Michael Horn predicts college athletics will split in two directions: some schools building professional-level programs that could clash with the NFL and NBA, while others abandon the arms race entirely for cheaper, lower-profile models. The bifurcation could create an antitrust battleground.
I'm going to ask you to put on your crystal ball hat. If you were looking at athletics 5 years from now, what do you think it looks like?
I think it might be sort of, I think you're going to have a class of it that is professional and is sort of maybe disruptive to the professional sports leagues, frankly, that we have in the US. And I think that's going to be a very interesting antitrust battleground in this country. And then I suspect you're going to have a bunch of schools that have either been driven to like a financial breaking point by their athletics or have voluntarily, to your point, dropped out of the arms race. And that, that's the group that the latter is the group that voluntarily drops out that I think will actually reinvent what this looks like in a more sustainable way forward. And that's the group that I'm super curious to see what they put back in its place.
I could not agree more though. If I had picked the exact same anything, I would've picked those 3 things as well.
