Just two days ago, the largely bipartisan Protect College Sports Act passed through the Senate en route to the House floor. A new report by Ross Dellenger on Thursday suggests the cost of a potential ACC collapse is too much to pay for the legislation.
One of the most debated topics of the bill is conference realignment, which, along with the streamlined NIL standard, increased revenue sharing, and harder restrictions on transfers and eligibility, has the largest effect on the college sports landscape. It’s like Battleship: you move enough pieces around, and a boat or two are likely to set off a chain reaction devastating the fleet.
It appears the House is reluctant to pass a bill that’d allow schools from the ACC, or any conference, to move conferences freely with little scrutiny or punishment. As it stands, the current proposed bill, as passed by the Senate, would require any school that jumps from one Power Conference to another to compete independently for three academic years as a sort of leveling period.
It’s good in theory, but ultimately a university would surely protest the three-year gap because it’d hurt recruiting, competition, and, for public schools, a diminished investment of state dollars that’d normally support a Power Conference athletics department. This change arrived Monday evening before the bill advanced through the Senate, negating previous revenue and size caps that deterred a superconference or megaconference from forming with the intent of creating a monopoly.
The main question here is what role the NCAA can play in adapting to the Protect College Sports Act, considering just how we’ve seen examples of Power Four schools – Brendan Sorsby and Texas Tech being a prominent example – fight and lose in the public square just as Lane Kiffin did with his pursuit of NFL players at LSU.
The bill allows for third-party mediation, but we’re talking about massive institutions across the SEC, Big Ten, Big 12 and ACC – all with the resources to at least challenge some of these rules and bend a new framework that’ll soon become old.
Can the ACC do enough to keep its marquee members – Florida State, Virginia Tech, Miami, North Carolina, etc. – from leaving for greener pastures? Or will this legislation only delay the collapse of yet another beloved conference?
