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Dan Murphy
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.
Did he just say he hates political campaigning? The guy who paid millions of dollars in the past half decade to capture the ear of President Donald Trump? The guy who has paid millions more to put himself in television ads and grab headlines with brash statements about the greed and ego of college football’s power brokers? Is that what he just said? It is.
Campbell is calmly fiddling with the lid of a paper coffee cup, watching the All Saints’ Episcopal High School football team blow out its final home opponent of the season. He doesn’t holler at coaches or referees. His only reaction when his 14-year-old son, a 290-pound mauler on the offensive line, flattens an opposing linebacker is a pair of raised eyebrows and a small grin that barely creases the edges of his salt-and-pepper goatee.
Campbell, 44, is an oil-made billionaire. At Texas Tech, where he has bankrolled much of the football team’s unprecedented launch into national relevance and current spot in the College Football Playoff, he gets as many interview requests as the head coach. The former offensive lineman had a brief NFL career before co-founding one of the largest private oil and gas companies in West Texas, a business he still runs on top of his duties as a father of four, an active Republican fundraiser and the chairman of Texas Tech’s board of regents.
«It feels like every day is 10 days,» Campbell says, taking a swig of his coffee.
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.
Bundled-up frat boys pause mid-beer-sip and smack their buddies in the ribs.
«Yo, that’s the rich dude! Sir, thank you!»
«Bring ‘er home, Cody! Bring ‘er home!» they yell through cupped hands.
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 The eyes have been replaced by laser beams and it reads «Mad Cuz You Broke.» Campbell chuckles, then obliges.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 powerbroker 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.
Texas Tech recruited Cliff Campbell, Cody’s father, to play for the football team in the early 1970s. Cliff’s father worked in the oil fields when he returned home from fighting at Iwo Jima. Cliff’s mother picked cotton to help make ends meet. Cliff was the first member of his family to attend college, thanks to football.
Cody Campbell, having passed up an offer to go to Harvard to keep the family tradition alive, now rides to campus from his home in Fort Worth on an Embraer E550 with a slick, polished wood interior outfitted with throw blankets that have his company logo embroidered in the corners. Covered wagons to private jets in the space of a century, an American success story fueled by the opportunities provided by college sports.
«It’s generational for me,» Campbell says.
He wasn’t always beloved in Lubbock.
In early 2021, Campbell was worried about his alma mater and its place in the future of college sports. Months before college athletes started making money, months before Texas and Oklahoma announced plans to ditch the Big 12 for the SEC, stoking fears that the biggest brands in college football might eventually split the sport and leave programs in small markets like Lubbock in their dust, Campbell was angling for a seat on Texas Tech’s board of regents.
He wasn’t happy with the direction of the football program. And he wasn’t shy about it. On fan message boards and social media, he railed against then-head coach Matt Wells. Campbell was loud and disruptive. Several members of the university’s board didn’t want Gov. Greg Abbott to appoint him.
«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 only a rabble-rouser because he wasn’t yet in a position to act. Hance borrowed a phrase from the ultimate Texas powerbroker, 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 on to 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.
Campbell puts his arm around his son during the team prayer and McGuire’s pregame speech. Then, Campbell follows the team through the stadium tunnel. The players turn right to take the field. Campbell and his son turn left to head to their suite, where the rest of their family, friends and Patrick Mahomes — perhaps the only Texas Tech alum drawing a bigger buzz on campus — are waiting for them.
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.
«I knew he’d figure out how to be an insider once he was on the inside,» Hance says.
His daughter-in-law leans over to ask whom Hance is talking about.
«Oh, Cody Campbell. I haven’t met him yet,» she says. «When you see him, tell him thank you for me.»
Indianapolis Colts.
When real estate went belly up in 2008, the buddies from Canyon tried the oil and gas industry. They scoured small courthouses in Louisiana and South Texas to determine who owned the mineral rights they wanted to purchase and spent long days working to build trust with local landowners. Since then, they’ve sold four iterations of their Double Eagle Energy (a nod to their high school mascot) for a total of roughly $13 billion.
