Let's chat about the National Football League. This week's schedule (all times Eastern):
Thu 2024-10-17 8:15PM Denver Broncos @ New Orleans Saints
Sun 2024-10-20 9:30AM New England Patriots @ Jacksonville Jaguars
Sun 2024-10-20 1:00PM Cincinnati Bengals @ Cleveland Browns
Sun 2024-10-20 1:00PM Detroit Lions @ Minnesota Vikings
Sun 2024-10-20 1:00PM Houston Texans @ Green Bay Packers
Sun 2024-10-20 1:00PM Miami Dolphins @ Indianapolis Colts
Sun 2024-10-20 1:00PM Tennessee Titans @ Buffalo Bills
Sun 2024-10-20 1:00PM Philadelphia Eagles @ New York Giants
Sun 2024-10-20 1:00PM Seattle Seahawks @ Atlanta Falcons
Sun 2024-10-20 4:05PM Carolina Panthers @ Washington Commanders
Sun 2024-10-20 4:05PM Las Vegas Raiders @ Los Angeles Rams
Sun 2024-10-20 4:25PM Kansas City Chiefs @ San Francisco 49ers
Sun 2024-10-20 8:20PM New York Jets @ Pittsburgh Steelers
Mon 2024-10-21 8:15PM Baltimore Ravens @ Tampa Bay Buccaneers
Mon 2024-10-21 9:00PM Los Angeles Chargers @ Arizona Cardinals
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Notes -
I know this is the NFL thread, but it seems like a good place as any to discuss college football as well, as discussions I had at a tailgate party over the weekend have had me thinking about how incredibly goofy the college football landscape has become over the past several years, and what the future may hold.
Part I: Project Rudy
Last week, an article at Yahoo Sports revealed that a group of former Disney executives who now run a private equity firm called Smash Capital have been shopping a proposal to college ADs over the past several months. They propose to form a 70 team super-league. While they don't have any particular teams in mind, the assumption is that the league would include all the current Power 4 teams, plus independent Notre Dame and the Pac-12 rump of Oregon State and Washington State. The league would keep current conferene alignments intact (presumably to avoid conference pushback by preserving the phony baloney jobs of the commissioners) but would negotiate a league-wide grant of media rights that would see teams paid based on 3 tiers. They assume that the first tier of the top 16 teams would get something like double what the Big 10 and SEC are currently getting, the second tier of 22 teams would get about what the Big Ten and SEC are currently getting, and the remaining teams would get something comparable to what the ACC and Big 12 are currently getting. G5/FCS games would be eliminated and replaced with marquee matchups of the top teams that would partially drive the increased revenue, and the backers are supposedly putting up 5.4 billion. There's also supposedly an expanded playoff format as well, but the whole presentation hasn't leaked and details are sparse.
This is one of those proposals that looks good on the surface until you start thinking about it and looking closely at the details. It hits some of the high notes of what college football fans want: Conference stability, promotion/relegation, more playoffs, not playing 3 creampuffs a year, etc. The schools should be salivating at the potential to double their revenue. But there's no way in hell that this pans out, and the effect on fans of schools that aren't blue-bloods isn't clear. First, there's the possibility of an antitrust violation, but that's the least of my concerns. The bigger problem is that schools that can't compete won't necessarily make more money. If your team is in the ACC or Big 12, this is neutral at worst, but if you're a fan of a bottom-tier Big 10 or ACC team, a pay cut is almost certain. If Purdue goes 3–9 now, they still get the same national TV money as Ohio State. Under the proposal, they'd be making less than they are now, and Ohio State would be making significantly more. Furthermore, if a marquee team has a bad year, they aren't going to be happy taking less money. Part of the perversity of college sports is that bad teams often have better ratings (and thus drive more revenue) than good teams. Florida is not going to be happy making Big 12 money just because their record dictates that they do.
The plan, of course, anticipates this, and puts two safeguards in place. The first, dumber, proposal is that 8 teams with huge revenue streams would become "permanent" members of the top tier, and would always get the big bucks. This fails for the simple reason that there are more than 8 teams that think they deserve this distinction. If you make the permanent members Alabama, Ohio State, Michigan, Texas, USC, Clemson, Georgia, and LSU, it seems okay at first glance. But there's no way Penn State accepts this arrangement. Neither does Florida, or Nebraska, or Oregon. Texas A&M won't, and Oklahoma won't either. And don't get me started on Florida State. The second guardrail, which is more reasonable in one sense and stupider in another, is that promotion/relegation decisions won't be made based on any kind of statistical formula, but on an opaque process determined by some sort of committee. In fact, I can't find anything to indicate that the "top teams" will even be determined by record and not simply based on how valuable the committee feels they are to the brand. If Baylor wins the national title, one can imagine them still being considered Tier 2 due to lack of sustained national interest, not to mention if Northwestern manages to finish at 16 after a good season where they don't actually win anything.
