What’s Going on in College Football?

NCAA Logo 1957

Remember when athletic conferences existed to foster regional competition? Remember when you could drive to almost every intra-conference away game? Well, no more, unless you’ve got the time to drive thousands of miles or spend thousands of dollars on a weekend at the other side of the continent. In 2024, three of the five so-called Power Conferences will become truly national conferences (the Big 10, Big 12, and the ACC – Atlantic Coast Conference); one, the Southeastern Conference (SEC) will remain somewhat regionalized but will cover more territory; and one, the PAC-12 Conference, is facing extinction. Why are college football conferences scattering their members all over the place? Do I care whether my alma mater, Georgia Tech, and Cal-Berkeley become ACC gridiron rivals? No, but I am interested in seeing how the competition between their engineering schools is working out. Moreover, how many students, faculty and alumni from the University of Maryland will buy tickets and travel to Seattle to watch their Terrapins play the Washington Huskies? I daresay, not many. I suggest the three main reasons for all this shuffling and scattering are money, money, and, uh, oh yeah: money. If the athletes, students, alumni and fans receive any added benefit from conference realignment, it’s purely collateral.

It all started when college football games began being televised in the mid-50’s (and it began with just one game per week – one game!). Since then, the time-honored autumnal rite of amateur sport between nearby colleges has been leveraged into a nationwide capitalist juggernaut for the NCAA, television networks and the universities – truly a Wall Street love story.

For the record, I’m a lifelong SEC fan. I was born, raised and lived my entire life in SEC country, and both of my alma maters (Georgia Tech and University of Florida) were founding members of the SEC in 1933 (Tech left the SEC in the mid-sixties and later joined the ACC). However, I’m disappointed to learn that, in a major economic study published in 2013, SEC schools outpace the other Power Five conferences in average spending per athlete, while simultaneously spending less per academic student. That said, the gulf between spending on student-athletes (chuckle) and academic students at all Power Five conferences is stunning.

There is no doubt that television and the advent of cable television have been a godsend to fans like me who want to watch games from the comfort of their living rooms. And I don’t mind that it’s capitalism that makes that possible. What I do mind is that corporate and institutional greed has taken over the game of college football, and turned a sporting event commercial enterprise. For example, remember when timeouts lasted only a minute? Now, due to the billions being spent on television contracts, timeouts are far more frequent and they run from two to three and a half minutes per timeout wherein enough commercials are crammed in to pay for it all. Even the 30-second timeouts last over a minute. The NCAA and ESPN should be penalized for delay of game.

During the first 50 years of the television era there was only a trickle of inter-conference moves (e.g., Arkansas and South Carolina joining the SEC, Penn State to the Big 10). Around 2010, conferences began stretching their boundaries by moving into regions in which they had not actively competed before. In 2013, the Big East Conference was virtually decimated by defections, and with that, regionality in bigtime college football truly became a thing of the past. Now many schools within the same conference are thousands of miles apart. Can you hear the ka-ching of airline, hotel and restaurant cash registers?

Since the 50’s, about 20 teams could be considered dynastic by consistently finishing their seasons ranked somewhere in the top 25, and often in the top 10. This past decade (2013 – 2022) has seen five teams finish consistently in the top 10: Alabama (9), Ohio State (8), Oklahoma (8), Clemson (7) and Georgia (6), and all but Clemson have a chance to finish there again this year. These five teams have collectively won eight of the last ten national championships, and Alabama has another shot at it this year. What do all these super-dynastic schools have in common? They are all big, and I mean big, money programs. In fact, four of them, Ohio State, Alabama, Georgia and Oklahoma, rank in the top ten in TV revenue receipts, with Ohio State being way out in front. The other six, Texas, Michigan, LSU, Texas A&M, Florida and Penn State, are all super elite programs and former national champions, and next year all of them will play in either the SEC or the Big Ten. The symbiosis between money and football prominence is pretty clear, don’t you think?

I am hoping that these forthcoming drastic realignments will bring more parity both within and between conferences, but I’m not optimistic. Instead, I believe that in the next decade, 2024 – 2033, nine of the ten national champions will be either an SEC or a Big Ten school, and none of them will be a team not already mentioned in this article. I’ll give Florida State, Clemson and Notre Dame an outside chance of being the tenth. When the 12-team playoff system goes into effect next year, we will see the four dominant conferences filling almost every at-large slot, most notably with teams from the SEC and Big 10.

Here’s the new lineup of the “Too-Big-to-Fail Four” conferences.

