The Protect College Sports Act is about the Big 12 and ACC trying to catch up to the Big Ten and SEC
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For starters, it’s nice to know the president of SMU believes a salary cap system is necessary in baseball. Having advocated for this over more than a dozen years, through scripted video, online columns and podcast appearances, I feel it can help to have more who follow sports on this side of the argument. It probably doesn’t hurt if the person in question has a Ph.D.
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If only Jay Hartzell had put that education to better use than in his preposterous opinion piece published by the Dallas Morning News on the subject of the Protect College Sports Act of 2026.
Employing more than 800 words, Hartzell argues competitive balance is necessary in college sports in the same way it would be beneficial to Major League Baseball. He points out how much, by comparison, it has facilitated the growth of the NFL.
And he’s right about all that.
Where his analogy disintegrates is the same place it has for Texas Tech donor Cody Campbell and all his minions since he launched his self-serving “Saving College Sports” campaign with a series of televised public service announcements last autumn.
What Campbell and Hartzell really want is not parity across all of Division I. Why, that would mean the Mid-American Conference and American Conference and Sun Belt having the opportunity to compete at the same level as the ACC and SEC. They have zero interest in that.
What they want is for the Big 12 and ACC to get a share of what the SEC and Big Ten have earned.
That’s the only parity they seek.
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There are 138 schools playing football at NCAA Division I’s highest classification. There are 68 playing at the power conference level. Those advancing this legislation are not pushing to elevate the 70 below them. They’re seeking elevate themselves to the same level as the 34 above.
Hartzell makes for a curious representative of this cause, though perhaps no more so than Campbell, who spends money to air ads complaining about the current system and then donates to assure Texas Tech succeeds under these circumstances.
Hartzell, as it happens, was president of the University of Texas when the Longhorns and Oklahoma lobbied the Southeastern Conference to add them as members.
It is undeniably true that the decision of the SEC to expand into the Southwest led to a change in how the Big Ten approached the possibility of expansion and subsequently choosing to add both USC and UCLA and, as the Pac-12 approached a self-inflicted implosion, rescue Oregon and Washington from uncertainty.
Please let us not pretend this expansion contagion began there. It commenced in the early part of this century, when the ACC abandoned its unique regional history and destroyed Big East football by adding first Miami, Virginia Tech and Boston College and subsequently returning to gather up Pitt and Syracuse. The ACC still has not lost a single member to others’ 21st century expansions, but now they’re a victim?
If competitive balance is an existential issue in college sports, if it truly matters now to Hartzell, where were all the complaints when the SEC was winning 14 of the 24 national championships contested prior to the expansion of the College Football Playoff? They won seven in a row between 2006 and 2012, and the op/ed pages of major newspapers weren’t asked to publish demands for equity among the major conferences.
During the decade of the four-team College Football Playoff, six schools commanded 73 percent of the playoff positions available. That’s roughly 5 percent of the Division I FBS membership and 9 percent of the power conference competitors consuming nearly ¾ of the playoff berths. And now we’re worried about competitive balance?
No. Of course not. The members of the ACC and Big 12 are worried it’s costing more money to run athletics programs. And they want someone else to help them pay for it, including the athletes whose compensation they’d like to cap through legislation – without their permission, of course.
The reality is Texas Tech, the university to which Campbell makes such generous athletics-centric donations, is more competitive under the current system than ever. The Red Raiders just finished a 12-2 football season that included a Big 12 championship; it was their first league title since 2008 and only their second in the last 30 years. In men’s basketball, they’ve finished third or better in the Big 12 each of the past three years, which had happened only once since they joined their current conference. The women’s softball program reached the past two Women’s College World Series finals.
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The Miami Hurricanes of the ACC just completed their most successful season since leaving behind the Big East to join the ACC in 2004. They had only one season of double-digit wins in 20 opportunities during the pre-NIL era. In this system, they reached the College Football Playoff final and gave champion Indiana an extraordinary battle.
Competitive balance is less an issue in college sports now than it was a decade ago, or two. Revenue balance is more of one – for some programs. They’re the ones leading the charge for the Protect College Sports Act. If only they’d be more honest about what they’re really protecting.
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