What will the Big Ten-SEC partnership seek to achieve?

• Pete Thamel, ESPNFeb 6, 2024, 03:00 PM ET

The most essential thing to learn about the burgeoning cooperation of the Big 10 and the SEC, revealed late recently, is to not call it an alliance. Let alone The Alliance.The unfortunate

— and roundly buffooned– conference alliance of August 2021 was a ham-handed move. However most notably, it was the ACC, Pac-12 and Big Ten acting defensively in reaction to the SEC’s acquisition of Oklahoma and Texas.This “joint

advisory group” revealed recently between the Big Ten and the SEC should be seen more as a bellwether for where college sports are going, and the desire of SEC commissioner Greg Sankey and Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti to be proactive. It will be an expert for the 2 leagues however won’t have the authority to carry out changes.While more information stay uncertain, the Big Ten and SEC are sharing concepts to sculpt a course forward for college sports, something NCAA leadership has stopped working to do for a generation, topped by the recent flop of the transformation committee.This isn’t a breakaway, a point Sankey and Petitti

have done excellent gymnastics to mention. It’s rather an arrow pointing toward development, ranging from micro issues such as squabbles in the College Football Playoff (governance, gain access to and monetary circulation) to larger-scale concerns all the method approximately Congress.Editor’s Picks 2 Associated Here’s what’s definitive about this new connecting: These leagues don’t desire Eastern Michigan having a say in what occurs at Michigan or Florida International impacting Florida. They do not, for example, want the Dartmouth basketball team’s unionization effort to affect the Auburn and Iowa football teams’futures.The SEC and Big 10 are cool on new NCAA president Charlie Baker’s proposal that calls for a new tier of Department I, which includes $30,000 payments to a minimum of half of a school’s professional athletes and allows schools to make name, image and likeness deals directly with athletes.One of the reasons the SEC and Big Ten breaking away isn’t rooted in truth comes from the Supreme Court judgment in 2021 in the NCAA v. Alston case. That ruling stresses time and once again that conferences are complimentary to forge specific paths forward.So where could this SEC-Big Ten partnership show up to create the future of college sports? The easy answers are lawsuit settlement and profits share.Multiple sources told ESPN there’s a lot of chatter that this SEC-Big 10 arm-linking could manifest itself amid the thicket of lawsuits facing the NCAA. Some of the most affluent conferences want to discover a method to settle those fits– particularly the billions in prospective direct exposure of House v. NCAA– and

use the settlement structure to produce a path forward.This is not simple, nor is it inevitable, as it’s a complex play that likely would involve Congress. However as one industry source informed ESPN on the building settlement chatter:” Congress doesn’t wish to conserve us. They wish to assist us. There’s a huge difference. “Sources indicated your house vs. NCAA case, a class-action lawsuit that has the NCAA facing a multibillion-dollar payout in damages to former professional athletes if a federal judge chooses the association’s old restriction on NIL offers breached federal antitrust laws. That case is arranged to go to trial in January 2025, but it might be settled before then.All of the so-called

Power 5 conferences– SEC, Big Ten, ACC, Big 12 and Pac-12– are listed as defendants in your house case, which belongs to the reason they might be encouraged to settle.This spring appears to be the optimum window for settling.The NCAA is likewise dealing with 2 other open antitrust grievances and a federal suit that argues that all college athletes must be thought about workers of their schools.There’s no clean course to a settlement, and the circles around those talks are usually tight. But might the Big 10 and SEC spearheading some kind of settlement– perhaps in several looming cases–

suggest they agree to pay some of the past damages and find out

an authorized structure to profits show professional athletes going forward?Other leagues might and will follow along. With revenue sharing with professional athletes apparently inescapable eventually, would this be a way to

instill it?Gabe Feldman, director of the Tulane sports law program, alerted of myriad problems however acknowledged a prospective path through settlement that could develop a framework going forward.”It’s definitely plausible,”he said.”The sensible part is about the will of the celebrations. Are the parties ready and able to discover a dollar total up to make these cases go away and able to find a structure that they would continue under? It’s definitely possible.”Some defense would likely be required to slow or prevent future suits from coming and challenging the structure. There are various viewpoints on how and whether that might be attained, but that’s likely something that would need some kind of government intervention

. A settlement and some sort of profits share might assist encourage action from federal legislators, who have actually so far made little concrete development toward voting on the kind of expense the NCAA and its members say they need.”What they need from Congress, to be clear, is clarity,”

said Mark S. Levinstein, senior counsel for Williams & Connolly, who has decades of experience in the sports space.”They require a lot of answers. For example, with respect to labor law, can the athletes unionize? If they unionize and choose the labor laws, is everything the universities did now safeguarded from being challenged under the antitrust laws? “Levinstein included:” The universities would also require some aid with Title IX– if the football players receive a portion of the university’s incomes, what do they have to provide for the females’s rowing professional athletes? And they will require some clarity on any limitations they trouble NIL. Can they prevent boosters from paying athletes to come to the university? Do you enable the quarterback to get millions in NIL offers if they’re in fact NIL offers and not payments to get him to enlist at a specific university?”That’s a prolonged method to state there’s absolutely nothing direct here. But the settlement as a bridge to federal assistance is an idea being discussed, and it’s one the SEC and Big Ten appear set to dig in on as soon as they figure out which members– presidents, chancellors and athletic directors– will make up the advisory group.We’ve seen lots of committees, commissions and specialist panels in college sports over the years that have actually led to absolutely nothing more than extra committees, commissions and specialist panels. What makes this collaboration different is that the SEC and Big 10 have the monetary muscle, alignment and management. However that does not reduce the challenges.Since Sankey took over at the SEC in 2015, we’ve learned that he’s determining, the type

of leader who determines often times before cutting. Sankey is, in basic, a follower in the NCAA and the need for rules and a governing body. However there’s also a boiling point when Georgia State has the exact same juice as Georgia.Sankey worked as the co-chair of the transformation committee, a group that met for more than a year.

It was formed in an effort to improve Division I rules in the wake of the Supreme Court decision, and there were few concrete results. The time Sankey dedicated to it showed that he believed in some type of healthy NCAA for the future of college sports. However the truth is the transformation committee could not transform anything. So here we are.Petitti got employed in April of last year, and as he has actually gotten adapted to all the problems in college sports, he has made the strategic decision to relate to Sankey. Former Big 10 commissioner Kevin Warren and Sankey had a poor relationship, summed up upon Warren’s departure by Sankey saying,” We saw the world in a different way.”Alignment amongst leadership doesn’t indicate they can change anything

. The most gobsmacking thing about college sports is that, for as popular and profitable as they are at the highest levels, there has actually long been nobody in charge. And those who do qualify as leaders can’t tell you with any confidence what the standard structure surrounding their business will remain in 5 years. Really, nobody has any idea. Everybody is guessing.With cohesion in the landscape’s 2 most powerful leagues, they will plow forward. The task is daunting

, however fortunately the last alliance for power conferences set the bar pretty low.