College football–and college sports in general–are really going through some unprecedented times right now. The NIL rules have shaken up over 100 years of amateur tradition, the NCAA is on unsteady ground as an institution, while the conference expansion roulette heating up really feels like it’s about to re-draw the map in a lasting way that makes Texas A&M or Nebraska leaving the Big 12 years ago look relatively quaint.
For Notre Dame the attempts by Texas and Oklahoma to join the SEC feels like whiplash coming off the heels of a future 12-team playoff system that was extremely friendly to Notre Dame and seemed to have locked in independence for the Irish. In fact, all the way back on June 12th I wrote exactly that–expansion for the playoffs saved Notre Dame as an independent for my lifetime.
Here are some thoughts on the recent conference expansion rumors that could change the current landscape:
Ya’ll Go Ahead Then
Conferences trying to add new members, increase their membership, and attempt to increase their monetary value is something that personally doesn’t move the needle much for me as a Notre Dame fan. I see why the likes of Texas or Oklahoma would make the jump out of greed but I also view it more with bemusement than anything.
There are limits to a conference’s power within the traditional structure of college football (and sports in general) and the more the leagues increase in size the more difficult you’re making it for certain programs within your own cabal. For example, life may be tougher for the Sooners in the SEC but they don’t really view it that way since they are a current power and believe (maybe rightfully) that they’ll get even stronger with the increased exposure and money. It’s the likes of Texas A&M and Tennessee, traditionally second-tier members, who will feel the squeeze even more and win a lot less.
But their checks will be a bit larger.
Of course, the circular arguments we could see with 3 or 4 SEC teams making the playoffs is frustrating for some. The other side of that coin is that while a 9-3 Oklahoma might not seem worthy from the SEC you’d have to advocate for non-conference winning 10-2 Washington or 10-2 Penn State in their place instead. Then, it’s not so easy to say no to the SEC!
The Waiting Game
Notre Dame is still uniquely positioned right now and can afford to wait and see how the dust settles. Of course, many Irish fans are worried what all of this will mean to our team but this is so much scarier for the remnants of a Texas and Oklahoma-less Big 12 and most of the smaller Power 5 programs in other conferences, too.
If I had the power I’d like to figure out today if the future is going to evolve toward re-drawn Super Conferences where it’s possible the Power 5 gets reduced to just 4 or maybe even just 3 conferences.
We basically have the following scenarios:
1) Expansion leads to 4 Power leagues
2) Expansion leads to 3 Power leagues
3) Expansion keeps 5 Power leagues as Big 12 adds new members
Choice 1 would be preferable from a Notre Dame perspective. If the SEC, ACC, Big Ten, and Pac-12 want to bloat themselves into 16-team, 18-team, or 20-team conferences be my guest! In the current environment it’s difficult for the elite teams to get even more elite and all this would do is squeeze the non-elite teams in the conference even more.
Choice 3 isn’t really that bothersome although giving a bigger platform to AAC teams (who will surely be raided quickly in this scenario) probably just complicates the sport. Now more than ever, the highest level of college football does not need upwards of 75 teams given power status. A lot of these schools still struggle to pay the bills and joining a poor man’s Big 12 likely doesn’t help their cause, and maybe make it worse.
Choice 2 is interesting and long-term isn’t good news for Notre Dame as it would start to consolidate too much power into a shrinking amount of conferences. However, I’m not sure how we’d even get to that point in the near (thinking 20 years or so) future where a conference like the ACC or Pac-12 would cease to exist along with the Big 12 being gone.
Super League & No NCAA
The greatest fear with conference expansion would be it happening very quickly, to an enormous degree, while the NCAA ejects itself from the sport as we see a Super League beginning to take shape. For example, let’s imagine the SEC grabbing Ohio State, Michigan, Florida State, and Clemson in addition to Texas and Oklahoma.
There’s worry that a “semi-pro” league would form with Notre Dame on the outside looking in and it would force Notre Dame to make a very important choice for the future of its football program.
