When Cody Campbell, the billionaire oilman and Texas Tech mega-booster, unveiled his ambitious plan to “save college sports” earlier this year, a core part of his proposal—a federally chartered replacement for the NCAA—seemed to spring from nowhere.
But documents reviewed by Sportico suggest a surprising intellectual origin: the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative, free-market think tank with no real footprint in the world of college sports.
On May 2, Derek Cohen, TPPF’s chief researcher with a background in criminology, published a pair of articles for the organization arguing that the NCAA had so spectacularly failed in its fundamental mission that it should be scrapped.
“Since 1906, the NCAA has labored to uphold fairness, amateurism, and integrity in collegiate sports,” Cohen wrote in the first piece. “Yet as legal mandates, cultural shifts and market forces have redefined the landscape, the NCAA has become a hollow institution that resists reform, evades responsibility and cedes authority to state legislatures and market actors.”
In a companion article, Cohen proposed his radical alternative: replacing the NCAA with a new, Congressionally chartered organization modeled after the U.S. Olympic Committee. He coined it “the United States Collegiate Athletics Corporation.”
The proposal largely went unnoticed. TPPF, a $25 million nonprofit, is better known for championing limited government and deregulation in the Lone Star State, than national sports policy. And Cohen, by his own admission, is no expert in college athletics. Still, it seemed one influential reader was clearly paying attention: Campbell, who sits on TPPF’s board.
Immediately after Cohen’s articles were published, Campbell emailed them to Texas Tech athletic director Kirby Hocutt and vice chancellor Eric Bentley, along with a one-page legislative memo titled the Saving College Sports Act. The proposal closely mirrored Cohen’s blueprint, down to the very name of his new proposed NCAA replacement.
“I found myself intrigued by the establishment of the USCAC,” Hocutt replied. “I believe most within the industry would be supportive about the establishment of such an organization replacing the NCAA.”
Campbell declined multiple requests for comment through his spokesperson, but his emails, obtained via a public records request, suggests that Cohen’s writings helped shape the reform effort Campbell is now promoting on Capitol Hill.
Since May, Campbell has launched his own nonprofit, Saving College Sports, to advocate for his reform plan and has been actively lobbying lawmakers. In doing so, he has positioned himself against the GOP-backed SCORE Act, which would reinforce the NCAA’s authority and protect it from antitrust lawsuits. His efforts appear to be paying off, given House Republicans’ decision to shelve bringing the bill to a floor vote this week, after several members reversed their support for it.
In an interview, Cohen said Campbell, despite his TPPF board position, had no role in the development of the articles, which he co-wrote with Thomas Lindsay, the foundation’s higher education policy director and a former deputy chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
“We are a conservative think tank,” Cohen said. “That is where our orientation lies. We are not against government but think it should be effective or authorized. A private organization much like the NCAA would be ideal; the only problem is that this one private organization is subject to the whims of 50 state legislatures.”
Cohen, while advocating for the NCAA’s eventual replacement, expressed some sympathy for college sports’ governing body, which has already been forced to cede parts of its regulatory authority to the new, for-profit College Sports Commission.
“They are hamstrung by both court cases and their own internal structure,” Cohen said. “How do we get around that, for college sports writ large? So, that is how we came up with the [idea for] the second paper, where we started talking about having something similar to the U.S. Olympic Committee.”
