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Sen. Ted Cruz details confrontation with Greg Sankey, Tony Petitti over potential Big Ten-SEC super league

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SEC commissioner Greg Sankey and Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti made a special trip to Capitol Hill on Thursday to sit down with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), the lead author of the bipartisan “Protect College Sports Act” introduced last week, to discuss the newly-proposed legislation.

The impromptu meeting followed a three-hour hearing Wednesday before the Senate Commerce Committee where former Alabama head coach and ESPN analyst Nick Saban, Notre Dame athletic director Pete Bevacqua and Pac-12 commissioner Teresa Gould joined a five-person panel advocating for the potential landmark bill addressing college athletics.

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Following the Thursday meeting with Cruz, Sankey and Petitti — whose conferences previously voiced their opposition to the bill on Tuesday night — released a joint statement reinforcing their stance that the bill still needs more work before it should be put for a vote.

“Our goal today was to make collaborative progress toward improving this bill. We presented concrete solutions to key unresolved challenges, including providing consistent national oversight, ensuring the ability to make and enforce rules, and guaranteeing that student-athletes can maximize revenue share and NIL,” the statement read. “These changes are needed to achieve the bill’s objectives to bring long term stability to all of college athletics. We reiterated that we do not support this bill in its current form, but look forward to continued constructive dialogue with Senator Cruz and his team.”

And while it appears the meeting remained quite cordial, Cruz highlighted a key part in the bill where he and the two most powerful commissioners in college sports actually clashed — the provision restricting the Big Ten or SEC from merging or creating a potential “super league.” Cruz revealed those conversations later Thursday during a conversation with Punchbowl News.

“When I sat down with Sankey and Petitti, I said: ‘Listen, you’re not going to be able to form a super league. You’re going to lose the litigation on that.’ They disagreed with me on that,” Cruz told Punchbowl News‘ Jake Sherman. “I said, ‘Fine, (but) I gotta tell you, I probably have 100 votes to stop you from forming a super league.’ … That’s actually one of the things people like about this bill. And I said, ‘But think about it this way, one of the benefits of negotiating collectively is you can do schedule optimization. You can schedule blockbuster game after blockbuster game, (and) that generates more eyeballs, more revenue.’

“… And, I said, ‘Think about it this way, we are giving you legal protections to form a super league, but the price is you can’t leave everybody (else) behind. If you take the rest of college sports with you, if you preserve …,’” Cruz continued, “and a lot of my focus was also not on all the big, incredibly successful programs, but all the other ones. And the Division II schools, the Division III schools. Keeping the institution that is college athletics, preserving that is why it’s called the Protect College Sports Act. Because if we don’t act, much of that is going away.”

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The anti-super league provision, 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.

Tony Petitti calls idea of Big Ten-SEC super league ‘a fabrication’ after Senate hearing

The Big Ten and SEC’s alleged pushback against Cruz’s opposition to a potential super league flies in the face of recent comments from Petitti flatly refuting any pursuit of such an option: “Any statement that suggests the Big Ten is pursuing or wants a super league is a fabrication,” Petitti told Yahoo! Sports on Wednesday. “At no point in time have we discussed such a concept with the SEC or anyone else. Any suggestion otherwise comes from people outside our respective conferences.”

In fact, discussion about a potential super league picked up following Wednesday’s hearing after Bevacqua publicly suggested such an option would “truly maximize the media value” if the FBS conferences ever opted to utilize the bill’s optional pooling of media rights provision, another part of the “Protect College Sports Act” that the Big Ten and SEC vehemently oppose.

“I, certainly, don’t want a super league and I’m not sure anybody necessarily wants a super league. … (But) if you wanted to maximize media value around college football, I think you would take 24-30 teams, create unbelievably competitive scheduling where a team like Notre Dame would play Alabama, Georgia, Penn State, Ohio State, Michigan and start to get a number that more closely resembles an NFL number,” Bevacqua said before the Senate Commerce Committee. “I could be right, I could be wrong. But that’s why I was encouraged that it’s a voluntary application and that a lot more work can be done over the course of the next series of years to see if the value can prove itself out.”