I tend to think the semi-pro fears are overblown (I believe we’ll continue to see academics and concrete attachments to universities beyond just wearing their school colors) so in the worst case scenario of a Super League coalescing I would hope Notre Dame acted quickly to join.
Being a part of a Super League, especially if they create their own separate championship, is the only reason Notre Dame should get rid of its independence in football. Some may disagree as such a move would go against the mission of the university but participating in a second-rate competition with peers of Penn State, Wisconsin, Washington, USC, Stanford, Oregon, Miami and the like will slowly shrink the Fighting Irish into a has-been program without the cachet to consider itself a national program.
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Don’t forget about the 12-team playoff in all of this. Jack Swarbrick mentioned recently that while there’s a massive lack of stability among the college football landscape he’s more committed than ever to independence given the playoff restructuring while coming off the lone campaign in the ACC during 2020.
I’ll say with some confidence that a Super League probably isn’t forming. It would certainly take a long time and so much coordination between parties that right now don’t have the same interests. It’d also take a lot of contract-breaking and is something that would grow ever-more complicated with teams from multiple conferences joining up together.
No one can even guarantee that a Super League would even work for an extended period of time. Who’s to say the SEC could balloon to 20 teams but a few years later Florida, Georgia, Texas A&M, LSU, Tennessee, and South Carolina decide to go do something else? I know that’s sacrilegious and absurd for some people to believe but it could happen.
Extremely long-term, I’m thinking 50 years or longer, these larger conferences and particularly a stronger SEC will slowly drain Notre Dame’s legacy as a football power. If the SEC really is raking in so much more money than everyone else it will have an effect that would be difficult to reverse. As I said, it’s a much larger problem for the non-SEC teams who think they are still relevant today but it’ll hurt Notre Dame too.
By some estimates, Notre Dame could be leaving as much as $35 million to $40 million on the table by not being in a conference due to upcoming new TV deals. For a program that makes upwards of $120 million per year in revenue that’s a significant amount of cash to turn away. However, as long as Notre Dame has access to the playoffs and a Super League doesn’t form it’s a price, quite literally, they are willing to pay.
The school is in the early stages of expanding Fighting Irish Television (FITV) which will eventually offer a subscription price. It’s easy to lament the current deal with NBC (reportedly worth a paltry $15 million per year through the 2025 season) but a lot of insiders expect FITV to re-define the model for a school like Notre Dame and its relationship with fans leading to an expected windfall of $30 million* or more per year. In other words, Notre Dame is hoping FITV makes up for the gap in pay for not being in the ACC full-time or permanent members in the Big Ten, Pac-12, or SEC.
*I’d probably push back that the revenue will be this large, at least right away. But, I have been on the train for a long time that college football is going to evolve into a much more different experience for fans in the coming decades and stuff like this is the future.
The FITV experiment, should it prove to be a success early on, is an ace in the back pocket for Notre Dame. We’ll likely see increased effort from the ACC to grab Notre Dame for football but the league has very little negotiating power. The exit fee for Notre Dame to leave its agreement with the ACC is rumored to be incredibly high so that likely means Notre Dame to the SEC or elsewhere is off the table for now. Yet, without Notre Dame added to its portfolio (to say nothing of the potential impact of losing Clemson or Florida State) the ACC does not have the bargaining power to negotiate a larger TV deal (their current deal with ESPN runs through 2036 anyway!) that would even come close to making the Irish consider joining due to lost money as an independent.
For Notre Dame it’s still just a case of access to the playoffs means the future is stable while the risks taken are more for other conference members who are betting on a new league or left in the lurch in a crumbling home around them.
Texas and Oklahoma have notified the Big 12 they will not renew their grant of media rights after they expire in 2025.
As it becomes more difficult and expensive to watch the 2 or 3 teams and sports I truly follow. I find I am bracing myself for the day when I pack it in on those teams. I had to change providers last year (Youtube TV to Fubo) to follow my Bruins and in doing so lost a couple networks that I watched when not watching sports. The cost of cable is ridiculous and these streaming services add 5 channels you’ll never watch and go up $10.
The new NIL rules though fairer for the players have the potential to make college athletics into an even bigger sewer, than it has been. As far as my fandom, I am not optimistic about how things are going to shake out.
