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Texas Tech booster Cody Campbell pushes back on belief he's only trying to help Red Raiders funding

by: Alex Byington4 hours ago_AlexByington

After the NCAA-backed SCORE Act was shelved after failing to come to a vote this week in Congress, a notable supporter of the Republican-sponsored college sports reform bill is pushing another option. That is billionaire Texas Tech booster Cody Campbell.

Campbell is behind a push to overhaul the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 and modernize how college athletics — specifically college football — monetizes its on-field product through more lucrative media rights deals, especially in the day and age of NIL and revenue-sharing. And, during a Thursday appearance on The Pat McAfee Show, the 44-year-old Texas oilman and Red Raiders legacy wants to make it clear his work with “Saving College Sports” is purely for the betterment of college athletics, and not just his alma mater.

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“As far as Texas Tech goes, we’re doing just fine. We’ve been able to take advantage of all the chaos. I mean, we sit on top of the largest oil field in the world. If everything falls apart and there are no rules at all, we benefit from it,” Campbell told McAfee on Thursday. “So, I’m actually working against the interests of Texas Tech in what I’m doing, trying to make it so everyone can survive and everyone can be competitive. Yeah, people like to paint me as (just) a Texas Tech guy, but that’s just not the case.

“And hey, I’m going to keep doing everything I can to help Texas Tech regardless of what the rules are, but there have to be rules,” continued Campbell, who co-founded the Red Raiders’ NIL collective The Matador Club and is also chair of the school’s Board of Regents. “Folks just don’t understand how very important this is and how existential the problem is. And what we’re talking about is a solution that’s not going to happen overnight. What I’m concerned about is, … we have seen 182 programs cut this year, that’s a fact – all women’s sports and Olympic sports. And that’s all because of these budget problems.”

Those budget problems stem from the reality that most collegiate sports are non-revenue generating — only football and men’s basketball actually create revenue while all other sports, especially most women’s and Olympic sports, lose money each year. In fact, Campbell said most college sports departments ran an average deficit of $20 million in 2024. Of course, one way to potentially reverse that trend is for Congress to modernize the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 and put college athletics on the same level as their professional peers, providing a major financial windfall across the board.

“But the problem is just going to keep getting worse and worse and worse. What we’re looking at is a solution that, we’re talking over 10-12 years, we reform the way that we market our media rights, the way that we generate revenue. The NFL’s a great example, but the NBA is an even better one,” Campbell continued. “College football has twice as many viewers as the NBA does, but college football makes half as much money as the NBA does. And that is all because of what’s called the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 and the rights that professional sports have that college sports don’t have. That’s part of it.

“It’s also because we don’t have a central governing body that coordinates scheduling and makes sure we maximize viewership and have games on the right times that people want to watch them, and we don’t cannibalize our viewership,” Campbell concluded. “… So if we can just fix those problems and run (college football) like a business like the NFL has done very effectively, we can increase revenue massively, and that’s just common business sense.”