Fox, ABC decline to run ad accusing Power Four commissioners of being greedy

Billionaire Texas Tech booster Cody Campbell has been running ads aimed at saving college sports! A couple of major networks have declined to take his money in exchange for broadcasting his latest commercial.

Via Amanda Christovich of FrontOfficeSports.com, Campbell claims Fox and ABC refused to televise a spot that criticizes the Power Four commissioners of greed.

Campbell wants to replace the NCAA with a new governing body. He also wants Congress to amend the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961, giving college football the ability to sell TV rights collectively, like the NFL does. He contends that the extra revenue from that approach could help fund women’s sports and Olympic sports.

“To conference commissioners, it’s all about money and control,” Campbell says in the new commercial. “Their greed is bankrupting all but the biggest schools — and women’s sports and Olympic programs everywhere are paying the price.”

That’s a clear pivot from his prior (and misleading) claim that “UNIVERSITIES BLEED RED INK IN THEIR ATHLETICS BUDGET.” That graphic from the original commercial cited a Forbes article with a headline indicating that “Several Big Ten Universities Bleed Red Ink In Their Athletics Budgets.” The story itself listed only four of 18 Big Ten schools as operating at a deficit.

So the message has gone from “no one is making money!” to “the ones who are making money don’t want to make less!”

The problem with Campbell’s proposal is simple. A larger national pie likely would reduce the net slice the major conferences currently get by doing their own deals. At the NFL level, the most popular teams (like the Cowboys) sacrifice the added revenue they would earn by selling their own rights and instead share equally with the less desirable teams.

So it’s not about the major conferences trying to get more. It’s about the major conferences keeping what they currently have.

Christovich reports that ESPN had asked Campbell for “more supporting documentation” regarding the commercial, and that it wasn’t supplied in a timely manner. Campbell claims that the “General Council [sic]” for one network claimed that it was a “business decision.”

It probably was. Fox and ABC currently do extensive business with the Power Four conferences. Fox and ABC surely don’t want to shift to a system in which they pay even more for the games that generate the biggest audiences, and the games that don’t.

The debate will continue as various universities try to undo the chaos that years of exploiting the players has created. And they’ll keep trying to sell doom-and-gloom scenarios in order to avoid the right outcome (a national union of college football players), even as the TV ratings keep going up and up.