Banged for the buck

The SEC is a place that pisses money away on coaches like nowhere else, so why should this come as any surprise?

That defensive posture for the Power Five comes after the conferences — the ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, SEC and Pac-12 — collectively spent $1,730,000 to lobby Congress in 2020 — by far the most they have spent in a year, according to lobbying disclosures reviewed by The Associated Press.

The NCAA, despite calling off its lucrative basketball tournaments last March, spent $480,000 on lobbying, roughly in line with its budget in past years, for a total of $2,210,000 paid to lobbyists with similar aims.

Each Power Five conference hired its own lobbying firm and they collectively hired the same two firms — one Republican and one Democratic — as part of their push for a narrow bill giving athletes NIL rights, with numerous restrictions. The Southeastern Conference had the biggest lobbying budget of any league and even outspent the NCAA, paying its lobbyists $570,000.

The lobbyists got most of their wish list into a bill introduced last month by Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., but with Wicker no longer the chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, it’s unlikely his bill would advance if it were reintroduced in the new Congress.  [Emphasis added.]

If Jimmy Sexton represented the lobbyists, he’d have already negotiated a raise and a contract extension for them, with a large buyout.

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