The SEC (the Sports One) Is Acting Like It’s Invincible
Good morning and welcome to another edition of Free Agent! Maybe think twice before jumping for joy today (especially because the A’s still lost).
Plenty to talk about today, with college football in turmoil again (I could copy and paste that every week), plus an interesting sports-related tax issue to discuss, along with two new racing documentaries and the NBA and NHL reaching the final stages of their playoffs. Let’s get to it.
Locker Room Links
- Bad take! “NBA officiating needs more bias.” Surely there are better ways to make the regular season matter more.
- Oklahoma’s softball dynasty is over—they lost to Texas Tech in the semifinals Monday night in a walk-off play at the plate.
- “Illinois passed a new sports betting tax in the middle of the night.”
- Russian teams are still banned from the Winter Olympics in 2026 (although some individual athletes will be allowed to participate).
- The FBI is probing a company partially owned by the NFL and MLB players unions.
- A transgender athlete won first place in high jump and triple jump at California’s state high school track and field championship meet. The state allowed an extra athlete to compete and medal in events the trans athlete was competing in.
- Two leaked medical tests say Algerian boxer and Olympic gold medal winner Imane Khelif has male chromosomes.
- RIP John Brenkus, creator and founder of Sport Science.
- Elsewhere in Reason: “J.D. Vance Wants a Free Market for Crypto. What About Everything Else?“
- The only thing crappier than Manchester United’s season (15th place!) is its stadium food:
Manchester United’s Old Trafford stadium has been given a two-star food hygiene rating after mouse droppings were found in multiple hospitality areas.
The inspection report from the Trafford Council, which was completed on April 16, gave recognition that “significant work has… pic.twitter.com/UPSWLNVXVB
— The Athletic | Football (@TheAthleticFC) May 27, 2025
S-E-C Guarantee?
The SEC seems to think it’s invincible. If it gets its way, it just might be.
We’ve only had one 12-team College Football Playoff and even though the format is already changing for this season, the college football world can’t stop talking about expanding the playoff (again) and changing the format (again).
The all-powerful SEC and Big Ten don’t want to take any chances. They think they can design the best system: four automatic qualifiers for each of them, plus two each from the ACC and Big 12, one team from the midmajor Group of 6 conferences, and three at-large spots.
Based on tradition and hubris, they think they’re the best conferences, they’ve always been the best conferences, and they always will be the best conferences, so they deserve multiple automatic qualifiers even if their top teams have a relatively bad year.
Multiple automatic qualifiers would be unprecedented in American sports. The other college sports, to my knowledge, don’t give out more than one automatic qualifier per conference. The NFL doesn’t guarantee the NFC East two playoff spots just because the division has some of the league’s most powerful and historic teams. The only parallel I can think of is European soccer, where the international club competitions dish out a given number of qualification spots to the top teams in each country (though the number of spots per country is based on a coefficient formula calculated by team performance in the last five years of the competitions—sounds a bit like the old BCS, doesn’t it?).
It’s not, however, all that unprecedented in American business. Startups rise to the top of their new fields, and once they become powerful enough to crush their competition, they call for rules and regulations that will hold back any new upstarts with funny ideas or better business practices. But no matter how dominant they get, a new competitor eventually comes along to knock them off their pedestal.
The SEC is following this playbook, the sports version of crony capitalism. It has long been the best conference in college football, but its grip might be slipping—they haven’t sent a team to the national championship in two years. The system is changing (expanded playoff; name, image, and likeness payments; direct “revenue-sha
Article from Reason.com
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