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Could the NFL’s current media rights model, which can add even more players with a new deal expected sometime this year, make its way into college sports?
As both agreements currently stand, the NFL has a unified structure, where it divides revenue evenly among its 32 teams. Meanwhile, college football is fragmented, with conferences like the SEC and Big Ten getting more lucrative deals compared to others due to the popularity of their teams and larger budgets.
There has been debate about unifying the conferences to negotiate a single television rights deal, but while some are in favor of doling out money and helping each school be competitive against powerhouse programs, others see it as a complicated problem with no 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)
Appearing on OutKick’s “Hot Mic,” Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Alabama, was asked his thoughts on the NFL’s potential trouble as it seeks to renegotiate its media rights, where streaming platforms could make fans pay more to consume the sport.
Tuberville explained why he would prefer that to a different future as some in college sports have suggested.
“The antitrust laws kicked in for the NFL in the early ’60s,” Tuberville said, referring to the 1966 AFL-NFL merger, which came after Congress allowed an antitrust exemption for combining television deals. “Basically, the AFL and the NFL got together with the federal government and [the latter] He said, ‘You’re a monopoly.’ We will give you that opportunity. Get a TV deal with one or two TV providers and you can all do it together. That’s why they’re making $300 to $400 million at the beginning of the year, even before breaking a soccer ball. Antitrust laws really helped the NFL.
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“So, a lot of them want to do that in college. I’d rather do it at the end of the day in the future than have people buy college sports programs. You’re hearing that now, some of these schools are worth $200 to $250 million and some of these billionaires come and buy them and basically run everything. We don’t need to get into that. These are amateur sports, and let’s keep it up as long as we can.”
Could high-profile boosters with billions in net worth, or private equity firms, gain media rights in the future of college sports, especially football? Tuberville hopes that isn’t the case, but if it were to happen, big-name programs could become a team like Notre Dame, which acts 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 pressure to join one over the years. They reached an agreement with the ACC to play 5 or 6 rotating games each season, but remain outside the rest of the conference.
Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) arrives at a Senate Republican Caucus luncheon at the United States Capitol in Washington, DC on April 2, 2025. (Nathan Posner/Anadolu via Getty Images)
If billionaires came and bought the rights to college programs, and basically ran everything to the point of Tuberville, what’s to say that higher-value programs like the University of Texas, Ohio State, and the University of Georgia wouldn’t start raising their asking prices for their network media rights?
Therefore, Tuberville would prefer to see the NFL model in college football, as would prominent Texas Tech billionaire booster Cody Campbell, who serves as head of the university’s board of trustees, or regents.
Campbell has pushed 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, it 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 the SEC and the Big Ten commissioned a study that found allowing conferences to bundle media rights would generate less revenue than if they continued with the current structure. In fact, this study showed that the growing rate of media rights from the SEC, Big Ten, ACC and Big 12 would eventually exceed the Campbell report’s $7 billion projection over the next decade.
Campbell responded to this report, believing that “those who first created the mess and profited handsomely from the status quo do not 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)
At the same time, SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey said in October 2025 that Campbell possesses a “fundamental misunderstanding of the realities of college athletics.”
While it is, and will continue to be, an important debate in the ever-evolving universe that is college sports, Tuberville would rather see the NFL model adopted than have independent programs running rampant for years to come.
