The shift in alignments among universities has not gone unnoticed in Washington. In a telephone interview early Sunday morning, a Congressional member from a state with a university potentially negatively impacted said that the conference issue raised concerns over taxes, antitrust law and potentially Title IX.
While nothing no one has formally approached Congress yet, the representative said that the situation was “spinning out of control.â€
“I think the situation is rising to a level where getting Congress engaged may be unavoidable,†the representative said.
In an era of billion-dollar contracts, and with dozens of athletic departments at state universities attempting to balance budgets of tens of millions of dollars, there is a potential loss of public money for the universities left behind.
“I think Congress has a variety of ways in which they could engage,â€
the representative said. “What we’re seeing is an effort by certain institutions to push other major institutions out of revenue deals and thereby impacting universities. And it’s done in a way that’s breaching contracts.â€
While the representative said he was stopping short of saying that Congress should get involved, as he needs to see how things play out, he did say that it was likely to draw their interest. He pointed out how Congress got involved in the steroid issue in baseball.
“Congress has the nexus to engage,†he said. â€These are tax exempt organizations now making billions of dollars off of unpaid athletes.
When it’s a regional league it seems to make sense. When you’re taking schools practically from coast to coast and putting them in big profit revenue leagues, we may be at a point where the N.C.A.A. has lost its ability to create a fair system for all universities to play in.â€
A lawyer who has higher education clients and has been involved in discussions with Congress about the legal ramifications of conference realignment said the threat of Congressional involvement was real.
“The sudden consolidation of the B.C.S. conferences may raise any number of issues that Congress will want to explore, especially because these conference affiliation decisions have been made quickly and out of view of all concerned constituencies — student athletes, alumni, fans, and the governments who control the public universities that overwhelmingly populate the B.C.S.,†said the lawyer, who was not authorized by his clients to speak publicly on the subject.
The extent of Congressional interest could come down to how many universities get squeezed monetarily from the shift in landscape.