NCAA versus The Colleges: An OU-Georgia Legal Redux?

Most college football fans older than, say, 40, have at least a fleeting memory of the time when the NCAA controlled college football rights, and limited just about everyone to no more than two national TV appearances annually.

That's right, two.

Not quite thirty years ago, the universities of Oklahoma and Georgia grew tired of the NCAA's control, having started to realize the untapped value in the commercial sale of TV broadcast rights. Eventually, attorneys for one (or both) schools made a revelation - that the NCAA's control over broadcast rights was never part of NCAA membership, and that control was a violation of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. The schools sued to get those rights back.

After some legal wrangling, the Supreme Court agreed, handing OU and Georgia a landmark victory in a case that quite literally reshaped the way college football is broadcast. The BCS itself, arguably, owes its very existence to the OU-Georgia lawsuit of not quite a generation ago.

Now, I can't help but wonder if a similar donnybrook is ahead, over what is arguably the purest expression of rights ownership - a university sports network.

This week, Texas launched its (in)famous Longhorn Sports Network, after a summer of arguing and fighting over the propriety of LHN carrying Texas high school football games. Members of the Big 12 screamed foul, pointing out a multitude of lesser promotional actions (such as showing a recruit on a scoreboard display) that have been nixed by the NCAA, meaning surely a television network can be held to no lower a standard.

For now, the Big 12 put its foot down (and, yes, I tried to say that without laughing), and told Texas, "no." And then the NCAA confirmed that ruling...and then, it didn't.

Almost without notice, the NCAA backtracked on that ruling, saying that ESPN could run "selected" high school highlights within its own content as partner for LHN. And I can't help but wonder what led to the NCAA's change of heart.

Methinks a flashback to OU-Georgia is part of their thinking.

If OU and Georgia successfully argued three decades ago that schools own their own broadcast rights, it doesn't take a great leap to say that no governing entity such as the Big 12 nor the NCAA can prevent Texas from exercising what it would argue were its First Amendment free speech rights - to broadcast on its own network anything it pleases.

It would start with Texas versus its own conference.

It would end with Texas versus the NCAA.

I'm no attorney, but my trick knee tells me that Texas would have a darned good chance to win that kind of fight. And if they did, there would be a free-for-all to follow regarding every other impingement of free speech  that has capped certain recruiting activities for years - all gone at the drop of a gavel, along with any significant pretense on the part of any other school that the NCAA had any real enforcement powers over, well, anything.

I think the NCAA's about-face on an absolute prohibition of high school football on LHN is a tip of the hat to a more fundamental fear; that as rapidly as college football is growing, with newer and more creative ways found by the most powerful schools to slide craftily around the rules amid those who simply disregard them, that the NCAA is becoming an anachronism, a tip-of-the-hat to a bygone era when college football really was college football.

If the shadows of conference realignment cast by Texas A&M show anything, they demonstrate how quickly college football could reorganize itself and gravitate into a sport where the schools representing the top, oh, 50 elite programs simply consolidate, bid the NCAA and its byzantine rules farewell, and play ball with their own playbook.

Don't laugh. Surely, the NCAA isn't.