One disagreement I’d have with that article is that ESPN can be held at fault.
While ESPN doesn’t compete with Florida State, they hold the media rights to certain schools. If they leveraged influence over a cartel (either explicitly or implicitly through their control of comparison metrics) to profit, they could easily be seen as acting illegally (and, yes, I know they own the ACC media rights, but they also own the SEC).
Antitrust cases are really hard to prove because you need to show that 1) people colluded and 2) that the collusion resulted in a different outcome than what would normally have been achieved.
In the DOJ chicken anti-trust case, they had executives (CEO in one case) from multi-billion dollar chicken companies sharing an excel spreadsheet showing what they all planned to offer their largest customer. They were texting during negotiations to jointly plan their responses. Everyone still got off (two mistrials and an acquittal) because the government couldn’t prove the outcome of the negotiations was different than what would have naturally occurred.
By extension, to bring criminal charges you’d have to show both collusion and that the outcome would have otherwise been different. As much as we believe that last point, we can’t prove it.
www.espn.com
