00:00Spence, let's go into this here with the Big Ten and the Southeastern Conference.
00:04In your opinion, would it be in the best interest of college sports for those teams or for those leagues
00:11to merge and be a super conference?
00:15Or do you think it would hurt the rest of college sports?
00:19Well, it definitely would.
00:21And when you say hurt the rest of college sports, obviously, when you have the revenue generating sports of football,
00:29and basketball essentially driving the ship, certainly those heretofore referred to as Olympic sports would feel that, no question about
00:37it.
00:38And that's the dirty little secret that we don't talk about nearly as much.
00:40It's not much of a secret, but those sports have been undergirded by the revenue that comes in from football
00:45and basketball, mainly football, disproportionately.
00:48So, yeah, it would impact those other sports.
00:51But you know what?
00:52You've got to decide who you are.
00:54And that's part of the problem.
00:56The NCAA wants its cake and they want to eat it, too.
00:59They want to be non-profit.
01:01They want to have this moral imperative.
01:03There was a time when I remember when they had an oath you used to take before you signed with
01:07a national letter of intent.
01:08All that stuff is fairytale, man.
01:10There is no material difference between how they function and how the NFL functions, right?
01:15And it gets closer and closer each year.
01:17And I think they need to just peel back the layer, like taking off a Band-Aid, and just say,
01:21look, this is who we are.
01:23And not be offended.
01:24I mean, we see it happening piecemeal with Utah, going private equity.
01:28That may be a bridge too far because they're a public institution.
01:31Once again, I come back to the presidents and chancellors.
01:33What a dumb move that is.
01:35How far do you think that that's going to last when you have private equity cutting as many people that
01:39they've cut from that program in terms of employees?
01:41And you're a public institution.
01:43You're taking government money.
01:45But yet you're managing one other aspect of your business unless you roll that totally off and said, hey, look,
01:50that is a for-profit enterprise, kind of like Michigan did its health facilities.
01:54It's hospital.
01:55And that's possible.
01:56But this is football.
01:57It's not hospital.
01:58Not an altruistic thing like medicine or something like that.
02:01It's different.
02:02We need to pull away the veneer, call football what it is.
02:06It's a revenue-generating sport with participants in it that should earn wages, commiserable with what their value is.
02:12It doesn't have to be NFL kind of money.
02:14No.
02:15But it has to be more than we've historically acknowledged it.
02:17And we're there now.
02:18It just can't have all this rancor attached to it, which you hear with people like Dabo Sweeney and Nick
02:24Saban of the Worlds.
02:25And that can exist.
02:27These guys are worthy of their hire.
02:28There's an old principle that says you don't muzzle the ox, man.
02:31And that's what they're still wanting to do.
02:34Here's my problem with the college football playoff.
02:37This is an ESPN event.
02:40And if you've got broadcast rights, Spence, and you've got broadcast obligations to, say, the ACC or the SEC,
02:48how are you not influenced by that when you've got shareholders and people that you've got to deal with
02:54when you're talking about picking teams for a 12-team tournament?
02:58I mean, shouldn't it be an outside source or entity that picks these teams?
03:04Because I don't know how you're not influenced by that.
03:08Yeah, you've got to be influenced.
03:09And this is not a value judgment.
03:10I'll say this real quickly.
03:11Look at what's happening in our old network at CBS on the network level.
03:15I mean, I don't need to say anything more than what's happening there with venerable institutions all of a sudden
03:20disappearing.
03:21That's not happening because someone's making financial decisions.
03:24That is politics at play, right?
03:25And whether you like it, you think it's justified or not, we know that politics are part of this whole
03:30situation.
03:31I think ultimately, if you're trying to expand to, say, 24 or something like that, you cannot do that with
03:36a straight face.
03:37Or you're looking purely at what is going to benefit you from on the football side.
03:41Yeah, the networks want all the inventory, but the bottom line is how those students are going to get even
03:46more time out of class and be away from situations where they need to be in school.
03:50You're crying, as Nick Saban is, about it used to be about education.
03:53Okay, you're going to expand to 24.
03:55You're going to take them out another additional two or three weeks out of school even more.
03:59So it's even less about education.
04:01So, again, every constituency has its value construct.
04:05What they need to do is come together.
04:06And I've actually written, and I'm going to send this to you, Partie, just to jog my memory here.
04:10I've written a Magna Carta, which basically tells all three entities what their role is in this new framework that
04:16we're in in college football.
04:17Nobody's talking to each other.
04:18No one really knows what it is.
04:20But I'll share it with you.
04:21Be more than happy to give it to you because it's basically a template for how to run the thing.
Comments