I’m with you. I can’t decide whether Swarbrick is a brilliant visionary or is overthinking. He has literally said Fortnite is his inspiration. Probably that’s always the question with people that make big swings.
As a consumer, my patience is finite. Between cable, Netflix, Hulu, Prime, Apple TV, etc., my willingness for additional add ons is not endless. At some point I will back out.
But maybe Swarbrick is okay with that? Maybe he’d gladly take for a smaller pool of fans that pay out consistently?
We may be headed for strange times here…
“He has literally said Fortnite is his inspiration.”
What’s his username?
BK4life
I was reading (I think on the athletic) an article that discussed how the WAC expanding too much eventually contributed to its downfall. When you add too many teams, you get to a point where some teams rarely (or never) play other teams, you have to balance schools with an ego (looking at you Texas), and schools might have different cultures or priorities.
Right now, the common goal of making lots of money is keeping them together, but we’ll see.
Scheduling in the super sized SEC could be an issue. If they do east/west divisions, it will almost be like have the old SEC on one side and a subset of the Big 12 in the other, and the teams in each division will rarely play each other. If they do pods, they’ll play each other more often, but champions might be determined by luck of the schedule rather than the best teams (e.g., avoiding Bama, LSU, and OU in a year might be enough to push a mediocre team to a top record).
In that last scenario the “champion” would still have to play one of the big boys in the SEC championship game.
I wonder about several things:
1) Did Sark know? Possibly, but whether Texas is in the Big 12 or SEC, it’s still a top tier job in college football so he likely would have taken it even if they had not said anything.
2) Did Swarbrick know? My guess is no — if you let too many in on the secret then someone is going to spill the beans (see A&M, Texas)
3) Yes, this means that Texas and OU value money more than winning
4) And yes, they are banking on the expanded playoff helping them
Along those lines, A&M has been in the SEC since 2012, and they’ve played Georgia one time in football (2019) and I don’t think they really play again any time soon.
It’s my hope in the inevitable 16+ team super conferences that at least they adapt innovative, fun ideas like pods of 4 teams and more rotation among others.
I cannot imagine what kind of content Fighting Irish Television could produce that (1) isn’t already covered with normal sports TV contracts and (2) would make me want to pay more than like $2 a month max.
My impression is that you’d basically be paying for the games when they move them from NBC to this network
I think so, and it sucks. You can cut the cord of cable but then need to pickup ten $12-16 streaming packages if you want to (legally) get access what you want/like. Welcome to the future.
I do kinda wonder/question if FITV is going to be as prosperous for ND as the NBC contract or if it will be used in conjunction with it. Especially since ND only has 6-7 home games a year to sell, not really sure how they parlay that as a new venture into more than their current situation. But I guess we’ll figure it out and see what happens, probably have to develop the resources and ability to have this available years ahead of time.
Not that anybody cares but me… but they better allow non-US IP addresses to get the streaming whatever (as NBC does not, but at least USTV gets NBC)
Oh, I did not appreciate that. Uh, yeah, you put the games exclusively on there, my price point is probably in the hundreds tbh
1) All home game shown on FITV only. Or, maybe to start it’ll be the only way to access a replay.
2) The only practice footage released comes from FITV. Beat media can only publish written accounts.
3) All-22 footage, maybe????
4) All practice and home game press conferences for ND staff and players only on FITV.
I doubt they do all of this right away but these are 4 big ways to get a lot of ND fans to pony up money. I think there will be a lot of in-house corny stuff, promotional stuff, things aimed at kids, etc. that a lot of fans may not care for as part of the package. Long-term maybe they tie seating and ticket packages to FITV subscriptions, too.
Maybe they can get a hit show like Schitts Creek or Ted Lasso — that would bring in the subscribers
(1) is worth hundreds of dollars to me and (2)-(4) I probably wouldn’t pay $20/year for. I consider myself a pretty big fan. So really whether or not I pay for it boils down to whether games are on there or not.
