Dan MurphyDec 29, 2025, 08:04 AM ETCloseCovers the Big TenJoined ESPN.com in 2014Graduate of the University of Notre DameFollow on X
‘Paid to Play: Understanding College Sports in 2025’ (12:31)E60’s Jeremy Schaap unpacks the seismic shift that has transformed college athletics from an amateur ideal into a high-stakes enterprise. The full episode ‘Paid to Play: Understanding College Sports in 2025,’ an E60 special, is streaming now. (12:31)
LEAN IN CLOSELY. Cody Campbell is surprisingly soft-spoken. On a cool Friday night in Fort Worth, Texas, a night built for high school football, over the din of cowbells and rattling bleachers and Will Smith’s “Wild Wild West,” it’s difficult to hear the man who has become the loudest, most controversial voice in a fight to shape the future of college sports.
He’s busy. So why, now that he has helped repair the Red Raiders football program, is Campbell spending significant time and money trying to fix college sports? That’s the question most people in the industry ask when they first meet him. What does he really want?
Most of those folks, Campbell said, leave their meetings surprised. He is not the backslapping, overly confident charmer in a ten-gallon hat the headlines might lead you to imagine. He doesn’t stand out in the crowd of parents filling the bleachers despite his broad shoulders and 6-foot-4 frame.
Campbell and his adversaries — most notably the commissioners of the four power conferences — agree that the NCAA is suffering from an inability to enforce its own rules. They agree that a fix will require help from Congress. But each side accuses the other of proposing solutions that are motivated by self-interest rather than what’s best for college sports.
Is Campbell a misinformed newcomer, as some commissioners have asserted, who bought his way into influence? Or is he the fresh voice a broken system needs to embrace its new professionalized reality?
“I’m a threat to the status quo,” Campbell says. “But the status quo is failing. … A lot of people want to hold on to the way things used to be. The fact is, we’ve already crossed the Rubicon.”
ON THE MORNING of Texas Tech’s top-10 showdown with BYU in early November — the biggest game in Lubbock in nearly 20 years — Campbell carves through campus, leaving a wake of fans spinning their necks and calling after him.
A man in a Tech jersey asks for a selfie. He’s holding a poster of Campbell’s face. The eyes have been replaced by laser beams and it reads “Mad Cuz You Broke.” Campbell chuckles, then obliges.
Campbell is the chief architect of an NIL collective, The Matador Club, that has paid more than $60 million to athletes at Texas Tech since 2022, much of it to the football team. The club’s aggressive approach to the NCAA’s new rules has rebuilt a program that historically struggled to make bowl games into a legitimate contender to bring a national championship to the football-crazed outpost in West Texas.
Campbell served on the committee that hired coach Joey McGuire in 2021. He donated $25 million to help rebuild the football stadium. He spearheaded the fundraising effort for the parts of the football payroll that didn’t come directly out of his pocket. He even watched film to evaluate prospects for one of the nation’s best transfer portal classes this offseason.
For his efforts, Campbell moves through a Texas Tech game day with the same unfettered reign as Jerry Jones at a Cowboys game. He might as well own the place. Outside the stadium, he chats with a security guard and slides into a VIP section behind the set of ESPN’s “College GameDay,” barely breaking stride.
The show’s stars take time between their segments to shake his hand. Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark introduces Campbell to a pair of television executives in sharply tailored suits. Campbell, in dad jeans and a black baseball cap, nods along as they speak into his ear. They’d like to set a meeting. They’ll come to him.
The university’s president strolls over to say hello. He knows Campbell’s wife, Tara, and each of their kids by name. Kent Hance, a former chancellor and legendary yarn-spinning Texas political power broker who is the only man to beat George W. Bush in an election, seeks him out with a familiar smile and wave.
“It doesn’t really feel strange,” says Tara, also a Tech alum, as another fan asks her husband for a photo. “These are our people. It feels like family.”
Campbell’s roots run deep here. His maternal great-grandfather, Boyd Vick, was a member of the university’s first class in 1925. The Vicks, according to family lore, arrived in West Texas in a covered wagon in the early 1900s in search of work during a silver rush. When Boyd matriculated to the new university, he played on the football team, naturally. More than a dozen of his descendants now hold Texas Tech degrees.
“He was more outside the tent, throwing rocks for a period of time,” says Dusty Womble, a fellow board member who was the lead donor for Texas Tech’s newly renovated, $242 million football facility.
