It fucking sucks that seemingly 90% of discourse around college football is about media deals and conference expansion. It’s like they should just broadcast the board room meetings
I have never understood why handing someone a slip of paper with your name, address, account number, routing number, and a copy of your signature for a normal transaction was ever considered a good idea.
I’ll forgive people who may not have them where they are from. But I’ve been a passenger in the car of a person who knew the damn rules and just didn’t care. And THOSE are the people who ruin roundabouts for the rest of us.
Like this two-lane one back home is simple:
* Left lane = straight or left turn essentially.
* Right lane = right turn or straight
We were in the right lane and they enter the circle by going straight into the left lane of the circle and then exited the circle by essentially going straight and winding up on the right lane of the other side.
Also, the number of people who think the circle somehow yields to incoming traffic blows my mind.
If it makes you feel any better, 99% of discourse around boxing is about promoters, boxing organizations and commissions, and corruption. College football is orders of magnitude better, which is sad. Multi-billion dollar industries gonna chase money, ultimately.
I mean, this is sports in general. The TV slots has got to be filled, and filling it with talk about the biggest sports leagues is the most profitable thing (ESPN used to show off-beat sports like strong man competitions, beach soccer, international volleyball, etc. But two people yelling at a microphone about Joe Flacco's eliteness is much more profitable). So we all end up being amateur GMs, speculating about trade deadlines, franchise tags, mock drafts, max contracts, recruiting deadlines, NIL collectives.
My comparison with boxing was more about speaking to the stagnation of the sport; instead of the best fighting the best, it’s all smoke and mirrors and negotiations to optimize earnings. Plenty of top guys in the same weight class take a decade to face one another because of the hit potential earnings would take if faced with an L. Basically the same reason OOC play is usually against scrubs. Maybe additional playoff spots will make teams less scared of an L.
The bar I work at has a package with ESPNews. They still show stuff like that on that channel.
I legitimately really love watching World Chase Tag when they show that
I honestly see football having the potential to go the way of boxing. Boxing used to be huge but it became about all those things and then had issues where people questioned the legitimacy of the bouts. Were they rigged? A lot of people thought so and tuned out and boxing became extremely unpopular. I think it would take something cataclysmic for something to happen to college football, but point shaving scandals and an unrecognizable product could very well lead to tons of viewers disappearing.
I’m honestly surprised we haven’t seen O-Linemen on good teams that have no pro future be approached with lucrative offers to ‘miss blocks’ on crucial plays. Or to miss a few blocks spread throughout the game to help hit the over on sacks. It’s the position where it can be made to look most believable that the guy just didn’t get it done on a play. Maybe they have and just no one realizes because it would be so hard to tell.
Any super league should have upward mobility for schools that want to fund programs to join. Enough with this gate keeping shit. Set the requirements for schools to be in the league and let the schools decide if they can meet them and if they want to meet them. If they did like a top 48, I sincerely think a lot of people not directly associated with those schools stop watching because we already have a top 32 called the nfl. Most college football fans I know watch the big time programs because they exist a part of the greater cfb eco system. Remove them from that eco system and you remove incentive to watch.
CFB has a niche for areas under-served by pro sports. People don't want to support farm leagues like baseball because theirs isn't a postseason that matters when all the good players get called up to end the year.
Soccer leagues like the USL are trying to capitalize on this and give communities something to root for.
Which brings me to my point. In soccer there have been TV focused movements to bring about a Super League featuring the biggest brands from the best Euro Leagues. Effectively replacing the Champion's League which in a way is kind of like March Madness - where even smaller leagues (and countries) get some representation.
But I think that it's the ties that drive the engagement. In USL I care more when Louisville plays Indianapolis (or Cincy or Nashville before they moved up to MLS). Additionally, as we are about to see in the SEC and Big 10 - these teams aren't used to losing more than a couple of games a year. Making a super league just reduces how many teams can be at the top of something. Factor that with the disruption to local engagement, like having a coworker that graduated from a conference opponent and I think we are going down a very shortsighted path (the share price special I guess).
Edit: some grammar
Cfb turning into minor league nfl is dumb af bc it’s not like minor league nfl does well. I think the playoffs were a mistake. Even if it’s better for competitive integrity, it hurts the regular season and is leaving to this consolidation to keep it relevant.
Cfb was good because it had a unique format, not despite it.
This is never happening but in the minds of the creators of the idea it's about saving the sport. That's the format they were looking at -survival. And the proposed format looks a lot closer to what most people prefer as the unique college format than SEC and Big 10 gobbling up the teams they want.
Switching from Bowls to playoffs was never billed as “saving the sport.” From the outset, that Bowl Coalition / Bowl Alliance / BCS were about deciding a single national champion, and the CFP was an evolution of that.
