UCLA News: Athlete Payments Could Be Amended Thanks To Joint SEC-Big Ten Venture

The head honchos in your UCLA Bruins' impending 2024-25 conference, the Big Ten, are joining forces with another of college athletics' top conferences (financially speaking), the SEC, in an effort to develop an improved payment method for athletes and to generally attempt to better handle the whirlwind that has hit college sports, sources have informed Ross Dellenger of Yahoo Sports.

Dellenger explains that the two conferences are putting together "a joint advisory group of university presidents, chancellors and athletics directors."

Though the NCAA itself has historically governed initiatives of this sort in the past, the dissolution of the Pac-12 conference and the influx of NIL earnings into the game have thrown everything out of whack. As Dellenger writes, now it has fallen to individual leagues with power to throw their weight around.

“From our perspective, we have a lot that is linked to the NCAA,” SEC commissioner Greg Sankey told Dellenger. “We want to see a healthy national organization. I think that’s very much a need... We’re going to have conversations about what might a path forward mean for college sports.”

“We thought in the Big Ten that coming together this way to share ideas was the fastest and best way to increase the pace of what we are doing,” Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti said.

“Settling on an acceptable athlete compensation model is perhaps the most pressing issue before the Big Ten and SEC’s advisory group, as well as the other FBS leagues," writes Dellenger. "A new model could rectify both the House v. NCAA antitrust case and the current landscape of college football and basketball recruiting — a space which coaches and administrators describe as a pay-for-play, unregulated free agent marketplace."