According to a report from On3’s Pete Nakos, Texas Tech Board of Regents Chairman Cody Campbell has been appointed co-chair of President Donald Trump’s newly formed commission on college sports, joining former Alabama head coach Nick Saban in leading the initiative.
In what is a major development for college athletics, the commission aims to address pressing issues such as Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) regulations, the transfer portal, and the evolving landscape of collegiate athletics.
Campbell, a former Texas Tech football player and co-founder of the Matador Club—an NIL collective supporting Red Raider athletes—brings firsthand experience to the commission. His recent $25 million donation to Texas Tech underscores his commitment to the university and its athletic programs. Campbell sold his company, Double Eagle, for $4.1 billion earlier this year and took over as the Red Raider Board Chair on April 14.
Over the past few years, we’ve seen college football morph into something that borders the professional model that the NFL implements—the only problem is there are any regulations in place to keep the integrity of the sport in place. As a result, the NIL and transfer portal have combined to form a Wild West-esque free agency market where tending to a roster is next to impossible.
President Trump’s commission hopes to provide standardized regulations in college sports, particularly regarding NIL deals and transfer players. Saban has been vocal about the need for reform, advocating for consistent guidelines to ensure fair competition, and has been to Capitol Hill to do his part in seeing that through. Campbell has echoed similar sentiments, emphasizing the importance of pooling media rights to enhance revenue distribution across conferences.
“College sports, unlike pro sports, does not have the right to pool its media rights together and act as a single seller to the media companies,” Campbell said last month on SiriusXM College Sports Radio. “Because of that, the conferences compete with one another for media deals. That dynamic has caused them to get less money per viewer than the pro sports do. The NBA has about half as many viewers as college football, but they get twice as much money than college football does, which is crazy. And it’s all because of this legal setup that we have. That needs to change. So everybody needs to come together, pool their media rights, and do a single, big media deal that will give college football more control and give college football more money. So expand the pie.
“And then, I think through that, you do some kind of more fair revenue-distribution system with respect to the media rights. Colleges, places like Alabama, like the University of Texas, like Oklahoma – who have big followings, who have big stadiums, who have big licensing deals – they’re still going to have a huge economic advantage. But a New Mexico or a Wyoming or a Toledo will still be able to sustain an athletic department under a system like that.”
While the issue of NIL and transfers is making the most headlines, the commission is expected to delve into other problem areas in college athletics, too, including but not limited to: the potential employment status of student-athletes, Title IX implications, and conference realignment.
“I think that we need to rethink the way that we organize our conferences,” Campbell said. “And again, because of the way that they have to do our media deals, these conferences are encouraged to have a school or schools in every single time zone because they want to have games at different times of the day.
“So we have these transcontinental conferences that make absolutely no sense. They cost too much money for travel, they’re too disruptive to the student-athletes, especially in the non-revenue sports again, and I think we need to reorganize and rethink just the way that we do college sports in general.”
Could Campbell and Saban finally provide college athletics a path back to an operation that relies on logic and tradition, rather than schools with the biggest athletic budgets pooling together to make the most money possible? It certainly feels like that could be in the cards, and while there’s no guarantee, it’s the most legitimate hope we’ve had for the future of college football in quite some time.