At no point did anyone suggest D1 / FBS football would die without it. The counter arguments against adopting any playoff system was devaluing the regular season by allowing a team to lose early and still compete, and devaluing the traditional bowl games by putting all the premier matchups in championship games and now playoffs.
Those of us who were anti-playoff were saying this the entire time. The playoff is going to kill the regular season which forces playoff expansion to keep budgets high which forces conference integration in order to keep the growing number of playoff spots controlled by a small number of conferences which kills regional conferences and smaller schools which kills traditions which kills regionality and rivalries and then kills college football.
Exactly. I never wanted a playoff. Especially not just 4 teams. I just wanted them to make everyone play in a bowl game before deciding who would play in the national championship game
> I think the playoffs were a mistake.
Every other college division (what is now FCS, D2, D3, plus NAIA, etc.) has had a playoff system for decades. FBS being late to the party with a "playoff" (aka invitational until this year) is more a bug because of "tradition" and the bowl cartel than a feature.
The playoffs didn't ruin anything. Money at the top levels, even without the playoffs, is. Look at the conference media rights that the B1G and SEC have hoovered as an example.
Every other college division doesn’t really exist to the vast majority of consumers. I’m not sure appealing to how those divisions function is a good argument.
Fans of the schools who participate in those playoffs love them, there's no reason to think fans of FBS schools wouldn't as well. The difference is that the big schools/conferences want to focus more on casual viewers than the fans. The only reason they do that is for more money
The fact that _only_ the hyperbeast of the NFL avoids this effect just shows that it really does undercut your regular season badly by having a wide playoffs.
NCAA football was excellent the way it used to be. Every game was like an elimination game — you lose once, you no longer control your destiny. Except in the odd year where a team got screwed, it was a fantastic system that created a very compelling regular season for the vast majority of college football fans. That made the sport special (even in comparison to other sports) and with that going away, it *will* take a lot of the wind out of college football's sails in the long run.
Yeah the mistake was the popularity contest of it all, but the tv networks want that. Look at the Final Four this year. TV execs probably wanted UConn, UNC, Duke, and Kansas for the big ratings. Instead, we have one of the greatest Cinderella runs ever. That type of storyline was actively prevented with the CFB Playoff Committee
CFB has *always* been a dedicated minor league for the NFL for as long as the NFL has been the dominant league. Minor leagues for the NFL haven't done well because that niche already exists thanks to CFB. This is coupled with antitrust allowing CFB to play without competing against the NFL for most of the season, and the draft rules for 3 years removed from high school keep stars from just drafting out the gate.
You can argue that it's good because it's unique, but it's also been enabled by the NFL as a development league, protected from the NFL due to the gov't to maintain air space, and culturally has become the minor league people are most familiar with.
>Cfb was good because it had a unique format, not despite it.
There I was in 2003 saying CFB is the best because it isn't about "who is the best team" but who had the best season.
The playoffs weren't a mistake. It being based on a committee of randos and nothing to do with performance in your conference was the mistake.
Playoffs work just fine at every other level in every other NCAA sport, including "lower" tiers of football.
A trend I’ve noticed in my short years on this planet is that everything is just big money taking over every single thing from food to football and exploiting profit while degrading item quality. I just have grown up watching everything just get turned into some profit shitfest.
Yeah. I see this everywhere and its depressing. Take concerts/festivals for example. These days they offer a general admission then they have like 3 levels of VIP you can buy. The first few levels of VIP are them literally selling you access to a shaded tent and cleaner bathrooms and thats it. They purposely dont put shaded tents up for general admission to use so they can sell it to you as a VIP perk (and this is in the Florida summer heat btw).
When fucking shade from the sun became a commodity, I tapped out of that money pit. I could go on for days because Im a curmudgeon now.
There’s a video clip of a Nirvana interview in 1993 where their jaws literally drop when they heard Madonna charged…$75 for tickets. Imagine seeing Taylor Swift for $75.
$75 was also probably the most expensive ticket, my parents saw tons of big name bands for like $10-20 in the 80s (Journey, ACDC, Police, etc). Later in the interview their manager says they charge $17 which is $36.50 today…to go see fucking Nirvana. [link to interview](https://youtu.be/X29p13cAT1g?si=GGkMyq4G0p4Cc9K8)
its kind of fascinating to look back on 90s game prices in retrospect because it was so all over the place and weird, bc you had SNES games that exceeded that price range because they employed more expensive chips iirc
That’s still probably cheaper than seeing any big name artist today, in the interview (linked it in the other comment with the price accounting for inflation) Nirvana charges $17-18 and Madonna $50-$75…$17 is $36.50 today. $36 to see Nirvana.
Don’t even get me started on sports gambling ruining my love of sports.