So you already have a system where there isn't any incentive for any individual school to buy in, other than the possibility of the absolute top-tier doubling their incomes. But even if you do get buy-in from everybody, it still doesn't solve the entire problem. The 5.4 billion that Smash Capital is putting up? Well, that's borrowed from future revenues. the idea is that there's a three year transition period, and the money will be paid back when the new league negotiates a new media deal. This isn't entirely unprecedented; schools that change conferences often forgo a full share for the first several years in exchange for interest-free loans that are paid back in future years. This is supposed to ease the burden of dilution on existing schools while giving the new entrants ready cash. The difference is that the amounts involved are relatively small compared to the total revenues, and are based on what the conference is already making. And it only applies to one or two teams in the conference. 5.4 billion needing to be paid out of revenues, presumably with interest, requires some serious revenue increases. By comparison, the power conferences plus Notre Dame currently gross about 2.7 billion in TV money related exclusively to football. revenues would probably have to increase by at least 30% just for them to tread water once the payoff period begins, let alone for them to get the eye-watering increases that are promised. And if the revenues aren't there, who ends up holding the bag? It's not going to be Smash Capital. This proposal is nothing but hot air.
Part II: Insert Joke About Billable Hours Here
Late last year, the Atlantic Coast Conference, anticipating litigation, preemptively filed suit against Florida State in North Carolina. Florida State quickly filed their own suit against the ACC in Florida. Last February, Clemson, who had initially said they weren't pursuing litigation, filed a similar but slightly different suit against the ACC in South Carolina, and the ACC filed their own suit against Clemson in North Carolina the next day. At issue here are conference exit fees and grant of rights agreements.
In 2004, the ACC raided the Big East, perceived to be the weakest major conference, by poaching Miami, Virginia Tech, and Boston College, the first two of which were perceived to be the strongest programs. The Big East responded by raiding the mid-major Conference USA, and was able to limp along for a few more years, until the ACC came calling again in 2011. The departures of Pitt and Syracuse effectively killed the conference, and West Virginia soon jumped ship to the Big 12. Inspired by this new alignment, the Big 10 poached Maryland from the ACC. Maryland wasn't a strong program, but at the time, media deals involving the nascent Big Ten Network made weak programs in big markets particularly lucrative. The ACC responded by increasing its exit fee to be so large that no school would dare leave. When it renegotiated its broadcast rights with ESPN in 2016, the member schools agreed to grant their media rights to the ACC through the end of the deal, which was soon extended to 2036.
In 2020, the Big Ten and SEC signed lucrative media deals that would pay their members double what ESPN was paying the ACC. Florida State and Clemson, who envision themselves as among college football's elite, were no longer happy with their lot. The ACC money had always been lower, but it wasn't that much lower. Additionally, both of those leagues had since started expanding at a breakneck pace, gobbling up any team that would add value. Surely, another conference would be willing to offer Clemson a better deal than they were currently getting. Surely, Miami and North Carolina thought the same thing, but were biding their time. Florida State, however, made no bones about their wanting out, and the situation was exacerbated when the Playoff committee snubbed an undefeated Seminoles team in favor of an Alabama team with a loss.
The stumbling block, however, is that the current exit fees and grant of rights would make leaving financially ruinous. Exit fees have been around for a while, but they aren't necessarily enforceable. There's a principle in contract law that says that damages have to be proportionate to the actual loss. In some cases the law allows the contracting parties to agree on damages in advance, but courts will only enforce these clauses to the extent that they're a reasonable attemt to estimate damages that would be difficult to prove in the event of breach. Courts will not enforce them to the extent that they are meant to penalize the breaching party. The result of past conference raids was that the remaining members would sue whoever was leaving to collect the exit fee and they'd eventually negotiate a settlement. the Grant of Rights is an entirely different animal, though. Instead of a naked attempt at getting damages for breach, it's essentially no different than an agreement granting a copyright or patent license. If the ACC owns the broadcast rights, then it doesn't matter where Florida St. plays, they get the money from it, and since Florida St. wouldn't be in the conference, they wouldn't get a share of it. How this would actually play out in real life is anyone's guess, and I don't know enough about this kind of thing to make any predictions about what the court would do, but suffice it to say that the cost of Florida St. leaving is estimated to be between 200 and 500 million, and they're suing for declaratory judgment that the exit fee and grant of rights provisions are unenforceable.
