Overcoming Big Ten, SEC skepticism is first hurdle for super league proposals

Len Perna’s job is to embrace change.

Since 2020, four of the Power 5 conferences hired new commissioners and the NCAA appointed a new president. Perna played a behind-the-scenes role in the transitions as founder and CEO of TurnkeyZRG, one of the most prominent search firms in college sports.

Identifying and recruiting new candidates to those positions, on top of an ever-constant stream of administrative and coaching hires, meant interacting with a wide cross-section of university presidents, athletic directors and board members. Perna found many to be hyper-focused on the mounting legal challenges and big-picture changes hurtling toward college sports, wondering how an industry that had long been too slow or stubborn to adapt would navigate these tectonic shifts. So he started reaching out to fellow business leaders to brainstorm possible solutions.

Roughly a year later, the result is the College Student Football League (CSFL), a proposal announced this month by College Sports Tomorrow (CST) that would bring all 136 FBS programs under one umbrella, separated into upper and lower conferences and then split into geographical divisions.

Then last week, Yahoo Sports first reported on Project Rudy, a separate proposal that would fully break off the power conferences from the rest of college football. It’s backed by former Disney executives now working for Smash Capital, a venture capital and private equity firm.

Both proposals, which have been shorthanded as “super league” concepts, aim to remodel college football and maximize revenues in distinct ways, just as schools are bracing for the increased financial burden of the House settlement, including direct revenue sharing with athletes at north of $20 million a year per school.

The proposals also face an implausible future, so long as the sport’s two wealthiest and most powerful leagues stand in the way.

“I have yet to see a single thing in any plan that I’ve learned details about that contains things that we couldn’t do ourselves and do with other colleagues,” said Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti, seated next to SEC commissioner Greg Sankey at a historic meeting between the leagues in Nashville last week. “I don’t see anything that’s proprietary that anybody holds, that we would need, that someone else controls to do what they’re talking about.”

The public talking points discussed at the Big Ten-SEC meeting turned out to be rather tame — a potential football scheduling partnership, how to best approach the House settlement — but the unspoken parts had everyone else in college sports on edge. It was the most overt show of force the SEC and Big Ten have made from an off-field perspective, including Sankey’s and Petitti’s full-throated dismissals of the recent super league discussions.

“We have the responsibility to make decisions for our future,” said Sankey, who even attributed the timing of the CSFL and Project Rudy pitches entering the news cycle to the Big Ten/SEC meeting. “We’re going to focus on how we continue to lead and how we continue to improve. I think that’s the right focus, not to be distracted by these concepts from others.”

Both pitches are markedly different in terms of design and approach. According to a 14-page pitch deck on Project Rudy obtained by The Athletic, it preserves the current power-conference format but would no longer schedule games against Group of 5 or FCS opponents. Smash Capital would negotiate and own a percentage of future media rights agreements in exchange for facilitating up to $9 billion in investment. Project Rudy has yet to be officially unveiled and Smash Capital declined to comment on it.

The CSFL is a much broader and more ambitious reimagining of college football, but each has the same end goal: to schedule more marquee power conference matchups, and to make everyone more money.

“We believe, through the model we put together, there is opportunity to generate additional revenue for the benefit not just of college football, but the overall college sports ecosystem,” said Mark Abbott, the former president of Major League Soccer and another member of the CST leadership team. “The underlying core idea is to create something more compelling for all involved and of greater value for the media partners.”

Although Sankey and Petitti shot down these proposals, neither did so based on the substance of the concepts, but rather because they believe the SEC and Big Ten should have control over such decisions. Still, the message was clear: No thanks — and good luck getting anything done without us.

The skepticism from the SEC and Big Ten did not come as a surprise to those involved in the proposals, even after months and months of work. Among the many challenges that stand between turning these plans into a reality, changing the minds of Petitti and Sankey is at the front of the line. It’s also something both proposals genuinely believe is possible, despite the commissioners’ very public comments to the contrary.

“The model shows that all of the schools will benefit. Significantly,” Abbott said. “That’s why schools at the top would ultimately choose to do this.”

That includes programs at the top of the Big Ten and under the leadership of Petitti, a former television executive and COO of Major League Baseball who was appointed commissioner in 2023. But it’s Sankey who has become the elder statesman and leading voice of college football. He’s been at the helm of the SEC since 2015, the longest tenure of the power-conference commissioners. And even though it’s currently outpaced by the Big Ten’s latest television deal and annual distributions, the SEC is still considered the most formidable and successful football league. When Sankey puts his weight behind (or against) something in college sports, he tends to win out, a dynamic the super leagues will have to resolve.