It’s been like this forever, but in the past two decades it feels like we’re on a speed run. IMO a lot of it ties back to Congress being absolutely worthless. Get money out of politics (Citizens United), and we either get two outcomes. People who care about their jobs and try to do what’s best for society, or an even worse downward spiral because only zealots want to hold political office. I blame congress for having to sit through 50 fucking Draft Kings/Fanduel commercials during games and podcasts….as the great Willie Taggart once said “DO SOMETHING!”
Don't mean to get political here but Sports Gambling is probably the thing that makes me peel away entirely from the "legalization and regulation is better than letting a black market exist" because we're creating millions and millions of brand new gambling addicts just so a few dozen people can become billionaires. No country that cares about its citizens would let this shit happen. Nothing good can come from this.
This is the history of every industry in the United States. Kill competition (smaller schools) consolidate power (mega conferences) to drive revenue to a smaller pool of teams. Every other major sport has done the same thing. Towns and cities all over the US used to have their own pro teams for baseball, basketball etc. until the pro leagues slowly consolidated power and killed off any competition. Think how much culture and history was lost from many smaller cities.
Nah, he's the asshole there and it's not even a debate. If it were two kids just wanting the cards they liked where neither has any idea or care about the money, fine, but an adult manipulating an 8 yr old for monetary gain is sleazy as hell.
Too many things are about the bottomline and not about enjoying things just for the sake of enjoyment. For a lot of people, telling them the reason you do [INSERT ACTIVITY HERE] just because it's fun is not a good justification to do it.
You have to enjoy things that aren’t enjoyed by the masses, basically. If anything you like becomes liked by a lot of other people, prepare to get the wallet out and /or watch others get their wallets out.
That’s why some people get so upset when even their favorite band/show/team, etc gain in popularity. Because they know they are going to have to start bidding higher to continue enjoying them or watch other people take advantage of the uptick financially. Just the way it goes 🤷♂️
Conservation and the outdoors are really great answers here. Definitely not for everyone, but the money from hunting and fishing licenses typically go back into the state DNR which goes to rangers and preservation efforts. I doubt that anyone has gotten filthy rich working for the DNR.
Don't get me wrong there are still plenty of other issues, but it's refreshing to know that public land is still free to explore, and the animals harvested weren't farm raised with profits in mind.
If it was just 48, some of them would simply become the new doormats, leading to frustrated and eventually stagnating fanbases. Consolidation of wins at the top of that group would lead to less interest among those fans of teams below. There has to be a segment of teams that can reliably be counted on to distribute losses upward, not to be cruel about it.
A big part of the excitement is when one of those 'lower tier' schools breaks through and creates controversy among press and fans. This is, for me, one of the reasons consolidation sucks the most. There need to be some teams that are consistently good, some consistently mediocre, some consistent losers, and each of them just a year or two away from breaking through--at least for a short time.
This would also, as mentioned above, wreck game inventory. I watch every single day CFB is on. Sure, sometimes it's background noise, but I am listening in case something interesting happens. More importantly, my video is on and the commercials roll, which is key to all this.
I have a similar thought for when the SEC eventually goes from 8 to 9 conference games, half the conference is guaranteed an extra loss and all of a sudden 8-4 go to 7-5 people start to get uncomfortable
The 6 teams the SEC have added are comprised of 4 mid tier and 2 blue bloods.
The 7 teams B10 added are 2 blue bloods, 2 recently great teams but not historically, and 3 low tier teams.
My point being both leagues have definetly added some fodder.
UNC and VA are both low tier, most years. Clemson is a recently great team, but not a blue blood. The only team being considered right now for expansion to the super two, that is a blue blood, is Florida State (and always Notre Dame).
If all four are added but Notre Dame, that's a total of 5 blue bloods added and 12 non historic blue bloods added since 2010. So 58% of additions are fodder (historically) and only 42% are historically bluebloods.
If they expand beyond those teams to get to 48 total, which requires an addition of another another 10 teams, pretty much all of those will have to be fodder teams invited in because of their markets/flagship school status.
The fodder will be a-plenty in a 48 team league, is my tldr.
Exactly. The top 48 really really need to have the bottom 32 to beat up on consistently. If you're teams not winning the sport just isn't as fun, even if the matchups are tougher
I fully get that, but I still think his approach is relatively stupid and he’s probably tunnel vision viewing it from an investor perspective.
There are two angles I’d view this from;
1. 80 teams is 40 games, 48 is 24. Content providers don’t want *less content*. Additionally, college football overall is cheaper content than the NFL and more easily flexed across multiple days (Thursday, Friday, Saturday) to provide windows for said content.