As I mentioned above, I'm less interested in the legal details than I am of the overall consequences of these lawsuits. There are two interesting wrinkles. The first is that there's also a fifth lawsuit that was filed by the Florida Attorney General that seeks to make to contents of the ESPN deal public. It came out in litigation that the schools don't actually have their own copies of this agreement due to a confidentiality clause, and the only way they can see it is through personal inspection at ACC headquarters. The more interesting aspect is that it also came out that the ESPN deal doesn't definitively extend until 2036, as was originally thought, but that ESPN has a unilateral option to extend the deal until that date, and that they must make that election by February 2025. If Florida State's suit is successful, there is widespread consensus that it could mean the end of the ACC. It's not so much that the league wouldn't survive without them, but that the absence of any financial penalty would instigate a mass exodus of the stronger teams, leaving the weaker ones holding the bag.
This puts ESPN in an interesting situation. All other things being equal, an freshly-negotiated ACC deal is likely to be worth significantly more than the current deal, so in a normal world, it would be a no-brainer for ESPN to exercise their option. But the litigation changes things. If Florida St. is successful, and the predicted exodus were to occur, the contract would be worthless. And with the other conferences locked into their deals until 2030, it may be to ESPN's benefit to blow the whole thing up. When the ACC's current deal expires in 2026, they'll be in the same position the Pac-12 was last spring. With no TV deal, there's no grant of rights to worry about, and the biggest barrier keeping teams in is removed. To be clear, most ACC members want the conference to survive. The problem is that no one wants to be left without a seat when the music stops, so everyone is behooved to jockey for position early.
At least that was the theory until late last week, when yet another wrinkle emerged in this mysterious deal: It's not a full option like it had been reported. It's actually a complicated situation, the details of which I won't bore you with, but the consensus now is that ESPN is expected to pick up the option because not doing so would put them in a weird situation where they could be subsidizing a television network without any teams, but that's another story entirely. Another wrinkle in this is that it's not entirely clear that Florida St., or anyone else, would even get an invitation to join the SEC or Big Ten even if they could get out of the ACC. Florida St. fans seem to think they'll waltz right into the Big Ten, but that's far from certain. The current Big Ten deal, which runs through 2030, doesn't make any accommodation for expansion. Any increased revenue a new member could provide wouldn't be realized until after that date, and existing members will be reluctant to share too much of the current pie. When the Big Ten added Oregon and Washington at the last minute following the Pac-12's imminent demise, both teams were forced to accept shares far less than the other members, shares that aren't any more than what they had been getting in the Pac-12. Oregon doesn't have to worry about this, with Phil Knight willing to pony up whatever they need, but, aside from some semblance of stability, Washington isn't going to benefit for a while.
Note that that's only a semblance of stability. One possibility is that the new so-called Power 2 renegotiate even larger deals come 2030 that will be enough to feed everybody. The other, and the one some think is inevitable, is that the bigger teams cut the dead weight and form a super conference. If Florida St. isn't content to subsidize Wake Forest and Georgia Tech, then why would they be content to subsidize Illinois and Rutgers? While the dedicated network deals are still lucrative, cord-cutting, and the willingness of networks to pay eye-watering sums for premiere matchups, mean that they aren't the primary drivers of revenue that they once were. Sure, Maryland may get you higher carriage fees in the Baltimore and DC markets, but those pale in comparison to how much you're paying them from a national deal that they don't make much more attractive. One suspects that once the TV deals are up in 2030, the big schools will cut the remnants of the Big Ten and SEC loose and form that new super league, freed of NCAA restrictions and of the Mizzous and Purdues of the world. These schools have no exit fees or grants of rights, because there's no threat of leaving. Until, at least, the blue bloods start talking among themselves about how much money they could be making, and people start getting ideas. Thus is the real reason why Florida St. and Clemson want out. If there's going to be a super league, they don't want their ACC commitment to get in the way, and if it means making less money for a few years, then so be it.
