The chaos is well and truly underway. The Big XII is finally imploding, with the imminent departure of Texas A&M to the SEC leaving only nine teams behind. Now the rumors are starting about Texas, Texas Tech, Oklahoma and Oklahoma State to the Pac-16 (!) and Kansas to the Big East (where their football-to-basketball ratio will be an asset rather than a liability). Missouri keeps getting pitched as a possible 14th for the SEC. And this leaves Baylor, Iowa State, and Kansas State…standing without a chair when the music stops.
In 1984, the Supreme Court rules that the NCAA was in violation of antitrust law by collectively selling the rights to college football broadcasts. As a result, 64 schools broke away and formed the College Football Association to sell their game rights to the highest bidder, while the Big Ten and Pac-10 in turn made a separate deal with ABC. Famously, Notre Dame then went to NBC for their home schedule exclusively, and before long every conference was trying to make the best arrangement for itself…which is how we got here. The SEC got the world from CBS and ESPN, only for the Pac-12 to get the universe from Fox, and now the arms race has hit critical mass yet again.
The situation we find ourselves in is this:
1) Conferences will be increasing their membership in an attempt to reopen their broadcast deals and negotiate better arrangements for themselves.
2) Most conferences are at 12 members already.
3) Conferences larger than 12 are inherently untenable owing to the limited number of games available in a season.
4) Conferences as large as 16 will invariably function as a joint alignment of two 8-team conferences, and will in almost all cases result in splitting up intraconference rivalries.
5) Superconference realignment for football purposes stands to have a deleterious impact on non-football sports.
6) At some point, schools will be unable to keep up with the arms race associated with major college football, either from a financial standpoint or from an unwillingness to prioritize the sport.
We are reaching a point where another CFA-type situation is in the offing. The biggest-ticket programs – think the SEC exclusive of Vanderbilt, the Big-XII as of last season, USC, Notre Dame, Florida State, Miami, probably BYU and possibly Ohio State and/or Michigan, and possibly a few others – could conceivably assemble themselves as a new CFA, withdraw their football programs from NCAA sanction and set themselves up as their own thing. Call it the College Football Premier League. All the big-time programs – Florida, Alabama, Oklahoma, Texas, USC, Ohio State, basically anyone who’s played in a national title game or more than one BCS bowl in the last decade – will go off on their own, along with the Auburns and the South Carolinas and the Oklahoma States and the Texas Techs and the other schools intent on being a football factory first.
Say, the top 64 teams, organized into four 16-team conferences for the sake of a name and a title game, but effectively playing in 8-team pods en route to an 8-team playoff for their own championship of college football. And the rest of what’s currently NCAA Division I-A possibly reorganizing as a sort of I-AA-plus, possibly with its own championship tournament, possibly not. Either way, you can forget about the bowls, save perhaps as a sort of framework for the Premier League playoffs or a series of consolation matches among the teams knocked out.
Except for the Rose Bowl, of course, and the Big 14 and Pac-14, which probably won’t go for that Premier League nonsense. Or maybe they will, who knows – but then, if there’s a bowl and a conference that have always held themselves to be above the rabble of mortal football, it’s the Rose Bowl and the Big Ten. So who knows.
Either way, I doubt Vanderbilt makes the cut. The eternal argument – serve in heaven and cash fat checks, or reign in hell and be the best of the dregs? – might be settled forcibly. I doubt the new-look CFA is going to be all that concerned with AAU membership or endowment and research credentials; the key metric will be the ability to deliver eyeballs on Saturday afternoons…