At this point, I think we’re getting close to there being only two conferences in college football: Coke and Dr Pepper. Or maybe Pizza Hut and Domino’s — whichever corporate monolith is willing to fork over the most moolah for the naming rights.
NCAA football ain’t what it used to be. Money changes everything, and when you’ve got billions of dollars in TV deals on the line, whimsical notions like “tradition” no longer apply.
The Big 12, despite losing its marquee programs, still has a $2.28 billion deal with ESPN and Fox. And even that’s chump change compared to the Big Ten TV deal with Fox, CBS and NBC — a mere $8.05 billion.
And the SEC? According to one Yahoo assessment, the new TV deal with ESPN shakes out to about $6 billion for first-tier rights alone.
A lot of people are making a lot of money off college football. That’s obvious. and with name, image and likeness (NIL) deals and the transfer portal coming into play, it’s equally evident that even more people stand to profit off the sport — including the players themselves.
The end result here seems like a foregone conclusion. Give it five or 10 years, and college football will be hardly anything more than the National Football League lite.
The NCAA isn’t expanding the college football playoffs format to erase any uncertainty about the validity of the championship. They’re doing it because a.) it means more primetime games in the middle of an entertainment dead zone and b.) more followers of more schools will tune in to watch game coverage that’s honestly just 30% football game and 70% commercials nowadays.
The implosion of the Pac-12 tells you everything you need to know about the future of college ball.
Oregon and Washington ain’t leaving the conference because the competition in the Big Ten is any better, but because that means they’ll be playing more games when East Coast viewers (and consumers) are actually awake to watch ‘em. Along those same lines, Texas and Oklahoma jumped ship to the SEC because they knew that they’d get more money (and TV deal leverage) playing against Alabama and Georgia then piddling around with Kansas and Iowa State in glorified sandlot competition.
And thanks to that aforementioned transfer portal, programs don’t even really have to recruit anymore. All you have to do is wait until a quarterback or a defensive end gets tired of Nick Saban’s malarkey and quicker than you can say “University of Colorado,” you’ve got a probable Heisman candidate on your roster.
Pretty soon, student-athletes won’t pick schools based on the quality of a program or the coaching. They’ll chose which college to attend based on the overnight Nielsen ratings.
Heck, you might as well get rid of the term “student-athlete” altogether. Eventually, some wide receiver is going to file a lawsuit and just like that, college football programs will be able to BUY the best team imaginable. Forget “going pro,” these kids will be able to make beaucoup bucks sleeping in for general studies class. You just know if he had it his way, Bo Nix would be in college until he was 50.
Now, I’ve got nothing against college football reorienting itself to modern sensibilities. You can’t expect anything to stay the same forever, not even the industry of 18-year-old fullbacks giving each other concussions for state pride.
But if we’re not careful, the pendulum might just fly off the string altogether.
If things keep going this way, how long until there are teams in the Atlantic Coast Conference from states literally bordering the Pacific Ocean? Will there come a day when we hear a commentator on TV actually say the words “perennial Southeastern Conference powerhouse Penn State?”
Maybe college football will go full NFL and deans and presidents will start threatening to move their campuses to Los Angeles if taxpayers don’t approve a new $1.8 billion stadium. Can anybody else see Brian Kemp on his hands and knees begging the University of Georgia to stay in Athens and not move into some state of the art colosseum out in Vegas?
It sounds preposterous, I know. But then again, so did the idea of Liberty University playing in an actual New Year’s Day bowl game, didn’t it?
James Swift is the managing editor of the Dalton Daily Citizen.