Sellers says he operates by gut feeling. Campbell is the analytical partner — an NFL player whose all-state honors in high school were for his work on the Canyon High debate team. Campbell says he has been an avid researcher since his grandmother bought him his first shares of a sports trading card company when he was in grade school and taught him how to track the market in newspaper clippings.
«He’s the ‘ready, aim, fire’ guy,» Sellers says. «I’m more of a ‘ready, fire, aim’ kind of guy.»
Campbell and Sellers credit their legendary coach Mike Leach with instilling in them an ability to tirelessly sweat small details. Campbell says he wants his children, and thousands of other kids, to have the same opportunity to learn life lessons from their coaches in college sports.
The rest of their success, Campbell says, comes from the values they absorbed growing up in Canyon.
«People out there are just tough,» he says. «They understand that there are good years and bad years. It’s a boom-and-bust area. … You have a bunch of people who aren’t afraid to take risks, who aren’t afraid to break their back to make a living.»
Campbell took risks and built a fortune. Now his résumé — the shrewd oil billionaire with very powerful friends — walks into a room before he does. He says he’s still adjusting to his new reality, still reconciling the gap between public perception and his own view of his story.
«I see myself as a kid from a small town in West Texas,» he says. «That’s who I am.»
THE KID FROM CANYON looks comfortable dressed in a custom-tailored suit and crisply pressed white dress shirt during the first week in December as he steps off the escalator in the lobby of a Las Vegas casino convention center.
Campbell is here to speak to a room of college sports insiders at the annual Intercollegiate Athletics Forum hosted by Sports Business Journal. Campbell and his interviewer, SBJ publisher Abe Madkour, take their seats on stage. The cavernous ballroom suddenly finds a bit of a pulse. Lawyers and administrators tuck away their phones and trade glances with colleagues, perhaps hoping for some fireworks at the end of two days of repetitive panel discussions.
Campbell unspools some of his usual arguments from what has become a stump speech in recent months, sharing his backstory and his plans for adding billions of dollars to the system. He loses his rhythm only temporarily when Madkour mentions that some conference commissioners actually like him. Campbell pauses, bobs his head. «Well … some of them,» he says. The room laughs with him.
Four days earlier, Campbell was at AT&T Stadium watching Texas Tech win its first Big 12 championship. A day before that, he was in Waco, watching his son’s team win a state title. Whatever hangover he was nursing — «I had not had Fireball shots in quite a while,» Campbell says — was wiped away by a warmer-than-expected reception at the conference.
Not that he doesn’t think he’s worthy of being an insider. Campbell points to his bona fides — four years on a university board, four years writing NIL contracts with players, experience dealing with private equity funders (a popular area of exploration among college sports leaders) and his own time as a student-athlete — as he scoffs at the people who say he doesn’t have the experience necessary to understand their industry.
«Everything has changed in the last four years, and I’ve been directly involved on an extremely detailed level for those four years,» he says. «I’m not sure that experience gained 30 years ago in college sports is necessarily that relevant today. … To say that I’m not qualified to be involved in it is sort of an absurd thing to say.»
On stage, Campbell’s interviewer begins to wrap up their 20-minute session with the question that persists in convention center hallways, echoed over cups of coffee in the morning and steak dinners at night: What’s in it for him?
Campbell told ESPN he has no financial stake in any proposed future college sports league. He isn’t interested in using this campaign as a platform to run for office. He doesn’t want to be the commissioner of a new national college football organization if one emerges. His only motivation, he says, is maintaining the same opportunities that launched his success for future generations.
«I know a lot of people have a hard time believing my intentions are pure,» he tells the ballroom in Las Vegas. «… We need to preserve this national treasure that we have. It belongs to all of us. We need to make sure we protect and preserve it, and we make it sustainable for the long term.»
Madkour tells the room that his publication was criticized by some attendees for putting Campbell on the agenda — offering him equal footing as Charlie Baker and conference commissioners.
«We thought he was an important voice to be heard,» Madkour says.
Campbell steps down from the stage and wades through a line of people who wait to shake his hand or pass him a business card. The conference commissioners — all of whom except Petitti were in town for the conference — didn’t stick around to listen to him speak. They didn’t really have to. Believe him or not, Cody Campbell is inside the tent now. His voice is unavoidable.
ESPN researcher John Mastroberardino contributed to this story.
