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, extend into college sports?

With both deals currently in place, the NFL has a unified structure that splits revenue evenly among the 32 teams. Meanwhile, college football is fragmented; Conferences like the SEC and Big Ten see more lucrative deals than others due to the popularity of their teams and larger budgets.

There have been discussions about merging the conferences to negotiate a single TV rights deal, but some think this is to spread the money and help each school compete against powerful programs, while others see it as a complex problem with no simple solution.

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make an appearance on OutKick’s “Hot Mic” Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., was asked about his thoughts on the potential issue of the NFL seeking to renegotiate media rights for streaming platforms that could cause fans to pay more to consume sports.

Tuberville explained why he chose this over a different future suggested by some in college sports.

“In the early ’60s, antitrust came into play for the NFL,” Tuberville said, referring to the 1966 AFL-NFL merger, which came after Congress allowed an antitrust exemption to combine TV deals. “Basically the AFL and the NFL got together with the federal government and [the latter] ‘You are a monopoly,’ he said. We will give you this opportunity. ‘Go and get a TV contract with one or two TV providers, you can do them all together.’ That’s why, at the beginning of the year, they earn 300-400 million dollars before they even explode a football. Antitrust has really helped the NFL.

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“So a lot of them want to do it in college. I’d rather do that at the end of the day than have people buy up college sports programs in the future. Right now you hear about some of these schools being worth $200-$250 million and some of these billionaires coming in and buying them and basically running the whole thing. We don’t need to get into that. This is amateur sports and let’s keep it that way as much as possible.”

Could high-profile promoters or private equity firms with multi-billion-dollar net worth seize media rights in the future of college sports, especially football? Tuberville hopes that’s not the case, but if it were to happen, the big-name programs could evolve into a franchise like Notre Dame, an independently-owned team that is negotiating its own media rights with NBC through the 2029 season.

But Notre Dame is not part of a conference, despite pressure to join over the years. They reached an agreement with the ACC to play 5-6 games on a rotating basis each season, but were left out of the rest of the conference.

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

What if billionaires came in and bought the rights to college programs and ran things the way Tuberville wanted, that higher-value programs like the University of Texas, Ohio State, and the University of Georgia wouldn’t start asking for media rights on the networks?

So Tuberville prefers to see the NFL model in college football, and so does Cody Campbell, a prominent Texas Tech billionaire backer who serves as chairman of the university’s board of governors or his nominee.

Campbell lobbied Congress to amend the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961, called the SAFE Act, to allow college sports to band together and negotiate TV deals as a single group, citing self-commissioned research that showed the deal could be worth nearly $7 billion. In turn, it would help schools like Texas Tech and others not be overly reliant on high-profile backers to compete with the funding of top programs that can afford larger NIL payouts 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 that allowing conferences to pool media rights would generate less revenue than continuing the current structure now. In fact, that study showed that the growing share of SEC, Big Ten, ACC and Big 12 media rights will eventually exceed the $7 billion projection over the next decade in Campbell’s report.

Campbell responded to this report and believed 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 in Washington, D.C., on February 10, 2026 (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

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

While it is and will remain a huge debate in the ever-evolving universe of college sports, Tuberville favors adopting the NFL model over independent programs being widely run in the coming years.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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