Private capital has no place in higher education. The power four schools should throw off their athletic departments . Doing so will drop the facade of education and let it be clear that the athletics department will function as a professional sports league. Leave traditional NCAA operations to mid-majors, D II and D. III. Our football and mid-major football teams do NOT need to be beat up in body bag games for 300-600,000 dollars. I am not surprised by these discussions, just by how quickly the power 4 landscape has changed.

I agree that this is a step toward the Power 4 conferences becoming professional leagues. I read an article last year in which Duke basketball coach Jon Scheyer bemoaned only being allowed 4 hours a day with his team. Sounds like he at least has dropped the "facade of education" in his own mind.

However some key quotes (at least from my reading) from the article make me wonder if they don't have a tiger by the tail:

Like most businesses, athletic departments can always use more money to cover ever-increasing costs.

Translation: The current enormous income streams aren't sufficient to sustain the business model. Inevitably, the athletic departments will become dependent on the cash infusions generated via the private equity arrangement.

The private capital company would get money back through the new entity through annual distribution in proportion to its financial stake.

Any private equity firm has a fiduciary duty to its investors and funds, based on the Investment Advisers Act of 1940 and the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 for funds holding plan assets. These duties require firms to act in the best interest of the fund and its investors.

That seems to run counter to: "...this setup eliminates the need to give an outside investor a specific portion of control over decisions or board seats..." Private equity firms can't just give away investor money, with no mechanism to protect that investment and the return on that investment. Anyone who thinks it's a no-strings flow of cash is fooling themselves. IMHO

When team record is downstream from how successful programs are at extracting funds from their assets, its not surprising that professionals are sought to maximize the extraction of value.
Private capital could identify undervalued assets the conference owns, agree to pay the conference a guaranteed amount in exchange for the rights to the asset, with them taking a profit from the amount they guaranteed and what they actually get from marketing the asset. They put some investment or money at risk and earn income from the asset. Assets might be broadcast rights, logo’s, images, endorsements. The private equity firm doesn’t need a seat on the board, just a contract to market the asset.

I'm hoping that the Power 4 for FOOTBALL evolves into some type of super conference, and then let the other sports go back to the old regional alignments. At some point, the San Jose's of the world are going to be much closer to FCS schools than the Power 4.

It’s not that unusual for theoretically non-profit or public universities to own for-profit businesses, think patent rights marketing or Stanford Shopping Center. But basically Ohio State wants to own a professional sports team as an investment and they’ve decided a professional team branded as Ohio State is the better return than buying a stake in the Cleveland Browns. Buyer (or seller) beware, private equity cares not about your brand. They care about this quarter’s profit and maximum resource extraction, even if it destroys the business. Go ask TGI Fridays, Red Lobster, Southwest Airlines, Buzzfeed, Vice Media, and others. They thought they could find Oz by sniffing the sweet rich taint of PE and they all ended up eating dogsh*t.