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The billionaire Texas Tech booster Cody Campbell has been one of the most prolific advertisers on college football Saturdays this season: All of the major networks have been running his ads calling for major overhauls to college sports. But this past weekend, Campbell’s spots were nowhere to be seen. On Saturday, he took to X to say that Fox and ABC refused to run his ad this week, which is partially true, according to my sources. After all, the ads he submitted included swipes at conference commissioners. “Their greed is bankrupting all but the biggest schools,” he said in the commercial.
Understandably, the networks had no interest in running a commercial bashing their business partners in such personal terms, so they told Campbell to revise and tone down the language. We’ll see whether the edited version makes it into upcoming broadcasts. Regardless, the micro-drama captures the oilman’s role as an agitator with deep pockets, unafraid to push for significant changes in the college sports business and unconcerned with whomever he upsets. When Campbell talks about his plans, he uses rhetoric more commonly associated with political campaigns, complete with intensive lobbying and huge ad buys.
Above all, Campbell wants to amend the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 to allow college conferences to pool their rights, and potentially work out more lucrative media deals. But Campbell has a hard road ahead of him. His detractors are among the most powerful people in sports—conference commissioners, athletic directors, media executives, to name a few. They dismiss Campbell’s ideas as naive, and believe the billionaire’s ultimate goal is to help his alma mater, Texas Tech, more than college sports in general. Campbell addressed these criticisms and more on a recent episode of The Varsity. What follows is a Q&A, lightly edited for clarity.
The Flutie Effect
John Ourand: You talk about athletic departments losing money—and they obviously do—but some people want to reframe that as a marketing expense. When I was a junior in high school, for example, Doug Flutie was a senior at Boston College. In the span of one year, BC became an impossible school to get into because so many people applied.
Cody Campbell: What you’re talking about is well studied and documented. It’s called the Flutie effect. Another great example is that, from the time that the University of Alabama hired Nick Saban until he retired, their enrollment increased by a ton. There’s a marketing element that brings a lot of value to the school in terms of enrollment, but also the value of the degree. There’s benefit to alumni engagement. As people say in higher ed, it’s the front porch of the university. I’m chairman of the board at Texas Tech, and we see this firsthand.
However, there’s no reason for the schools to have to put money into the athletic departments. One solution is to just modernize media rights. The Sports Broadcasting Act is 65 years old. A lot has changed within media in the last 65 years, and if you fix that problem, there’s no need for academic funds to be diverted. Something’s just not right about tuition money going to pay for athletics.
It’s going to be hard to change that thinking.
The conferences receive the media rights distributions from NBC, CBS, ESPN, Fox, whatever. They pay for their conference expenses, and then they divide out the remainder and send it to their constituent institutions. And then those institutions have to deal with the budget problems that they have. It really creates this scenario where the people who are sensibly running the business at the top end don’t have any idea of what’s going on at the bottom line. And that’s crazy. No business would run like that in a normal sense.
The $7B Question
I’m having trouble with your idea about opening up the Sports Broadcasting Act. If you pull all the rights together, you’ll certainly get more money. But the realities of the media business today is that networks are cutting costs. If you think there’s an extra $7 billion out there, I have trouble finding it.
College athletics severely under-monetizes itself. Beyond football and basketball, we have all these other sports that people are interested in, like volleyball, women’s basketball, baseball, softball. People want to watch these sports. But when the schools sign over their media rights, they sign over the rights to every sport. So if a network chooses to not platform women’s basketball, for example, there’s no opportunity for that sport to grow fandom or viewership.
The NFL dictates exactly which games are broadcast on which networks at what time. We could do the exact same thing with our women’s sports and Olympic sports, and actually grow those into sports that make money if we had more control over how things are broadcast. I’m not so sure that the media companies are going to be opposed to this. What they want is more live content.
In the near term, you may have some pushback, but long term, the best thing for the media companies, and college sports, is for there to be better coordination and pooling of rights in college. If we don’t do something today, you’re going to see this erosion of college sports over time, especially if there’s no promise of more funding to come because the schools just flat out can’t afford it.
Your detractors question your motives. They believe that you’re out for Texas Tech more than the overall college sports business.
Here’s the deal. Texas Tech is going to be just fine. If everything burns down, Texas Tech’s fortunate enough to be sitting on top of the world’s largest oil field. We have great boosters. The state of Texas is very healthy. The school itself is very financially healthy. So Tech is fine.
The reason I’m doing it is because I care about the opportunity across the country. I’ve learned so much through being the board chair at Tech. I’ve learned so much through the work that I’ve done in our N.I.L. collective. I’ve seen the things that have happened over the last four and a half years. I understand the problems, I understand the legal issues, the practical issues, the commercial issues at a very deep level. I’ve felt like I’ve had a lot of success in business, and want to find ways I can give back. This is an area that I deeply understand and know that I can help fix.