“Greg Sankey is one of the smartest men in our profession. He understands college athletics as well as anyone. We need him at the table,” said Texas Tech athletic director Kirby Hocutt, who has also signed on as an ambassador for the CSFL, alongside a few other ADs and university presidents. “We need Commissioner Petitti at the table, (Big 12) Commissioner (Brett) Yormark, (ACC) Commissioner (Jim) Phillips. We need a teamwork approach. It’s no different than a Saturday afternoon.”

CST understands that finding a way to win over Sankey and Petitti is a wiser approach than trying to defeat or circumvent them, but that doesn’t mean the group is strictly appealing to their egos either. The CSFL pitch, while including all of FBS, is rooted in competitive balance, which the leaders stress is not the same as parity: 94 percent of the media rights revenue would go to the Power 12. By keying in on a handful of specific aspects — scheduling more marquee matchups and TV windows, pursuing a collective bargaining agreement, creating regulations around name, image and likeness (NIL) and transfers — CST believes it can nurture a more entertaining and valuable product. And proprietary or not, that’s something it does not believe the SEC or Big Ten is capable of replicating.

“Why is CST even involved in this? Can’t the Big Ten do this? Can’t the SEC do this?” Perna said in an interview with The Athletic. “The reality is, when you are focused on competitive balance, it’s hard to have one of the players in the ecosystem be responsible for it. So we don’t think it’s likely that the SEC or the Big Ten are going to drive the kind of increased competitive balance we believe is necessary to drive value and then support the costs in the system, reward the players, support the Olympic sports and all the rest of the stuff we want to do.”

The Project Rudy proposal leans even harder into marquee matchups and competitive balance by completely separating the power conferences from the rest of FBS, presenting a tiered, success-based revenue distribution model to incentivize the best teams and then guaranteeing revenue minimums on the opposite end of the spectrum. The top selling point, according to industry sources familiar with the Project Rudy pitch, seems to be those billions of dollars in investment, an amount far above what the SEC or Big Ten would be able to secure on their own, regardless of whether they link arms.

Both pitches also focus intently on the House settlement, in terms of generating more revenue to cover the upcoming financial burdens, but also by selling a unified front as the likeliest path to Congressional relief in the form of antitrust exemptions and possible collective bargaining approval. It’s one of the biggest reasons the CSFL created an all-encompassing model, and why a scenario in which the SEC and Big Ten attempt to either break away on their own or railroad other conferences could spark issues.

“Every time you exclude one of those 136 schools, you create a political opponent,” said Perna. “If you exclude 100 schools, you create such opposition politically that it becomes unrealistic to think anything can get done.”

At the same time, CST leadership doesn’t tout its model as gospel. Perna views having Project Rudy as a dueling concept as a good thing, and expressed a willingness to work with Smash Capital or anyone in the college sports landscape to find common ground and blaze the best trail forward. It’s the same thing they’re hoping Sankey and Petitti will do.

To illustrate this point, Abbott referenced Wellington Mara, late owner of the New York Giants, and how in the early 1960s, Mara agreed to a league-wide sharing of television revenue in the NFL. He chose to willingly spread the considerable wealth his Giants could earn in the world’s biggest media market to teams in cities like Green Bay and Pittsburgh.

“It turned out to be the linchpin of the entire NFL, and the Giants are more valuable today as a result of that,” Abbott said. “The history of sports tells us that the healthier the overall ecosystem is, the stronger and more valuable the teams at the top are.”

One major difference, of course, is that the Giants were just one team. The SEC and Big Ten are collections of 16 and 18 teams, respectively, and already share revenue internally — at a more lucrative rate than their fellow conferences. Even if the super leagues can promise them higher dollar figures, is that incentive enough for Sankey and Petitti to abandon a system that disproportionately benefits their leagues and constituents? For the sake of some communal and hypothetical greater good that helps their competition?

“The current model is broken. None of us feel great about it. Something has to change,” said Hocutt. “We need all the thought leaders and everybody to work together to protect college sports and everything it means to our country. We have to quit having conversations and discussions in silos and quit thinking about individual priorities.”

Whether one believes the system is broken or simply in need of a nice tune-up, massive change is coming to college sports, and it’s clear that many of the entities involved — including some in the SEC and Big Ten — are unsure of how to reckon with the financial demands of that fast-approaching future. It’s also clear that even with the House settlement, the NCAA’s time in the legal crosshairs won’t end anytime soon, and it will still need Congressional input on everything from antitrust exemptions to employment status to NIL.

The College Student Football League and Project Rudy proposals claim they can solve all of those issues and make everyone rich in the process. We’re still a long, long way from either being able to prove whether that’s the case: Even with broad support, neither could be fully implemented until the end of the current media rights agreements, all of which extend into the 2030s.

But before it can even get to that point, the super league models have to convince the SEC and Big Ten to give them a chance. And it’s tough to put a price tag on that level of influence.

(Photo of Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti (left) and SEC commissioner Greg Sankey (right): Kirby Lee / USA Today)