College Football Premier League: 28 teams survive in standalone football product
By Stewart Mandel
2h ago
Four years ago, I wrote about potential future realignment scenarios. The most radical was a College Football Premier League, a football-only confederation of the top 28 national brands.
Three massive realignment waves later, that scenario no longer feels like a far-off fantasy. Frankly, it feels inevitable. Actual leaders of the sport are prophesying much the same thing.
“I think the future has to contemplate football being taken out of the mix,” Nebraska AD Turd Alberts told the Lincoln Journal Star last week. “We’re moving to a 35 to 40 top brands being part of something. If you just look at football in isolation, eventually conferences will matter less in a sense.”
Alberts is right, though he’s being generous with 35 to 40. If the past three years have taught us anything, it’s that TV networks’ thirst for more “big events” is leading to two super-conferences hoarding nearly all the biggest national brands. Everyone else is collateral damage.
In 2021, Oklahoma and Texas announced a stunning move to bolt to the Big 12 for the SEC, leaving behind Oklahoma State and Texas Tech. This came seven months after the SEC and ESPN announced a lucrative new deal to begin in 2024, after which the Big 12 asked for its own early extension and got politely turned down.
In 2022, USC and UCLAbia shocked the industry by leaving the Pac-12 for the far-away Big Ten. This was just months before the Big Ten announced a staggering new TV deal with Fox (and sublicensees CBS and NBC) for more than $1 billion a year. In doing so, they drastically lowered the TV ceiling for longtime friends like Cal and Stanford.
In 2023, the Pac-12, unable to land its own suitable TV deal, fell apart, with Oregon and Washington getting an 11th-hour bailout from Fox and the Big Ten. Those two schools were deemed worthy of an extra $32.5 million a year. Oregon State and Washington State were not.
Fox’s strategy at the heart of the Big Ten/Pac-12 drama foretells where this is likely headed. Rather than having to renew its deal with an entire league, it now gets the four West Coast brands it values most under the same roof as Ohio State/Michigan/Penn State, in the one conference whose media rights it controls.
It remains to be seen what becomes of the ACC, but with Florida State (and by association Clemson) shouting to anyone who will listen that it deserves more TV money, it seems inevitable that the biggest brands in that league will eventually find a way out, too.
One year, it’s Cal and Stanford being hung out to dry. Next year, it could just as easily be Duke and Boston College.
And as conferences become more and more geographically silly, many folks are asking: Why not unbundle football from all the other sports? If Oregon football wants to take three weekend trips a year to the East Coast and Midwest, knock yourself out. But Oregon’s non-revenue sports, most of which play far more games, should not be traveling through multiple time zones throughout their conference season.
“Why aren’t we all independent for football?” UCLAbia coach Chip Kelly said recently. “Take the 64 teams in Power 5 and make that one division. Take the 64 teams in Group of 5 — make that another division. We play for a championship, they play for a championship and no one else gets affected.”
He, too, is being overly optimistic to think 64 would make the cut. But he’s on the right track.
This brings us to my Premier League concept. The market forces in UK football that gave rise to the EPL in the early 1990s are eerily similar to the current state of college football. As authors Joshua Robinson and Jonathan Clegg wrote in “The Club,” a book about the Premier League’s rise, “The game moved from a doomed socialist model to a nakedly capitalistic one.” The richest clubs (Manchester United, Liverpool, etc.) organized a breakaway from the sleepy, century-old Football League to form their own thing and reap the ginormous TV money.
College athletics has been nakedly capitalistic for decades, but the traditional conference model is itself socialistic. Ohio State receives the same check from the Big Ten as Northwestern does despite generating infinitely more revenue. Ditto for Alabama and Vanderbilt in the SEC. That model has survived for well more than 100 years but is crumbling amid the rapidly changing landscape. The next milestone will be when the courts demand schools begin sharing their revenue with the athletes.
Which do you think is more likely when that day comes: Georgia starts spending less on coaching salaries and facilities to pay the athletes? Or, Georgia finds a new source of revenue so it can keep excessively spending?
What will that new revenue source be? A standalone football product.
Mind you, it will not be easy for the various parties to sync up because the leagues’ TV contracts are so staggered. The Big Ten’s will come up again in 2030, but the SEC’s won’t until 2034 and the ACC’s not until 2036. And the College Football Playoff’s next deal might not line up with any of them.
