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Could the NFL’s current media rights model, which could add even more players with a new deal expected sometime this year, find its way into college sports?
As both agreements currently stand, the NFL has a unified structure where it splits revenue equally among its 32 teams. Meanwhile, college football is fragmented, with conferences like the SEC and Big Ten seeing more lucrative deals compared to others due to teams’ popularity and bigger budgets.
There has been debate about unifying the conferences to negotiate a single TV rights deal, but while some favor it to spread money around and help each school be competitive against the powerhouse programs, others see 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 January 19, 2026 in Miami Gardens, Florida. (Mark J. Rebilas/Imagn Images)
Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., appeared on OutKick’s “Hot Mic” and was asked his thoughts on the NFL’s potential problem as it looks to renegotiate its media rights, where streaming platforms could get fans to pay more to consume the sport.
Tuberville explained why he would prefer that to another future that has been suggested by some in college sports.
“Antitrust stepped in for the NFL back in the early ’60s,” Tuberville said, referring to the 1966 AFL-NFL merger, which came after Congress allowed an antitrust exemption to combine television deals. “Basically, the AFL and the NFL went along with the federal government and [the latter] said, ‘You are a monopoly. We give you that opportunity. Get a TV contract with one or two TV providers and you can do it all together.’ This is why they make $300-$400 million dollars at the beginning of the year before they even play a football. Antitrust really helped the NFL.
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“So many of them want to do it in college. I’d rather do that at the end of the day in the future than have people buy college sports programs. You hear that now some of these schools are worth $200-$250 million and some of these billionaires come in and buy them and pretty much run everything. We don’t have to come in that way and that’s as much as we can keep amateur sports.”
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 football? Tuberville hopes that’s not the case, but if it were to happen, major programs could look to become a team like Notre Dame that operates 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 the push to join one over the years. They reached an agreement with the ACC to play 5-6 rotating games each season, but they remain out of the rest of the conference.
Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) arrives at a Senate Republican Caucus luncheon at the US 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 that higher-valued programs like the University of Texas, Ohio State and the University of Georgia won’t start racing to get prices for their network media rights?
So Tuberville would rather see the NFL model in college football, as would prominent Texas Tech billionaire booster Cody Campbell, who serves as the board chairman 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 television deals as a single group, citing self-commissioned research that showed the deal could be worth about $7 billion. In turn, that would help schools like Texas Tech and others not rely heavily on their high-profile boosters to compete with the economics of top programs, which can pay bigger NIL payouts to top talent coming out of high school and the transfer portal.
But a study commissioned by the SEC and the Big Ten found that allowing conferences to pool media rights would generate less revenue than if they were to continue the current structure in place now. In fact, this study found that the increasing rate of SEC, Big Ten, ACC and Big 12 media rights would eventually exceed the $7 billion projection over the next decade from Campbell’s report.
Responding to this report, Campbell opined that “those who first made the mess and profited handsomely from the status quo don’t want to fix it.”
U.S. Senator 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)
Meanwhile, SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey said in October 2025 that Campbell possesses a “fundamental misunderstanding of the realities of college athletics.”
While that is, and will remain, a big 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 for years to come.
