A Group of College Presidents and Sports Executives Has Devised a Plan for an 80-Team College Football 'Super League'
The Athletic — Several college presidents, Roger Goodell’s primary lieutenant at the NFL and some of sports’ top executives have devised a plan — dubbed by outsiders as a “Super League” — to completely transform college football, those involved in the group “College Sports Tomorrow” (CST) told The Athletic. Although the plan has drawn skepticism from within the sport’s current institutions, the people behind the ideas believe they must be implemented.
They are trying to implement a drastically new system that would replace the NCAA and the College Football Playoff and potentially provide a solution for the hurricane of current and future lawsuits aimed at the business of the sport, plus the NIL and transfer portal issues that, they believe, have put college athletics as a whole in peril.
The current CST outline would create a system that would have the top 70 programs — all members of the five former major conferences, plus Notre Dame and new ACC member SMU — as permanent members and encompass all 130-plus FBS universities.
The perpetual members would be in seven 10-team divisions, joined by an eighth division of teams that would be promoted from the second tier.
The 50-plus second-division teams would have the opportunity to compete their way into the upper division, creating a promotion system similar to the structure in European football leagues. The 70 permanent teams would never be in danger of moving down, while the second division would have the incentive of promotion and relegation.
The playoffs would not require a selection committee, as the eight division winners and eight wild cards from the top tier would go to the postseason. The wild-card spots would be determined by record and tiebreakers, much like the NFL.
As the NCAA draws its dying breaths, college football needs to figure out what it's going to look like in 10 years. It seems inevitable that the biggest FBS schools will eventually break off and form some sort of new organization, but this College Sports Tomorrow layout is the first time we've really seen a concrete secession plan.
On the whole, I guess this could be worse. The idea of promotion and relegation would be great if it was actually going to happen for real rather than guaranteeing the top 70 teams that they'll never be sent down. That misses basically the entire point of the structure. The playoff system almost exactly mimicking the NFL sucks for those of us who beg to keep college football unique, but it's only a matter of time before the new world of college football looks largely indistinguishable from the League if TV executives and conference commissioners have their ways.
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Seven 10-team divisions is a pretty novel concept, though. Maybe they'll be broken down geographically, with one league for the South, another for the Midwest and so on. That seems like a good system; has anyone tried that before?
I understand it will not and cannot happen, but I'd give anything for the Power Five schools to just break away from the NCAA and form their own thing with college football going back to the way it was in, say, 2016. Life was so much simpler then. Now Oregon and Penn State are in the same conference and we're going to have NFL-esque playoffs.
"I wish there was a way to know you're in the good old days before you've actually left them." — Andy Bernard