Sen. Ted Cruz warns hypothetical SEC-Big Ten ‘super league’ would destroy college football
· Yahoo Sports
Following the last round of conference expansion in the early 2020s — when Texas and Oklahoma joining the SEC led to a plundering of the Pac-12 by the ACC, Big Ten, and Big 12 — college sports fans began theorizing about a future “super league.” Now Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) is sounding the alarm against just such a concept after introducing legislation that would ban the Big Ten and SEC from getting any bigger.
Cruz, who helped author the newly-unveiled bipartisan “Protect College Sports Act” along with Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), addressed his serious concerns regarding a hypothetical “super league” — at least as it involves the Big Ten and SEC — during an interview with On3‘s Andy Staples and Ari Wasserman.
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“There’s a provision explicitly in this bill that bans a super league. Look, one of the real risks is the SEC and Big Ten joining together,” Cruz said Thursday on the Andy & Ari On3 podcast. “Now I don’t believe they would success, I actually think they’d lose the antitrust litigation that’d be brought against them if they tried to form a super league. But whether they would win or not, this bill makes clear they cannot merge. Because you’d essentially turn them into the NFL. They’d be the G-League to the NFL.”
As Cruz pointed to, there’s specific language in the “Protect College Sports Act” that appears to directly target the Big Ten and SEC, restricting both leagues from further expansion, especially if it involves an imaginary merger of college sports’ largest and wealthiest conferences. Section 206, located on page 108 of the 111-page bill, specifically prohibits “certain” conferences that exceeded $1 billion in total revenue during fiscal year 2025 — the Big Ten and the SEC are the only leagues that qualify — from merging or acquiring new teams from another conference if the acquisition leaves the former conference below the necessary eight-team membership minimum.
Of course, while there has been occasional talk from those within the SEC — specifically Georgia president Jere Morehead and Bulldogs football coach Kirby Smart — about potentially “breaking away” from the NCAA in order to establish and enforce their own governance, all discussion about a potential “super league” remains relegated to messages boards, and the halls of Congress apparently.
Still, Cruz believes a future merger between the Big Ten and SEC is enough of an issue that it necessitated a specific provision in legislation that’s widely considered the best chance Washington has at resolving some of college sports’ biggest issues.
“It may not totally destroy (the other Power Four programs), it’d just turn them into effectively high school football, where they would not be competitive, they would not be playing the major schools,” Cruz continued. “Part of what’s fun about sports is the Cinderella story. A couple of years ago, Baylor won March Madness. It’s hard to see that happening right now. Right now the winners of the (NCAA) Tournament are the people with all the money who can pay for the top athletes. And for the smaller schools, it’s incredibly difficult to be competitive.”
Cruz and Cantwell’s “Protect College Sports Act” bill will next appear before the Senate Commerce Committee on Wednesday before potentially going to a vote on the Senate floor, where it would require a filibuster-proof 60 votes to pass. From there, it must then make its way through Congress before going to the desk of President Donald Trump for his signature.