In the long run (after 2035), I can see a distinct possibility that CFB transforms into 2 “leagues”: 1 semi-pro (maybe becoming NFL affiliated) super-league where academic requirements are gone, and affiliation with school is barely more than using name and mascot. The other, the holdouts who still cling to amateurism and academics, and basically those left out of the super-league. This would definitely be a “b” league, along the lines of FCS now, where they rarely get the top players (even if they still allow NIL).
This has been coming for decades now as the amount of money in NCAA has increased, and it became a huge business. I dont blame NCAA, ESPN, SEC, the NIL, or anyone else for this. This is capitalism doing what it does – capitalize.
Yeah, if anything it’s been remarkable the NCAA/conferences/institutions could conspire and collude to keep all the money and power for so long, considering how large the industry of sports of football and basketball have become.
I don’t think we’ll see a pro league come out of college any time soon.
The elite football schools already make a lot of money. And if you’re cynical many of them already make it very easy to complete course work. What incentive will these schools have to disassociate themselves from academics and potentially open the door to severing that relationship forever and also potentially losing an enormous amount of money, to say nothing of the lost prestige?
At the very least, this development would take a very, very long time. People think this is coming within 5-10 years and I don’t think there’s any way the relationship between schools and football will alter that much so quickly. Minimum 50 years, IMO.
The basics of the sport aren’t changing that much. Now, players can make money via NIL and the SEC is trying to assert its dominance. Taking athletes and making them employees who use school facilities and wear their uniforms with zero course-work is going to be a super tough sell at most universities. On one side, academic types will fight it and on the other side (pro-football let’s call them) it’ll just make things more expensive and the school could potentially make less money than they are today.
You make great points. But I’m cynical, and I think greed always wins, even to the point where it kills the sport in the end (think European Super League). I don’t think it happens at once, but more in a snowball effect manner. The SEC and ESPN obviously see where the money is at. They just added two huge college football brands, and if there is a way for them to position themselves where they have a vast majority of the big brand college football schools, it’s not unfathomable that they get to 24-32 teams and just start marketing themselves as the only college football in town that matters.
If they can poach teams like OSU, USC, Clemson, etc… is a network still gonna pay huge money to broadcast Purdue vs Iowa, or Wake Forest vs Syracuse? The viewers, sponsors, and money are all going to be concentrated in the SEC in that scenario, and any big brands (and the nouveau riche like Wisconsin, Penn State, Oregon) on the outside looking in are gonna be faced with taking dwindling conference money, or trying their best to join.
I think I saw the new payout for the remaining BIg 12 schools is likely going to be closer to $9M/year instead of $40M without OU and Texas. What happens to the Big 10 if Ohio State ever decides to leave for the SEC?
For now, the academics and athletics are tied together pretty tightly, so maybe Michigan or Ohio State don’t want to go join the SEC today. But if the SEC adds Florida State, Clemson, and USC in the coming years, and the best recruits start going south more and more, their brands take a big hit. How long does it take for them to get in while they still can? Maybe when that time comes, football becomes untethered from the schools, but every other sport just goes back to their old conferences? I don’t know, but I see a path towards this happening.
I give it a 20% chance the above scenario happens within the next 10 years. Maybe not likely, but not improbable.
The big X-Factor is if the NCAA gets tossed. I think there is a lot of dissatisfaction with the NCAA leadership in regards to how they approached the NIL, as well as arbitrary and unfair rulings, etc… If I am an ESPN exec, I am probably calling up the biggest brand names and whispering in their ears to break off from their conference and the NCAA and come join my super league. At that point, some of the SEC scraps (Arkansas, Missouri, Ole Miss, MSU, USC, Kentucky) can get kicked to the curb for bigger names
Yes, the NCAA dissolving is another matter as well. That too, I think is very unlikely.
Remember, these universities are moving with all of their sports teams and not just football. Pigskin may be the driving factor but they can’t just toss off considerations for all other sports, too.
Not to defend the NCAA but in this case they still provide a lot of infrastructure for all sports. Without it, conferences will be struggling to find a new foothold.
