News Article: SEC / BIG10 talking about a scheduling partnership

[BamaNation]

to sum it up: Move over wannabe's and let the big dogs eat.

The discussion is to take place at an in-person meeting in Nashville, Tennessee, next week, multiple sources from both conferences told ESPN on Monday.
...
Some have also expressed interest in limiting the role of the 13-member selection committee -- or eliminating it entirely.

"I think anything we can do to take the subjectivity of a committee off the table is really helpful," the SEC source said. ...

Sources: Big Ten, SEC eye schedule partnership

SEC and Big Ten athletic directors will meet next week to discuss a possible partnership in football scheduling and preferences for automatic bids, sources told ESPN.

www.espn.com

 

[4Q Basket Case]

I’ve said this elsewhere. I’ll say it once more and then shut up.

This is the first step toward the SEC and BIG breaking away from the NCAA. That’s 34 teams, and the ones not in either don’t amount to much.

Without those specific teams, the NCAA will collapse. So they’ll do it the way the SEC and BIG want, or they’ll cease to exist.…at least in the current form.

I originally said the timeline was 5 years. I now think no more than two.

The central issue is not pay-for-play, a/k/a NIL. It’s essentially unrestricted free agency. The only way I see to fix that, and have the solution be uniform across 50 states, and have the solution stand up in court, is to have a labor union negotiating with management.

By the 2026 season, I predict the SEC and the BIG will head a collegiate football organization. A committee of affiliated college presidents will be negotiating with a collegiate analogue to the NFLPA, and we’ll have some sanity back in the game.

Plus, as a union / management agreement, it carries the regulatory heft of the NLRB. Which very definitely does have subpoena power and godamighty penalties for non-compliance.

I wish we could go back to the days of 105 scholarships and $100 handshakes. They’re dead as a Stegosaurus. Given the realistic choices we have today, I’ll take the above structure over today’s anarchy.

 

[JDCrimson]

I think you can do it with mutual contract without collective bargaining where the school gets exclusive rights to the player's NIL. There could be negotiated liquidated damages for breaking the contract for convenience as well as arbitration, etc. Tampering could be address as well.

 

[BamaNation]

One major problem to begin with was that pointy headed academics at minor schools - who realistically cared nothing about big time athletics - were given bigtime committees to head at the NCAA back in the day. They ran them like a politburo committee meeting with unchecked power preventing the payment / subsidizing of players under the guise of amateurism.

I'm assuming that ridiculous structure will no longer be tolerated by SEC / Big10 (& possibly ACC/Big12 to follow) who are generating huge % of the revenue in collegiate athletics. The PAC12 is being turned down by Sun Belt and WAC teams. They will be a non-player in this.