Part III: Burning Down the House to Kill the Cockroaches
I want to shift the talk away from realignment and towards the other big changes that college football has seen the past few years, namely, player payments and the transfer portal. Just to be clear, it used to be against the rules for schools to pay players. In fact, it used to be against the rules for anyone to pay players, to the point that even part-time employment was considered suspect (after all, what does one think when a big donor pays a top recruit a ton of money to ostensibly work at his car dealership one hour per week?) The rule also used to be that if an athlete transferred schools, it came at the cost of a year of eligibility. Transfers still happened, but only if the situation was dire. First, the court ruled that the NCAA couldn't prohibit athletes from monetizing their name, image, or likeness, leading to so-called NIL deals. These deals were ostensibly for promotional purposes, like endorsements, but in reality most of them don't require the recipient to do anything other than play sports. Then, courts ruled that the NCAA couldn't put any prohibitions on transfers, especially since these could prevent them from getting NIL money (in practice, the NCAA had already loosened transfer restrictions). Finally, courts cleared the way for schools to make direct payments to student athletes.
A few years ago, coaches from big schools would recruit student athletes with promises of playing for huge crowds, of playing on TV, or of having a decent chance of getting to the NFL. Coaches from smaller schools would point out that their environment was less competitive and they were thus more likely to get playing time. But if a lesser program managed to snag a gem, they had a chance of making a run for it. Now, schools have to contend with the additional factor of how much money they can get, and they have to contend with this every year. They no longer recruit high school kids but people who are already on the team. After all, if another school is offering better money, there's nothing to stop them from transferring. At first it was thought that lesser schools might benefit from the transfer portal because good players who couldn't get playing time at big schools would be able to transfer more easily. The result, though, was that playing time became less of an inducement to go to smaller schools in the first place. After all, every kid who is offered a scholarship at a top program thinks he can be the starter. Under the old system, he maybe could have been reasoned with. Now, there's no reason not to go to Alabama. Take your shot at the starting job. If you get it, great. If you get benched, transfer. It's a totally different landscape.
While I may bemoan these changes, I really can't argue with them. Jurists from both sides of the aisle concede that the system that was in place for college sports throughout most of its history is ridiculous in any other context, and antitrust law prohibits it. A conservative would bemoan the changes and try to reverse them, or at least limit them. But that's just delaying the inevitable, and probably not by very long. My solution is to accelerate them; blow up the system so violently and completely that whatever remaining shreds of credibility are destroyed. Do something so radical that even the fans of the biggest programs will turn up their noses in disgust. Something that goes beyond what donor money and NIL deals and the transfer portal can accomplish. We need to destroy the last vestiges of NCAA eligibility requirements, and the path is clear.
The recent changes were driven by antitrust law. An athlete sues the NCAA for unreasonably restraining trade, the court agrees (because NCAA restrictions look ridiculous if applied to ordinary businesses), and block in the Jenga tower comes out. But most of these are simply taking them off the top, I want to go after the piece that holds up the whole tower: Time restrictions. Current NCAA rules are complicated but effectively limit players to 4 years of eligibility, and they must be used before your 28th birthday. Of course, there are exceptions for redshirt and COVID years, but the idea is that you get 4 years, and then you're done. If an entire industry had rules limiting how long employees could work there, and there wasn't some seriously good public policy interest at stake, it's unlikely a court would allow this. After all, they're preventing perfectly willing employees from working for companies that want to hire them for entirely arbitrary reasons. There's no conceivable reason that the same shouldn't apply to college football. Players who graduate can already play, provided they're enrolled at the university. If a player graduates after 4 years on the team and still wants to play, why shouldn't he be able to? This makes increasing sense in the world of NIL money, where you're unreasonably restricting his ability to earn a living due to arbitrary criteria. This was basically the same argument in the transfer case brought by the New York AG—the kid wants to transfer because he can make more money, and your arbitrary rules tell him he can't do that.
The effect of this would be dramatic. Most athletes don't peak until their late-20s, but only a few college athletes have any eligibility left by this point. There are plenty of guys out there who could make a college roster if they were only allowed to. And with the money involved, there are plenty of guys in the CFL and whatever the USFL is called now who would do better to stay in college. Once this rule is eliminated, these guys will just enroll in some class at the school where they can get the most money and continue their careers. The top levels of college ball will be dominated by these guys, since they exponentially increase your chances of winning. the practice of signing 30-year-olds who graduated years ago will be mocked at first, but any college team that's serious about winning championships won't have a choice. Pretty soon the 18 to 22-year-olds who dominate the game now will be slowly phased out.
This will have a downstream effect of ruining the NFL as well, because the 21 and 22-year-olds they're used to drafting simply won't have enough playing time to get a good read on. The only draftable players will be in their mid-20s, and guys will be on rookie deals into their 30s. I hate to see this happen and I hope the effect isn't too severe, but it's an inevitable consequence. The endgame here is that the increased ridiculousness of college football effectively becoming a b-league is that the traditional college players, who aren't getting playing time, form a union and strike a deal with whomever the powers that be are. Once a collective bargaining agreement is in place, antitrust rules no longer apply, and some of the provisions that are currently being struck down are implemented again, and maybe new restrictions are imposed that at least recognize that it's a professional league and that if we want to maintain the illusion of amateurism and parity then they need to do some things that were previously unthinkable. I don't know what it will look like, but I think it's inevitable that some kind of breaking point is reached where the product becomes so disgusting that it's forced to change.
