Mike Farrell Sports

College Football Recruiting, Opinion, and Analysis

College Sports Tomorrow Offers Impressive, Yet Impossible Super League Outline

The College Sports Tomorrow Group has outlined a sensible and substantive plan.

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Inside NCAA Headquarters located in Indianapolis on Friday
Inside NCAA Headquarters located in Indianapolis on Friday

By Rock Westfall 

A serious and comprehensive plan has not yet met college football’s multitude of challenges. But the College Sports Tomorrow Group has outlined a sensible and substantive plan. However, the iron curtain of conferences, power, money, egos, pigheadedness, and TV deals will likely kill it at conception. 

A Well Thought-Out Idea Whose Time Has Come 

This week, a report by Andrew Marchand and Stewart Mandel in The Athletic revealed that College Sports Tomorrow has the outline of an 80-team college football super league. The format is to take the top 70 college football programs (all members of the former Power Five conferences, plus Notre Dame and SMU) and form seven 10-team divisions.

Next, the other ten teams would be promoted from the lower tier, which is made up of over 50 teams. Those 50 teams, similar to European soccer, would be in constant competition for promotion and relegation in the top league.

Among the plan’s appealing benefits is that there would be no College Football Playoff committee. Instead, each of the eight division winners will be joined by eight wild card teams, with predetermined tiebreaking rules like the NFL. Additionally, all of the participating schools would have an ownership stake in the league.

The proposed CST model would indeed eliminate the traditional conference format for football. Instead, it would create a single entity to negotiate with a prospective union that would represent the players on NIL, transfer portal, and salary structure rules. This embrace of collective bargaining could allow it to avoid the antitrust issues that have limited the NCAA’s ability to enforce its own rules. 

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A Great Plan With Almost Certain Insurmountable Obstacles

Even the hard-core traditionalists can see what time it is in college football. And the proposal from CST is a classic “adapt or die” plan that makes the best of a perilous situation. The plan offers solutions to all major problems with unassailable logic.

The iron curtain with barbed wire obstacle is getting all of the major players to agree on the proposal. Problematic is that the SEC, Big Ten, and Big 12 haven’t met with the group yet. Hence, it is challenging to gauge what the powers of college football think. The proposed plan does NOT include equal revenue sharing and would instead use a weighted model. 

The main reason the current Power Four’s Super Two (Big Ten and SEC) have not met with the CST is that they are terrified of upsetting their TV partners, with whom the conferences have billions of dollars in broadcast deals.

Consider that all the top conferences have locked in with the major networks (ESPN/ABC, Fox, NBC and CBS). Additionally, the FBS conferences recently signed off on a six-year, $7.8 billion extension with ESPN for the exclusive rights to the expanded College Football Playoff. Furthermore, the Big Ten’s deals run through the 2029-30 season, the Big 12’s run through 2030-31, and the SEC’s run through 2033-34. The ACC is the longest, running through 2035-36, although ESPN could alter that.

Even if the conferences like the idea, it would likely be several years before it could realistically be implemented. That is because the leagues and networks would want to untangle current deals for an entirely new model based on unknown divisions and a certain realignment fight that will no doubt be highly contentious. To do so would be far too complicated until after the current contracts expire. 

It’s Unlikely that Sankey and Petitti Will Surrender Power  

It is also important to remember that the Big Ten and SEC allied earlier this year to do their own independent study of college football’s precarious future and how to deal with it.

It is hard to imagine that SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey nor Big Ten Commissioner Tony Petitti would willingly give up control of the two most powerful and richest conferences in college sports in which they dictate all major decisions in college football.

Also, the proposal of taking college football out of the NCAA and into a private equity situation may not sit well with some university presidents and related concerned parties.

The SEC and Big Ten have the upper hand. Thus, there is only one factor in why they would surrender power and control of their futures to the CST. 

Lawsuits May Obliterate College Football into a CST-Type Model  

Many administrative leaders, on both the academic and athletic sides, believe that college sports may end up bankrupted by lawsuits. Indeed, the current college sports landscape is like a minefield in the jungles of the Vietnam War. Title IX, equality issues, non-revenue sports, player compensation, and numerous other challenges are unexpectedly blowing up on college football at different times with surprise explosions that nobody anticipated or could prevent.

Someday, college football must come to grips with today’s landscape and unite in a forward-thinking way to prevent its feckless, inept self-destruction. Unfortunately, a trend handicapper would wager that college football never moves until AFTER the fact and ONLY when it is FORCED to do so.

The CST idea is the best and most well-reasoned plan yet. But power, money, egos, selfishness, reactive instead of proactive, shortsightedness, and litigation fears continue to rule college sports.

Like it was said about an unfortunate Vietnam village at the height of the war, college football must be destroyed to be saved. At that time, the CST may dictate the peace terms.

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