Tuberville warns against billionaires buying college sports programs

Could the NFL’s current media rights model, which could add even more players with a new deal expected at some point this year, make its way into college sports?

As the two agreements currently stand, the NFL has a unified structure, in which it distributes revenue equally among its 32 teams. Meanwhile, college football is fragmented, with conferences such as the SEC and Big Ten enjoying more lucrative deals than others due to the popularity of their teams and larger budgets.

There has been some debate over the possibility of unifying the conferences to negotiate a single television rights deal, but while some favor doing so to disperse the money and help each school be competitive against flagship programs, others see it as a complex problem with no simple solution.

CLICK HERE FOR MORE SPORTS COVERAGE ON PK Press Club

Making an appearance on OutKick’s “Hot Mic,” Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., was asked for his thoughts on the NFL’s potential problem as it seeks to renegotiate its media rights, where streaming platforms could force fans to pay more to consume sports.

Tuberville explained why he preferred that over a different future suggested by some in college sports.

“Antitrust came into the NFL in the early ’60s,” Tuberville said, referring to the 1966 AFL-NFL merger, which came after Congress allowed an antitrust exemption to consolidate TV deals. “Basically the AFL and NFL got together with the federal government and [the latter] said: “You are a monopoly. We will give you this opportunity. Get a TV contract with one or two TV providers, and you can do it all together. This is the reason they make $300-$400 million at the start of the year before they even play football. Antitrust has really helped the NFL.

BROADCAST TIM BRANDO Suggests sports fans consider where to watch games as streaming takes over.

“So a lot of them want to do that in college. I would ultimately rather do that in the future than have people buy college sports programs. You hear that now some of these schools are worth $200 million to $250 million and some of these billionaires come in and buy them and run everything. We don’t need to get into that. It’s amateur sports, and let’s keep that as much as possible.”

Could high-profile promoters with billions in net worth, or private equity firms, get their hands on media rights in the future of college sports, particularly football? Tuberville hopes that’s not the case, but if that were to happen, big-name programs could look to become a team like Notre Dame, which operates as an independent and has 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 have an agreement with the ACC to play 5-6 games on a rotational basis each season, but they remain apart of the rest of the conference.

Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) arrives for a Senate Republican Caucus luncheon at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, DC, April 2, 2025. (Nathan Posner/Anadolu via Getty Images)

If billionaires came in and bought the rights to college programs and basically ran everything like Tuberville, what’s to say that the more valuable programs, like the University of Texas, Ohio State and the University of Georgia, wouldn’t start jacking up the asking prices for their media rights with the networks?

So, Tuberville would prefer to see the NFL model in college football, just like famous Texas Tech billionaire Cody Campbell, who serves as head of the university’s board of trustees or regent.

Campbell 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 finances of top programs, which can shell out larger NIL payments to top talent coming out of high school and the transfer portal.

But a study was commissioned by the SEC and Big Ten that found allowing conferences to pool media rights would generate less revenue than if they kept the current structure in place. In fact, that study showed that the growing rate of media rights from the SEC, Big Ten, ACC and Big 12 would eventually exceed the $7 billion projected over the next decade according to Campbell’s report.

Campbell responded to this report, saying that “those who were the first to create damage and profit greatly from the status quo do not want to do anything about 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)

At the same time, SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey said in October 2025 that Campbell possessed a “fundamental misunderstanding of the realities of college athletics.”

While it is and will continue to be a major debate in the ever-changing world of college sports, Tuberville would rather see the NFL model adopted than see independent programs run rampant for years.