If you watched college football this weekend, you may have seen a political commercial that sent a message as strong and slick as it was vague and confusing.
Cody Campbell, a billionaire businessman and Texas Tech booster, has put together a group that calls itself “Saving College Sports.” Here’s the pitch, from the YouTube version of the ad that currently has (as of this posting) 378 views.
“It’s football season,” Campbell says, “and no matter who you cheer for, we all agree how much college sports mean to us. But it’s at risk. Dramatic changes are causing nearly every athletic department in America to operate in the red, forcing cuts, putting women’s sports and Olympic dreams in immediate danger. The solution? Congress must modernize the Sports Broadcasting Act. That single change will generate the funding needed to protect all sports and all schools. Let’s save college sports before the clock runs out.”
The commercial makes no mention of how the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 should be modernized. There’s no explanation, in the commercial or on the group’s website, as to how “modernizing” the SBA will magically solve a problem that is being exaggerated into a CRISIS!
Based on an interview Campbell recently did with Amanda Christovich of FrontOfficeSports.com, it seems as if the goal will be to extend the SBA to the NCAA, which lost the ability in 1984 to control the broadcast rights for college football games. (Not long after that, far more college football games became available for consumers to watch on TV. So how would returning to the pre-1984 model be a good thing for fans?)
Of course, any mention of revising the SBA will cause frayed nerves for the NFL. Especially since the executive director of Saving College Sports is David Polyansky, a former chief of staff for Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas). Cruz and other Republican politicians are currently sniffing around the SBA, with the not-so-subtle threat of potentially stripping the NFL and other pro sports leagues of their 64-year-old ability to sell TV rights collectively, not individually.
Still, details regarding the group’s objectives remain elusive. One thing is clear — Campbell has close ties to the current administration, which seems to be trying to turn the clock back to the days when the players weren’t getting paid nearly as much as they’re currently making.
Campbell’s group obviously won’t be advertising the idea that players make too much, and that in order to “save college sports” they should be making less.
No, it’ll be about an existential threat to all college sports. One that may or may not even exist. For instance, when Campbell says in the commercial that “dramatic changes are causing nearly every athletic department in America to operate in the red,” the following graphic pops onto the screen: “UNIVERSITIES BLEED RED INK IN THEIR ATHLETICS BUDGET,” with a citation to a Forbes article from January 28, 2025.
The headline to the article in question contains one key extra word, however: “Several Big Ten Universities Bleed Red Ink In Their Athletics Budgets.” And of the 18 members of the Big Ten, the Forbes article mentions (drum roll, please) only four of them that are operating at a deficit.
Don’t fall for any of it. Budgets are under pressure because players finally are getting their fair share. Schools that used to be able to collect 100 percent of the cash from boosters now have to share the wealth with the NIL collectives that help pay the players. The schools now have it harder because the players are getting paid. The schools prefer to make things easier by getting Congress to give them what they want.
But it’s not for Congress or the president or anyone else in the government to clean up the mess. The entire problem arises from the chaos caused by the NCAA’s long overdue antitrust reckoning. The universities illegally combined under the umbrella of the NCAA to fix labor prices, for decades.
“We’d love to pay you, Joe, but the NCAA says we can’t.”
It’s up to the NCAA and the universities to fix this themselves. Of course, they don’t want to fix it by, for example, doing the right thing and welcoming a nationwide union that would protect the players. No, folks like Campbell hope to claw back the players’ gains, in a political arena where they have no voice, no rights, and no hope for pulling the levers of government in a way that will keep them from losing what they have secured — the ability to be paid what the market will bear.
It’s wholly un-American to keep people from making as much money as they can. No one has ever artificially capped Cody Campbell’s income. When he sold one of his companies earlier this year for $4 billion earlier this year, nobody said, “Cody, don’t you think that’s a little too much?”
So don’t let Campbell’s smiling face in the commercial fool you. Or the fact that he once played college football. The overriding goal is to shift the dollars from the players back to the schools, without a fair fight. And it’ll all be done with the broad, vague threat that college sports will completely disappear if action isn’t taken.
Like so many political pitches made by both sides of the aisle, Campbell’s message contains far more bullshit than substance. And his group hoping to frame the issue as a 90-10 political issue when the truth is they’d love to take away 90 percent of what the players now make.