First up, the ACC, which could also be called the SAT Conference because of its many academically elite schools . . . which may explain why they currently have only one school in the top ten and two in the top 25. At one time the ACC stretched along America’s southeastern seaboard. When the expansion craze started several years ago, it reached westward to add Louisville from landlocked Kentucky and northward to add Pitt, Syracuse and Boston College. Contiguity was lost, but it was still locked within the Eastern time zone. Then it reached across the continent to pluck Stanford and Cal-Berkely from the PAC-12 Conference and also to Texas to grab SMU. None of these schools will increase the ACC’s prestige in football, but average SAT scores should definitely climb. On the monetary side, the ACC will penetrate two major TV markets, the Bay Area and Texas. The ACC is now comprised of 17-ish schools because Notre Dame (another cash cow) plays a heavy ACC schedule. Money, money, money.

Moving on to the Big 12, it began as twelve schools from seven adjoining states lying west of the Mississippi, east of the Rockies, and south of the Dakotas. Soon, its two most elite schools will depart, while four defectors from the PAC-12 are coming in. Next year, the Big 12, which technically is the Big 16, and its member schools will be scattered from Central Florida to the Midwest, across the Central Plains and out to the Four Corners. It will have a few near-elite programs, but chances are that only one, the conference champion, will make it into playoffs next year because that’s the rule. The Big 12 will have to wait a while before one of its teams will qualify to join the pantheon of super-elites, and I don’t see one of them winning a national championship in my lifetime. Why? Not enough money, money, money. But they’re working on it.

The Big 10 Conference, the oldest Division I conference, when it had only 10 schools, was mostly huddled around the Great Lakes. Never wanting to be outdone by any competing conference, it absorbed Penn State, a definite elite school but a perennial Miss Congeniality in the Michigan/Ohio State beauty pageant. Then they took Nebraska when it was an elite program, but it has never been one since. Finally, Rutgers and Maryland, two schools that will never be contenders for the championship, were added to allow the Big 10 to penetrate deeper into the rich and heavily populated Big Apple and Beltway TV markets. Money, money, money.

Again, not to be outdone, the Big 10 had to be the biggest conference in the land. Remember when the Big 10 first referred to its two divisions as the Leaders and Legends? What hubris! It will now expand to 18 programs with four new teams huddled along another big body of water, the Pacific Ocean. The four teams, to its credit, are two currently elite programs (Oregon and Washington) and two formerly elite schools (USC and UCLA). That said, the Wolverines and the Buckeyes will remain the Big 10’s premier headliners. Big Blue or OSU may not be the conference champion every year, but look for one or both of them to make it into the new 12-team playoff system for years, and possibly decades, to come.

With 18 schools, the Big Ten will be the largest conference – naturally – with by far the largest alumni base and tons of money, money, money. It will continue to think of itself as Texans think of Texas: the biggest and the best, even though it has only won three national championships in the last 50 years (excluding Penn State’s two championships won as an Independent), as compared to the SEC’s 21, the Big 12’s 9, the PAC 12’s 8, and the ACC’s 7. And please, don’t tell me it’s because the intraconference competition is the most rigorous.

A brief word about the PAC 12, a conference that has been raided and plundered to the extent that only two teams, Oregon State and Washington State, survive. The remnant may try to absorb the Mountain West Conference if the MWC is willing to surrender its name and be the new, but certainly not improved, PAC 12. In any event, it will never recover the esteem it once had. Unfortunately, for the PAC 12, it’s out of the money, money, money game.

Okay, let’s talk about the SEC. Of the Too-Big-to-Fail Four conferences, it remains regional, bordered by the Atlantic Ocean on the East, the Gulf of Mexico on the South, Interstate 35 on the West, and the Big 10 on the North. Like the Big 10, the SEC has two super-elite schools, Alabama and Georgia, and, like it or not, they’re going to hang around the top of the SEC for a long time. Over the past 50 years, six different SEC schools have won a national championship as compared with the Big 10’s two (can you guess which two?), but next year both conferences will have more bona fide contenders within their ranks when the Big 10 adds former NCAA champs USC and Washington, and the SEC adds former champs Texas and Oklahoma. It’s a no-brainer that the Big 10 and the SEC together will fill more than half of the slots in next year’s AP Top 25 ranked teams.

I’m not fond of having a small cabal of schools perennially dominating college football – unless, of course, one of them is my alma mater. I believe it affects competition in a bad way, because they already attract an inordinate number of the nation’s top high school talent. Now they will probably attract even more. Although it’s hard to rise to the summit of college football and easy to fall from it, we’re probably going to see the same eight or nine teams dominating the sport for many years to come, and you can bet their staying power at the top will be fueled by money, money, money. Money for the best coaches, money for the best facilities, money for the biggest stadiums, money for the best recruiters, plus the opportunity to play in more prime TV slots – all of which the super-elite, money-soaked programs can dangle before the eyes of the premier 18-year-olds whose eyes are already set on the biggest money bonanza in all of football: the NFL.