The SEC and Big Ten bullied the rest of the sport all the way to this

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I’ve made no real secret of the fact that in spite of the fact that the school I root for plays in the SEC, I hate what the conference has become. It’s a 16-team morass of some of the biggest brands in the sport, whose every move seems to be dictated by cash grabs, whether it’s adding Texas and Oklahoma or going to a nine-game schedule or getting rid of SoCon Saturday or getting rid of divisions all so that we sacrifice playing Kentucky every year because we’ve gotta play freaking Texas A&M more often. And unlike some of my SB Nation SEC brethren who have responded to college football being all about money by complaining that college football doesn’t go all out in the name of protecting the biggest brands, I don’t give a shit about the money involved because I see literally none of said money and never will. Okay, okay, SB Nation does give me a small stipend so that you have to sit here and listen to me rant.

The Big Ten is that, but on steroids. But what I especially hate is the way they’ve attempted to chop up the rest of college sports for their own gain. What started as simple on-field success became megadeals with ESPN (SEC) and Fox/NBC/CBS (Big Ten) that begat picking off the spare parts of other conferences, whether it was Texas and Oklahoma begging to get out of the Big 12 because Oklahoma wanted to play Nebraska at night or the Big Ten circling the carcass of the Pac-12 like a vulture to force Oregon and Washington to accept reduced revenue shares and kick their in-state rivals to the Mountain West under a different name. It began with Tony Vitello flying to Lawrence, Kansas, to have dinner with Maui Ahuna and getting slapped on the wrist by a toothless NCAA and it ended with Pete Golding literally texting a Clemson linebacker while he was sitting in class at Clemson University to offer him more money. It started with four SEC teams being in the top six of the first ever College Football Playoff rankings back in 2014 and it ended with the SEC whining that Texas got left out of the 12-team playoff because playoff rules said that James Madison got in as the fifth-best conference champion.

When that’s what you’ve done over the last decade or so, this is what you get.

This is the big bully getting the rochambeau that everyone else has long hoped that they would get.

Of course the SEC and Big Ten aren’t getting the bill that they want passed, because literally theentire fucking point of Congress passing a law on college sports in 2026 is to kick the SEC and the Big Ten in the nuts, because in different ways these are the people responsible for destroying the sport we love, the people who saw the Alston, O’Bannon, and House rulings and promptly began using them as meat shields to justify further action to destroy the sport in the name of money because we had to pay the players, never mind the amount of money they’ve been throwing at having Hogwarts athletic facilities and ten million athletic department staffers (many of whom are also losing their jobs as a result of having to pay the players, but that’s neither here nor there), and now in spite of the billions of dollars flowing into their coffers from television deals that made it necessary to bloat themselves to massive memberships, crying poverty when it comes time to fund nonrevenue sports that bring in actual student-athletes.

That kind of behavior is how you get this, from the bill’s co-sponsor who represents Washington — which contains a Big Ten school, somehow, but also inarguably the most screwed school in all of this:

U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), one of the bill’s sponsors, said after the bill was advanced, “I know my colleagues have concerns about the SEC and Big Ten, but what we did today is say we are not going to let the most powerful and richest conferences dictate to the rest of America what’s going to happen to 500,000 athletes”

While the SEC and Big Ten have gotten increasingly louder about threats to break away and do their own thing (which, as I’ve pointed out, suffers from the LIV Golf fallacy of assuming that people watching the biggest brands will continue to do so when there’s no on-field marker indicating that these are, in fact, the best out there), it seems the Protect College Sports Act wants to increase the opportunity cost of doing so: remaining in the NCAA means you’re covered by legislation. Leaving the NCAA would now sacrifice that protection and leave you subject to the same lawsuits that currently threaten the NCAA.

Restoring order requires recognizing that the biggest threat to order is the big bully, not the people fighting for table scraps. Of course this is what’s happening.

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