The main targets of Campbell’s ire, unsurprisingly, have been the conference commissioners. Campbell took several shots at them on The Varsity. “The conference commissioners never miss a paycheck. They never see the problem,” he told me. “They just expect their institutions to come up with the money to fund these sports however they come up with it.”

So it wasn’t a surprise to see a slew of conference commissioners start lampooning Campbell’s plan. To wit: The SEC’s Greg Sankey told the Associated Press that Campbell’s “comments reflect a fundamental misunderstanding of the realities of college athletics.” The Big 12’s Brett Yormark also recently knocked Campbell’s claims. “Hope isn’t a strategy,” he said. Media executives have also reacted negatively. In their view, his revenue goals are a fantasy; Campbell likes to point out that college football outrates the NBA at a fraction of the cost, but perhaps it’s possible that Fortune 500 businesses aren’t going to pay premiums to play their ads to audiences in Lubbock or other tertiary (and then some) markets. They also contend that the free-spending days of the 2010s have been replaced by a more fiscally conservative, cash-starved era. Yes, University of Miami quarterback Carson Beck may be pocketing $4.7 million this year in N.I.L. deals, but the industry is quickly shifting business models in real time. Even so, these executives contend, boosters are dumb money; mediacos are not. (Interested to hear your thoughts here…)

Regardless, we have unequivocally reached an era of fiscal prudence of some sort. Jimmy Pitaro opened Disney’s checkbook for the NFL, NBA, college football, and dozens of other sports. But while he liked having Formula 1, he wouldn’t engage in a bidding war. It was the same story with UFC this year—ESPN would have liked to keep the property, but only at the right price. So when Campbell suggests that these media companies have an extra $7 billion lying around to pay for rights, media executives say the market is telling a different story. And they scoff when Campbell suggests that smaller sports, like volleyball, baseball, and softball, would command discernably higher rights fees.

Last year, ESPN bought a package of rights to 40 NCAA championships, including women’s basketball, baseball, softball, lacrosse, etcetera, for $920 million over eight years. Some of the more popular sports in this package, like women’s basketball, could probably command a higher rights fee on their own. But that would devalue the rest of the package and orphan some of the smaller sports, like swimming and diving or track and field.

Campbell insists that he’s in this for the long haul. But media executives and college administrators see his ideas as nonstarters. I was reminded of this current dialectic while listening to my partner Matt Belloni interview TKO top executives Ari Emanuel and Mark Shapiro on his podcast, The Town. A mere two months ago, Shapiro doubled the UFC’s rights fees via a seven-year, $7.7 billion deal with Paramount. You might think he’d be optimistic, especially when the NBA is about a week away from starting its $76 billion deals with ESPN, NBC, and Amazon, and the NFL is about to open up its deals early—a move that will take even more money out of the market. Instead, he was cautious and sober. “It’s the middle that’s going to get cut out,” Shapiro told Matt, though he might have offered the same advice to Campbell.

On NBC’s first exclusive MLB game: “I predict NBC will choose the World Series winner’s first game, mirroring their Thursday night NFL season kickoff matchup. Unfortunately, that means my Cubs will not participate.” —A Varsity subscriber

On NHL’s intermissions: “I really enjoyed your recent podcast with Greg Wyshynski. However, I wish you’d asked him about whether the NHL has any plans to reduce intermission time. NFL halftime is at 13 minutes, yet the NHL has two 18-minute stoppages. Even as a die-hard fan, I find it hard to make it to the third period, especially for a West Coast game. I would be extremely interested to learn what the viewer drop-off rate between the second and third periods looks like.” —A sports business type

On the NHL’s puck drop: “Did you really write that the NHL was kicking off the season last week? Somebody needs to teach you that the NHL does not, and never will, kick off anything. That’s reserved for football.” —A sports business reporter

[Ed. note: Fine. But no dumb Puck double entendres, please…]

See you tomorrow,
John