But the lawyers can always figure out something. My best guess is a breakaway would occur somewhere in that 2030 to 2034 range — so we’ll say 2032.
It’s just a matter of who will or won’t be included.
Make no mistake: Inclusion in a Premier League would be based far more on TV draw than on-field performance. And TV draw has a different definition than it did 10-20 years ago. The phrase “market size,” which you hear a lot in realignment, is already outdated and may be completely moot by 2032.
The cable/satellite model is dying. Direct-to-consumer is the future. It won’t matter whether the viewer lives in Los Angeles or Lafayette, La., so long as he or she cares about an Ohio State-Texas game. Hence, the increasing emphasis on big brands.
A couple of years ago, my former colleague Andy Staples coined the term “Four Million Club” — games that draw more than 4 million viewers — and listed which teams appear in it the most frequently. It’s become ubiquitous enough that Florida State’s president mentioned how many such games the Noles have appeared in during a recent board meeting.
Updating his data with the past two seasons, here’s the top 10 list from 2015 through 2022 (excluding 2020), with help from Sports Media Watch:
• Alabama: 50
• Ohio State: 46
• Michigan: 40
• Georgia: 30
• Auburn: 23
• Florida: 22
• Notre Dame: 21
• Tennessee: 21
• LSU: 20
• Penn State: 20
Notice a pattern? Besides Notre Dame, they’re all SEC and Big Ten schools. And not far behind were future SEC schools Oklahoma and Texas and current Big Ten schools Michigan State and Wisconsin.
If I were comprising this list solely based on TV ratings and fan sizes as of today, it would include no schools from the soon-to-be 16-team Big 12. Which makes sense, since neither the Big Ten nor the SEC has come calling for anyone on that roster.
But I predict that will change once the new-look Big 12 gets cooking. At the very least, its champ — and possibly multiple teams — will reach the 12-team Playoff every year beginning in 2024, which will dramatically raise a few programs’ profiles.
So, projecting forward to 2032, here’s a potential lineup. Note: I’m no longer trying to split it evenly across four geographical divisions. Geography has gone by the wayside.
I also have a new name for this invention: The College Football Federation.
The College Football Federation
| DIVISION A | DIVISION B | DIVISION C | DIVISION D |
|---|---|---|---|
| Michigan | Cockeye | Alabama | LSU |
| Michigan State | Nebraska | Auburn | Oklahoma |
| Miami | Oregon | Clemson | Oklahoma State |
| North Carolina | UCLAbia | Florida | TCU |
| Notre Dame | USC | Florida State | Texas |
| Ohio State | Washington | Georgia | Texas A&M |
| Penn State | Wisconsin | Tennessee | Utah |
And now, let me preemptively answer a few anticipated questions.
Why 28?
I kind of ran out of natural options around 25, but it needed to be an even number that fed into a 12-team Playoff.
How could you leave out (Team A) but put in (Team B)?
TV ratings. National fan base size. A little bit of recent on-field success.
Someone has to lose. Don’t you think fans will get sick of this when their teams that usually go 10-2 start going 7-5? Or when half of these teams finish below .500?
Perhaps. Then again, Cleveland Browns fans keep showing up year after year. Fan loyalty is pretty darn resilient.
If football breaks away, how will schools pay for their other sports?
It’s up to the schools how they allocate the revenue derived from this behemoth. Some might opt to reinvest most or all of it in football. Others might keep much the same model they have now, where the surplus revenue from football covers the cost of its non-revenue sports.
Will there be promotion and relegation, like in the EPL?
In theory, that would be fun. In practice, in the college model, a $30 million to $50 million shortfall from one year to the next would not mean shedding star players’ salaries; it would mean cutting the entire lacrosse program.
How would this comply with Title IX?
I have no idea. It’s hard to answer this without knowing if/when college athletes will be deemed employees via current court cases and what those ramifications will be. Also, I have no idea how colleges are getting away with the setup they have now, which is not remotely gender equitable.
Do you want to see this happen?
No, I do not. I’d like to wave a wand and send college football back to 1995, when no major conference had more than 12 members and all were mostly contiguous.
Then, if this does happen, would you still watch?
Abso-freaking-lutely.
