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Who is Cody Campbell? Texas Tech billionaire booster is college sports power broker
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- Who is Cody Campbell? Texas Tech billionaire booster is college sports power broker
By now, three full weeks into the 2025 college football season, you've probably seen the ad.
During a break in the game — and wedged between commercials for beer, sportsbooks and erectile dysfunction medications — a fit, goateed man in his 40s appears on screen , holding a football in his right hand as he walks on the field inside an empty stadium.
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The smile on his face quickly disappears as he delivers an ominous message. College sports are "at risk," he says, with a rapidly evolving landscape forcing cuts across the country and putting women's and non-revenue sports in jeopardy at athletic departments that overwhelmingly operate in the red.
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He offers a solution to those problems, urging Congress to modernize the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961, a move he says will "generate the funding needed to protect all sports at all schools."
"Let's save college sports before the clock runs out," he says at the end of the 30-second spot.
For many viewers relaxing on a Saturday while watching their favorite team, it's quite a bit to process. Who is this man? And what is he trying to tell us?
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While he may not yet be a household name to the average American sports fan, Cody Campbell , the salt-and-pepper-haired star of the commercial, is one of the more consequential figures in college athletics at the moment, someone whose power and influence have only grown as universities still seek answers to some of the challenges posed by athletes being able to earn money from their name, image and likeness.
As we head into Week 4 and his face continues to appear on millions of televisions across the country, here's a closer look at Campbell, his background and what he's advocating for in those ubiquitous ads:
Who is Cody Campbell?
Though he's identified in the commercial merely as a former college and professional football player, Campbell is much more than that.
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He was a four-year letterman as an offensive lineman at Texas Tech from 2001-04, where he was an all-Big 12 performer under the late Mike Leach (the stadium in which the ad is filmed is Jones AT&T Stadium, the Red Raiders ' home venue). After college, he spent one season in the NFL, signing as an undrafted free agent with the Indianapolis Colts .
Once his football career was over, Campbell put his master's degree in finance to good use. Alongside John Sellers, his former Texas Tech teammate, Campbell founded Double Eagle Energy Holdings, an oil and gas production company. In February, it was sold to Diamondback Energy Inc. in a deal worth more than $4 billion. It was hardly his first big payday, either. Campbell's previous two business deals were worth $2.8 billion (in 2017) and $6.4 billion (in 2021).
That money has allowed him to amass power and influence at his alma mater. He was named to Texas Tech's board of regents in 2021 and was elevated to chairman earlier this year. In recent years, he has become the school's biggest, most impactful athletic donor.
The Red Raiders have become a major player nationally in the NIL space over the past year. Texas Tech football brought in the No. 2 transfer portal class nationally in 2025, a group headlined by several highly sought-after players. JT Toppin, an All-American forward on the school's men's basketball team, put off the NBA draft to return to Lubbock on an NIL deal reportedly worth about $4 million.
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The Red Raiders' once-middling softball program made the championship of the Women's College World Series behind the arm of superstar pitcher NiJaree Canady, a former national player of the year who transferred in from Stanford and earned a record-setting seven-figure NIL deal. In all, Texas Tech athletes are reportedly set to earn a combined $55 million this academic year in NIL-related compensation.
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Cody Campbell Save College Sports
While Campbell has been a power broker in the current system of college athletics, and while his beloved alma mater is thriving in this world of NIL deals and the transfer portal, he has been pushing aggressively for reform.
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The television commercials are only a small part of a broader effort.
Campbell has launched his own non-profit, Saving College Sports, whose website domain is shown at the end of the ad. The organization, according to its website , is "dedicated to fighting for a college sports system that protects both student athletes and the future of college athletics at every level."
That work has thrust Campbell into the highest levels of power of the American government. Campbell has established a close relationship with President Donald Trump . Though a commission on college sports that was teased earlier this year — which included Campbell and Nick Saban — hasn't come to fruition, a person with knowledge of the situation told USA TODAY Sports' Matt Hayes that Campbell is Trump's point person on the issue of college sports, with Campbell reporting directly to him.
"I've been in conversations with President Trump for quite some time now, and the one thing I can tell you is he cares very much about preserving and maintaining college sports," Campbell said to USA TODAY Sports in July . "Not just football, but women's sports and Olympic sports, and the opportunities they provide. It's one of the best things we have culturally in this country. I don't want to see it die. And we can all see it's dying."
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What, exactly, does Campbell want to see change?
For one, he believes the Student Compensation and Opportunity through Rights and Endorsements (SCORE) Act, which is being fast-tracked in the U.S. House of Representatives, is too narrow in scope. He thinks the legislation inadequately addresses issues facing women's sports and non-revenue sports, as well as problems plaguing smaller schools as they try to compete with their larger, richer counterparts.
In a column he penned for USA TODAY on Monday, Sept. 15, Campbell argued there needs to be a new governing body in college sports that replaces the NCAA, which he writes has "fought tooth and nail against any rule that would benefit student-athletes and protect the most vulnerable schools and sports."
"The NCAA's version of the SCORE Act ensures that the powerful colleges stay powerful and relegates the lesser-advantaged schools to permanent irrelevance," he wrote . "The SCORE Act also does not address the fact that there will not be enough money to pay for sports, like track, swimming, volleyball, soccer and softball. Through sneaky and strategic drafting, the SCORE Act does not explicitly grant the NCAA direct power, but the implications are clear — they will regain control if this bill becomes law."
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What is the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961?
Campbell's primary and oft-repeated solution to many of the challenges facing college sports is amending the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961.
For many, including millions of fans tuning into games and seeing Campbell on their screens, it's a relatively obscure piece of legislation.
The law, which was passed in response to a series of antitrust cases against the NFL, gives professional sports leagues an antitrust exemption to pool together their media rights and sell them as part of a single package rather than each team or division having its own deals.
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In Campbell's view, the Power Four conferences can get together and have a single media-rights deal rather than each league having its own contracts with television networks. Those conferences earn a projected $3 billion annually from their media rights and one industry person told Hayes that figure could double if the four conferences had a single deal.
Still, there are significant obstacles to Campbell's dream becoming a reality.
For one, amending the Sports Broadcasting Act would run counter to the Supreme Court's landmark 1984 decision in NCAA v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma, which ruled that the NCAA had an illegal monopoly over television rights. That ruling allowed schools and conferences to seek their own media-rights deals, a system that's largely still in place today.
There's also the challenge of getting the Big Ten and SEC, the most powerful conferences with the most opulent media-rights deals, to agree to come together with the ACC and Big 12 under a single contractual umbrella when they're so obviously advantaged in the current structure.
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"Why would we share revenue when we have the product that bears the fruit, and others don't?" an unidentified SEC official said to Hayes .
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Who is Cody Campbell, billionaire Texas Tech booster in commercials?