Greed may always win, no doubt. However, think of how much money the SEC would have to spend in order to set up the administrative structure to support a football Super League and then break away all sports from the NCAA. Right now, I believe the SEC spends $100 million per year on providing for their competitions. Does that cost rise by 200% or 300% without the NCAA around? I’d assume they’d have to hire hundreds and hundreds more people to make this a reality.
We’d also have to then factor in broken TV contracts all over the country (can you imagine the fallout breaking away from the NCAA Basketball tournament?) in addition to re-doing the College Football Playoff money (which the SEC teams are currently adding to their math for increased revenue).
Bottom line, without the NCAA costs are going up for every conference. The larger the footprint these conferences get the more money they have to spend to compete. One could argue we’re very close to a bubble with TV money, too. Sure, there are some projections where SEC teams are going to receive $70 million or $80 million per year after re-structured TV deals in the near future but that doesn’t mean the league has to break away from everyone else. They’re already more wealthy without doing that!
I still think in terms of pure greed, the current setup is best for the SEC. They can add OU and Texas, not disrupt the entire sporting industry too much, not have literally the entire country hate them, and let the NCAA do the work they’ve been doing while keeping costs down as much as possible. My guess is a lot of folks want to see the NCAA severely tweaked but I’d imagine not many among university leadership want them completely gone.
It sucks for the remainder of the Big 12 but I’d be surprised if this causes panic at places like Ohio State, USC, Michigan, Notre Dame, etc. We may be headed toward a situation where the SEC makes the most money, a handful of teams make a little less, and the rest of the teams make a lot less. Really, not too different than things have always been.
I was originally thinking 50 years, but this NIL and SEC expansion seem to be accelerating everything. The idea of an NFL-associated minor league is the least probable thing, since NFL has no need to do anything at this point – but definitely will if it means more $$$.
Here’s my long winded/fatalistic rant about the impact of the accelerating progression towards professionalism in NCAA athletics:
Does the SEC become the de facto NFL minor league? I mean, is that the deliberate goal – that their brand gets stronger, allowing member schools to rebuild rosters each year, poaching the best available from weaker conferences? If that’s the thought, the well will probably run dry pretty quickly. With so much imbalance, the schools outside the wealth bubble won’t be able to fund their programs. It’s easy to imagine viewership and stadium attendance dropping in concert with weaker product on the field. At some point, dropping to FCS starts to look more attractive than trying to keep up.
The job of evaluating amateur athletes (NFL scouting) is going to be changing rapidly. Between NIL rules, massive TV contracts, and the transfer portal, all the talent will be increasingly concentrated. Any player with professional ambitions would be foolish not to migrate towards the high-visibility institutions. Very few Randy Moss types of players (current reference – nailed it!) will exist at second tier schools. At first blush, the League probably likes these moves. But the NFL also loves being able to draw from 100+ feeder programs to replenish talent every year. If the pool of relevant colleges shrinks to the point where smaller schools start to wither, the value of CFB-as-farm will shrink along with it.
Today, the NFL has the best of both worlds. They have a seemingly unlimited supply of ambitious, talented men trying to get into the League. This allows teams to manage their salaries and dump the bloated contracts of aging stars with little risk. The owners also pay zero to maintain and develop farm teams. They don’t have to deal with the high-risk, high-return task of betting on teenagers whose competition sucks, let alone evaluating physical and psychological potential of thousands of kids. And colleges are well funded, so the kids are getting top notch services, from nutrition to coaching.
If, in the future, if the SEC were to fulfill its objectives to the detriment of CFB at large, eventually the NFL would be negatively impacted. Fewer relevant schools=fewer relevant players to evaluate. It’s just simple math, and the supply/demand imbalance that keeps the NFL from investing in player development would be forever changed. The perfect alignment of moneyed interests between NFL and NCAA schools would break down. It’s hard to forecast exactly what that looks like, but I’m betting on billionaire owners above wealthy schools 10 times out of 10.
Speaking of greed, pretty ballsy of ESPN to sabotage the Big 12 (allegedly) so they don’t have to keep paying for the Big 12 media rights.
Watching this conference realignment stuff is addicting.