What if Paul and Brandon were in charge of the NCAA?  

The NCAA oversees collegiate sports, organizing championships, and setting rules for over 1,100 schools, across three divisions. But what if Knox Sport's, Paul Sickmon and University of Tennesee's Brandon Parks were in charge of the NCAA?  It might look like making some changes to TV rights, relegation, and conference realignment.

TV Rights

The first category the pair wants to make changes to is TV rights. Currently, the conferences within the NCAA negotiate separate TV deals. With each conference doing its own deal and essentially fighting each other for money, there is limited earning potential. According to Sickmon, when compared to the NFL, college football gets less than half the money in TV rights with four times as many properties. Because the NFL’s 32 teams negotiate as one entity, it gets $10 billion annually from TV rights.  

In the world of TV and streaming consumption, sports still reign supreme, and the NFL is a glowing example of that. Sickmon and Parks believe that if the NCAA followed the path of the NFL, there would be more financial benefits. Working together as one entity, college football viewership could be double the size of the NFL and they ultimately could have double the money.

“If you ran the NCAA, and you calculated the number of viewers from week to week across all games, looked at the total viewership data across all games, and compared that to an NFL weekend. The viewership data from college football week might be similar to the total viewers of an NFL weekend,” Parks said.

 

Relegation

The idea of relegation in college football is also something the two have ideas to improve on. Sickmon wants to take the 60 football teams in the NCAA and divide them into two divisions. 30 teams would be in the upper division and 30 teams in the lower division. The teams in the upper division are those that will have the chance to play in the playoffs, while the teams in the lower division are playing for a shot to be moved into the upper division. At the end of the season, the four teams at the bottom of the upper division will drop down, while the top four teams in the lower division will move up.

This is a performance-based system similar to that of soccer. With this system, there is always an incentive for college sports to grow nationwide. It would keep competition throughout the season. Positive results in this could be assumed, as higher competition could drive higher viewership and higher TV rights revenue.

Conference Realignment

The conversation of conference realignment would help protect and emphasize the “student” in student-athletes. As a college athlete, it is important to be able to balance both academic and athletic responsibilities. It is beneficial to reinforce the importance of education, regardless if an athlete decides to go professional afterward. 

Sickmon and Paul discuss letting football break away from conferences, allowing the Olympic sports to be played more regionally. When you think about football, it is one of the only sports that plays once a week. Most other sports such as volleyball, basketball, and baseball, require mid-week games with cross-country travel. The Big Ten for example, now spans across multiple different regions making it a concern of how to preserve the importance of education for those athletes.

“College-based athletes are so much different than a professional sports team where the focus is 100 percent based on their profession, which is their sports activity. It is an apples-to-oranges comparison because the importance of student in student athletes makes it a challenge when thinking about how you’re going to navigate their future let alone how they’re going to navigate their sports schedule for the next 3 months,” Parks says. 

 

Unlike professional athletes, college athletes must maintain their academic responsibilities. However, the significantly long travel schedules for these students make it especially hard. By implementing the change of conference realignment, students can focus on attending class and learning how to better navigate their future with or without sports. 

Those are just a few areas that the pair would seek improvements. But, we are curious as to what YOU would change if you ran the NCAA?

 

Want to learn more about our thoughts on NCAA changes, listen to our latest episode of Knox Talk!