Campbell sought help from Hance, a former congressman who still holds significant sway in Texas politics. Hance liked him, and surmised Campbell was a rabble-rouser only because he wasn’t yet in a position to act. Hance borrowed a phrase from the ultimate Texas power broker, Lyndon B. Johnson, to explain why he nudged Abbott to put Campbell on the university’s board.
“I’d rather have him inside the tent and pissin’ out,” Hance says, “than outside the tent pissin’ in.”
Minutes before kickoff against BYU, Campbell and his son stroll past the big block letters that spell out Cody Campbell Field near the 20-yard line. Fans behind the end zone applaud as Campbell walks by. He smiles and looks down at his Texas Tech-branded sneakers, school pride from head to toe.
“He came onto the board, and I think that required him to maybe be a little more politically correct and not as disruptive,” says Womble, who happily works shoulder to shoulder with Campbell as vice chair of the board. “He became part of the system, part of the solution.”
Campbell heads up the stadium tunnel toward the locker room, past the marching band. A voice from the brass section shouts, “Thanks for buying us an O-line!”
That one gets him to laugh as he reaches for the door to the locker room. He greets players and grabs a bottle of water from the team’s cooler. McGuire stops by and shakes his hand. “This guy’s a stud. He’s a stud,” the coach says before turning and calling his team up to join him by taking a knee.
Hance sits in his own suite down the hallway with his family and watches Texas Tech physically dominate BYU en route to a 29-7 win, the full manifestation of a program Campbell has helped to overhaul. The stadium remains full well into the fourth quarter. For a growing university trying to compete for applicants with campuses in the state’s biggest cities, you can’t buy marketing this good. Well, except they did.
“Oh, Cody Campbell. I haven’t met him yet,” she says. “When you see him, tell him thank you for me.”
LEAN BACK NOW. Cody Campbell is in your living room. He’s staring right through the television to warn you that college sports are at risk. He’s standing alone in Texas Tech’s empty stadium with a football in his hands, identified only as a former player.
He’s looking at you, but he’s talking to Congress. Athletic departments are bleeding money, he says. Women’s sports and Olympic dreams are in “immediate danger” of vanishing. He has the answer. A “single change” that can generate enough money to “protect all sports at all schools.” He implores Congress to act.
If it were an election year, you might think he was running for office. The television ads, which ran frequently during college football games early this fall, were part of a strategic plan for Campbell to more substantially elbow his way into an ongoing debate among federal lawmakers.
Campbell says he has commissioned research that shows that if colleges could band together, their TV rights would be worth roughly $7 billion — almost double what they make in total now. It’s a change that would direct a larger share of revenue to schools such as Texas Tech, making the Red Raiders less dependent on billionaire alums to help them compete.
Sankey, along with Yormark, the ACC’s Jim Phillips and the Big Ten’s Tony Petitti, declined to be interviewed for this story.
Nonetheless, he says the threat of more cuts remains real, especially if Congress adopts the NCAA’s ideas instead of his. The NCAA and its schools have lobbied for an antitrust exemption that would allow them to place limits on how athletes are paid, but it doesn’t cap other spending races in college sports or provide routes to create new revenue.
Campbell had to decide how he wanted to wield the influence his loyalty had delivered. He says the president’s transition team floated the idea of making Campbell an ambassador. He speaks some Spanish and could fit well in Latin America. Campbell wasn’t interested in moving his wife and four young children to Buenos Aires or San Salvador. Nor was he interested in stepping away from the thriving oil and gas business he built with his lifelong best friend. Campbell had another idea.
Rollins smiled, unsurprised. A season-ticket holder at her alma mater, Texas A&M, she understood the importance of college sports and the current turmoil of the industry. She knew Trump had a strong interest in sports. She promised to make some introductions.
Sellers moved to the small town of Canyon, Texas, 100 miles north of Lubbock, in the summer before seventh grade. When he arrived for the football team’s opening two-a-day practices, Campbell was one of the first new classmates he met. Sellers played right guard. Campbell played right tackle. The following year, they switched — “I got a little taller, he got a little fatter,” Sellers says — and that’s where they stayed for the next four years on the offensive line of the Canyon High Eagles.
Campbell and Sellers were roommates and teammates at Texas Tech when they launched their first business, buying a plot of land on the edge of Lubbock and prepping it to sell to a real estate developer. They have been partners more or less ever since, interrupted only briefly by Campbell’s 15-month NFL career with the Indianapolis Colts.