Independence for college football?
UCLA’s Chip Kelly advocated for a sensible change to college football. Could it really happen?
UCLA football coach Chip Kelly is one of the most outspoken critics of college football’s massive realignment. On the eve of UCLA’s bowl game this past weekend, Kelly was asked a question about the changes happening in college athletics. His answer was less complaining, and more pro-active on what could be done instead.
Here’s the full video if you want to listen to Kelly’s speech.
These are some bullet-point highlights:
All college football teams should be independent, just like Notre Dame.
All other sports at a university, including basketball, should return to their previous geographic-based leagues.
College football teams should be split into two categories, half the teams in the Power Five and the other half in the Group of Five.
Corporations, such as Nike and Amazon, could sponsor the specific names of geographic-based football “leagues.”
A commissioner should be appointed to oversee college football.
All college football players should be paid, in a revenue sharing model with their universities.
It wasn’t the first time Kelly has brought this up. He said it in the summer before the season began, when the Pac-12 had just crumbled into a Pac-2.
Personally, I love just about everything about it. For over a decade, I’ve been among the many advocating to separate college football from all other sports in relationship to conferences. For example, UCLA and USC could still join the Big Ten for football, but all the other sports would remain in the Pac-12 Conference as we previously knew it.
Kelly did not provide a power point presentation – again, he was answering a question in a press conference, while admitting he’s thought about this a lot – but he mentioned a scheduling model of seven “conference” games geographically, four “non-conference” games against a different region, and one open date to play a regional opponent outside your division.
Yes, it’s a fabulous idea. It’s not even a radical idea. It’s actually a sensible idea.
But is it realistic? What must happen for this to actually occur?
Television partners
First, most importantly, you’d need all of the television networks to tear up their existing contracts and renegotiate new contracts.
This means that ESPN/ABC, Fox/FS1/FS2, CBS/CBS Sports Network and NBC/Peacock would all have to work together to a certain degree. Right now, conferences negotiate media deals with networks, usually multiple networks.
Kelly’s plan was for all colleges to share in the same TV contracts. [He didn’t mention this, but obviously Alabama would get more money than, say, New Mexico State.]
This is the biggest impediment. Networks are competitive. They might be willing to give up, or share, or change, some of their current inventory of games. But would they want to share it all equally?
They’d need new contracts for football, then separate contracts for all the other sports. It would be lots of lots of billable hours for lawyers.
This is not insurmountable. What the networks want is the best matchups to draw the highest ratings. Depending on what the new NCAA Football Commissioner gets the schools to agree upon for a scheduling model, this would likely lead to even better matchups.
If the NFL can divide up its 32 teams into various packages for Fox, CBS, ESPN/ABC, NBC, Amazon and the NFL Network, then I think a NCAA Football Commissioner could do the same for the 133 colleges.
The devil is always in the details. Would the networks all pay the same amount of money? Would they pay more or less money? Are they getting more games? Better games? Is the distribution of games equal? Would the networks hold a “draft” to pick the games they want to televise? [Man alive, THAT WOULD BE AMAZING if networks held a televised draft of games to televise.]
The Group of Five
This arrangement would make permanent what is basically the reality right now. There is a varsity and a junior varsity in college football.
The varsity is the SEC, Big Ten, Big 12 and ACC (and previously the Pac-12). As the dust settles on the changes, we’re at 67 teams in those four conferences, or the Varsity.
The junior varsity is the American, Mountain West, Conference USA, Mid-American and Sun Belt. Including Oregon State and Washington State, in what’s now the Pac-2, you’re at 66 teams in the JV.
If this ever happened, there would be intense political maneuvering by a lot of colleges, including my beloved San Diego State, plus the Pac-2 teams, to escape the Group of Five into the Power Five before the door is sealed shut.
We’ve seen some colleges “move up” in the ranks the last decade. From the Mountain West, Utah joined the Pac-12 and TCU joined the Big 12, and both thrived. BYU, Houston, Central Florida, Cincinnati are among the other teams “moving up” into the new Big 12.
Nothing is ever set in stone in sports, but Kelly’s plan of Varsity/JV would make it exceedingly difficult to move up.
Not that the Group of Five has much power anyway, but they’d need to accept their status as the JV. Again, this is the unwritten truth now. I think this would be a non-starter for some of those roughly 64 schools.
Kelly’s “7-4-1” scheduling model would hurt a lot of these schools, which use the guaranteed money they get from one-off road trips to Power Five opponents to subsidize their budget. Kent State, for example, netted $5.2 million in 2022 from playing at Washington, Oklahoma and Georgia.
In my ideal scenario, college football would follow a “relegation” system similar to the English Premiere League in soccer.
The Cliff Notes version: the worst teams in the Varsity would get “relegated” down to the JV, and the best teams in the JV would move up to Varsity. You’d do this based on records, computer formulas and performances in bowl games. You’d pick the number of teams swapping and the frequency this occurs.
[Man alive, this would be so SOOOOO much fun, but unfortunately, it’s just not happening. There is no way the 67 teams in the Varsity would agree to potentially lose their status and TV income.]
The Power Conferences
Dropping my “relegation” idea and back to Kelly’s more basic plan, convincing the current Power Conference teams might be the easiest.
As long as these 67 colleges are getting the same TV money, they’ll probably agree to anything. The TV money is what caused all this conference realignment nonsense. If you tell these universities they are getting the same money *and* they don’t need to send their softball team across the country for a league game, I’m sure they’d be thrilled.
The football coaches might not like the scheduling model because they’d prefer a couple of easy guaranteed wins against vastly inferior competition, but administrators would certainly prefer keeping their fans happy with more interesting regional matchups.
College Football Playoff
Starting in 2024, the college football playoffs will expand to 12 teams. The champion of the top six highest-ranked conferences earns an automatic berth, plus six at-large selections. The top four seeds get byes.
This is the best opportunity for Group of Five schools to regularly get invited and actually have a chance at a national title. It’s taken decades to finally each this level.
Under Kelly’s idea, would the College Football Playoff (remember, it’s a separate entity from the NCAA) decide to no longer include the JV Group of Five? If so, the Group of Five would be obviously against it.
Would their opinion even matter? No.
The Power Five (now Power Four) have always done whatever they wanted to do. Kelly’s plan wouldn’t change that. If anything, it would amplify it.
Bottom line: could it happen?
I have doubts that anything sensible will ever occur in college football.
You’re asking the very same people who created this convoluted money-grabbing travesty to deconstruct it all back into a logical format.
But who knows, maybe Chip Kelly’s speech might start it.
It might depend on how much energy Kelly wants to exert in preaching this plan, giving interviews to media members with the biggest megaphones, or closed-door meetings.
Or it might depend on whether Kelly gets Nick Saban and other powerful football coaches to lobby harder for this, and they join with basketball coaches with the most authority, and they put the right pressure on the right Athletic Directors, and they put the right pressure on the influential conference Commissioners, and they start talking to the TV networks.
Ultimately, it all comes down to leadership and vision. It takes a group of people -- either from the TV world or the collegiate world -- to map out a plan and sell it to everyone involved.
Know anyone who wants the job?
I think this is key. But it won’t ever happen until the other sports collapse because of the insane travel schedule and the effects of the remaining student athletes. Think about a ucla college softball player traveling to Rutgers and Maryland in the middle of midterms? On commercial flights with a per diem.
But alas, the student athlete is always thought of last and therefore nothing will change unless cfb decides it is losing money.