NCAA amateurism-based compensation limits, and a declaration under federal law that athletes cannot be deemed employees of their universities. Emmert’s suggestion that the NCAA has been a reluctant recipient of national regulatory authority fly in the face of the NCAA’s campaign for the Iron Throne of college sports regulation. Emmert specifically directed his Senate testimony in four hearings since February of 2020 to defend the NCAA’s role as the sole national regulator of college sports. Moreover, the NCAA premised its position in Alston on the belief that the NCAA—and only the NCAA—should decide what is best for college sports.