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Could the NFL’s current media rights model, which could add more players with a new deal expected sometime this year, apply to college sports?
As both deals stand now, the NFL has a unified structure, where it splits the money evenly among its 32 teams. Meanwhile, college football is divided, with conferences like the SEC and Big Ten seeing more lucrative deals than others due to the popularity of their teams and bigger budgets.
There has been debate about bringing the conferences together to negotiate a single television rights deal, but while some want to spread the money and help all schools compete with powerhouse programs, others see it as a complex problem without an easy 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 Jan. 19, 2026 in Miami Gardens, Florida. (Mark J. Rebilas/Imagn Images)
Making an appearance on OutKick’s “Hot Mic,” Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., was asked his thoughts on the NFL’s potential crisis as it looks to renegotiate its media rights, where streaming platforms can make fans pay more to watch the game.
Tuberville explained why he would prefer that to a different future suggested by others 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 antitrust exemptions to include TV deals. “Basically, the AFL and the NFL are meeting with the federal government again [the latter] he said, ‘You are a monopoly. We will give you that opportunity. Go get yourself a TV contract with one or two TV providers, and you can do it all together.’ That’s why they make $300-$400 million at the beginning of the year before they hit the ball. The dishonesty really helped the NFL.
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“So, a lot of them want to do that in college. I’d rather do that at the end of the day in the future than people buying college sports programs. You hear that now, some of these schools are worth $200-$250 billion and some of these billions come in and buy them and basically run everything. We don’t need to get into that. This is a way that we can keep amateur sports, and let’s keep it that way.”
Could high-end boosters worth billions, or private equity firms, acquire media rights in the future of college sports, especially football? Tuberville hopes that’s not the case, but if it does, big-name programs could look to teams like Notre Dame, which operates as an independent team that has negotiated its media rights with NBC for the 2029 season.
But Notre Dame is not part of a conference despite pressure to join one over the years. They reached an agreement with the ACC to play 5-6 alternating games each season, but remained out of the conference.
Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) arrives at the 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 basically run everything to Tuberville’s point, why wouldn’t the most important programs, like the University of Texas, Ohio State and the University of Georgia, start asking prices for their media rights through the networks?
Therefore, Tuberville would like to see the NFL model in college football, as well as prominent Texas Tech billionaire Cody Campbell, who serves as the head of the university’s board or regents.
Campbell has lobbied Congress to amend the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961, called the SAFE Act, to allow college sports to come together and negotiate TV deals as a single group, citing independent research that shows the deal could cost about $7 billion. In turn, it would help schools like Texas Tech and others not rely too heavily on their top boosters to compete for top program funds, which would result in large NIL payments to top talent coming out of high school and the transfer portal.
But the study was commissioned by the SEC and the Big Ten, which found that allowing conferences to pool media rights would generate less revenue if they continued with the current structure. In fact, this study showed that the growing level of SEC, Big Ten, ACC and Big 12 media rights will eventually exceed the projection of 7 billion dollars in the next ten years from Campbell’s report.
Campbell responded to the report, believing that “those who first did the damage and profited handsomely from the existing situation do not want to fix it.”
Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) speaks to reporters as he returns to his office at the US Capitol on February 10, 2026 in Washington, DC. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
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Meanwhile, SEC commissioner Greg Sankey said in October 2025 that Campbell “has a misunderstanding of the reality of college sports.”
While it’s a big debate in the ever-changing landscape that is college sports, Tuberville would like to see the adoption of the NFL model rather than independent programs going on for years.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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