Part IV: Conclusion
The last section may seem a bit ridiculous, but it it underscores a point: Nothing is sacred. Not to the courts, and certainly not to anyone who stands to profit. The NCAA is a more or less defunct entity at this point; I don't know how any of their current regulations are defensible under the way the laws have recently been interpreted. I also want to make a larger point, and one that it seems most college football fans don't understand: No changes will be made that cost the big schools money. This would seem so obvious as to be tautological, but it seems like most college football fans haven't figured this out. The internet is full of various proposals to "fix" college football by realigning conferences to more traditional alignments, improving revenue parity, imposing top-down organization, imposing NIL restrictions, or any number of other things. But none of these things improve revenue, so they won't happen. That's one thing about Project Rudy that actually makes sense, even if the rest of it doesn't. It doesn't present itself as anything other than a revenue generator. It doesn't eliminate creampuffs because they're idiotic schedule padding, but because better games are more attractive to TV networks (ironically, they fail to understand that this benefit probably isn't outweighed by the fact that the big schools would lose a home game or two, but TV guys can be myopic). It's main selling point is that it's lucrative. And, for better or worse, that's what we have to deal with.
Thanks for the summary. I find CFB impossible to understand or follow, the complexity of what exactly is a good season always stumps me. I would think that any simplification of the top end of the game would be beneficial to viewership.
As someone who did not attend what would currently be considered one of the top tier football schools, I used to think some of the appeal was the team acted as a sort of martial manifestation of your Alma mater. Before the transfer portal, there was at least a thin veneer of the players being students and future alumni of your school. I guess supper fans, and people at schools that are perennial contenders, care about national championships but in the BCS and earlier eras every game mattered for the quality of bowl your team could hope for an invite to. As @Rov_Scam pointed out there are far more schools that consider themselves top tier than can truly contend for a national championship in any given year. A far more reasonable standard for a good year would be to have a strong enough regular season to get invited to a decent quality bowl, and to win that bowl game.
I do think this naturally limits viewership, since you only follow your own school and maybe a few marque rivalry games. On the other hand I do think NCAAF is in extreme danger of becoming NFL B league.
Speaking of which:
Never up to the standard of the marque Big Ten teams in the modern era, but all three were at the founding conference for the Big Ten. This predates the NCAA. They have been members of the Big Ten longer than Ohio State, and much much longer than Pen State. I would lament a realignment that destroys some of the history and tradition of college football. Without that it's more or less just professional football at a lower standard of play. This weekends Illinois–Michigan game will be the 100th anniversary of their meeting for the dedication of Memorial Stadium; that is the dedication of the stadium to alumni killed in WWI. For once the game might actually be competitive, it would be a shame if it were never competitive again because Michigan has 5x the NIL money to spend from exclusive TV deals.
Yeah, around 2001 or so when I was forming my sports fandoms, I just couldn't figure out the whole Bowl Game hierarchy, and never much got into college sports at all as a result. It confused me that the AP rankings seemed just kind of arbitrary, compared to NFL or MLB standings which were very clearly based on winning/losing games between teams that have relative parity between them. I've always preferred the American professional sports model to the NCAA or UEFA models, in my mind a good season is finishing over .500 and making the end of season tournament.
I do wonder how much of that is downstream of location: as a child I went to tons of Phillies and Eagles games with my father, we never really went to college football games. I feel like my sports fandoms were really "set" by the time I was 12 or so, after that I've never formed a real emotional attachment to another team. I might decide to root for another team, but they can lose me just as easily by playing or acting in ways I don't like. Where the teams I fell in love with as a kid, short of, like, a major diddling scandal there's probably nothing that can change my fandom, though the Sixers have done their best to the point where I don't bother with the regular season.
It's interesting to me that this has quite obviously impacted my opinions on NBA and NCAA ethical issues, relative to how I feel about MLB or NFL ethical issues.
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Yeah, about that Pacific Coast Conference. That was 100 years of tradition flushed down the toilet. It's already happened, and I'm lamenting it right now.
Also, fucking Washington looks like garbage. Leaving the Pac-12 so you can lose to Rutgers and get blown out by Iowa is looking pretty dumb, especially since they're not getting any extra money to do so.
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