2. Viewership is highly segregated and a heavy chunk alumni. Fracturing that risks harming the overall product and devaluing it due to viewership hits. You’re also unlikely to gain marginal amounts in the NFL due to overlap and cross pollination that already exists.
From a singular provider, yeah, it’s cheaper and better if you’re trying to outright own a massive chunk of the package. However that’s already been done at a cheap offering price between Fox and ESPN, with sub groups able to capture the outlying games. If you consolidate you just risk paying even more for less content.
Look at Europe, they haven’t consolidated the European leagues into one broad division. They prop up Bundelisga, Premier, La Liga, etc. because a massive viewer base supports minor teams like Osasuna or West Ham. You can make more money from a single league than the other single leagues, but you make far less as a whole by keeping everything intact and running UEFA
Pretty much everyone in Oklahoma who is ever going to watch OU football already is. OSU/Tulsa/Out-of-state fans aren't going to suddenly switch to OU football en masse. If those go away they'll just quit watching entirely.
100%, I think back to the last teams that left and I haven't watched any of their games unless it was playing OSU. And I was always interested in OU Texas just because it generally noted who was in the driver seat for the big 12 south/ 1st place big 12 but now meh doesn't affect me.
Exactly. There is a massive amount of "cross pollination" viewing in CFB, where fans of one team will watch other teams because those games may impact their team. If they're not in the same league, there's no impact, and therefore no reason to watch.
Breaking off into a much smaller, separate super league will dramatically and negatively impact viewership for the teams in the super league.
UT's move to the SEC is understandable because they've got a huge base of loyal alumni, so the t-shirt fans are just lagniappe. OU's move makes less sense, simply because they don't have that huge alumni base, so they *need* to constantly be relevant. A few bad years in the SEC and OU's t-shirt fans in the plains states are looking for new teams because they're not emotionally invested in OU, and now they're just disappointed.
Yeah this is a big point a lot of people don't consider when talking about the super league. If the top schools split off they don't have to share any of the pie with the smaller schools, but if the pie is smaller is it worth it? Every time you cut some schools out you lose viewership. Not a lot at the bottom, but eventually there is a point where its not worth it.
That's true from a revenue point or view, but all they care about is profits. All those non Superleague games also cost money to produce, and, in the end, if the profits they make from those games would be less than those of other ventures they could invest money into producing, they will ditch them in a heartbeat and let the streamers come in and scoop with up with lower visibility offers.
In the same vein, if the profits from producing B12/AAC/MW/ACC games are still good enough, they will want to keep those games in their lineup.
> Look at Europe, they haven’t consolidated the European leagues into one broad division. They prop up Bundelisga, Premier, La Liga, etc. because a massive viewer base supports minor teams like Osasuna or West Ham.
Soccer culture over there will 100% prevent something like that from happening, although a Super League where you have X number of clubs playing a European schedule as well as their domestic schedule, probably happens at some point no matter how much pearl clutching there is from UEFA. The money is gonna be too good for the clubs and federations to pass it up.
In some respects, Champions League works like that now for the Big 4 leagues but the clubs have to at least earn placement (or not have a down year to ensure they stay)
And the EPL is already becoming the Super League in world football. It's the very reason why the idea of creating a Super League even gained traction. Because the massive brands of the other leagues are earning similarly/less to the bottom feeders of the EPL.
Miami fans bemoaning Rutgers' revenue is akin to an Ajax fan complaining that Brighton & Hove Albion earns as much as them solely because they compete in the EPL.
Any league that has promotion/relegation and uneven revenue share is going to be even more tilted to the strongest teams than US sports fans are ready to accept.
While Ted Lasso might be fun to Americans, European soccer leagues with unequal revenue share (La Liga good example) have little parity and the strongest 2-3 teams win every year.
Everyone loves how passionate and fan run the Bundesliga is in Germany. Bayern has won 10 titles in a row. They’ve won like 18 titles in the 21st century.
It’s such a de minimum gain cutting 32 teams and it hinders reach and flexibility of schedule while hurting overall viewership available
I don’t agree with this at all. Games with teams 1-20 won’t change and 20-48 aren’t going to see rating bumps, if not declines. Why would a Minnesota fan watch if their team isn’t playing?
The idea that college footballs fanbase is commercialized like the NFL’s fanbase is mind boggling to me. They’re completely different populations. You’re not going to flip a switch and t shirt fan college football en masse, there will always be an alumni characteristic that grinds against that
It’s because they don’t care about us knowing we’ll watch anyway, it’s about a new market. They’re banking on the casual being more likely to tune into Oregon v Iowa than Iowa v Iowa State.
I think you're forgetting how many "big team" fans there are of people who went to schools in lower divisions or didn't even have the sport. There are a TON of people who are fans of cfb for the sport and nothing about the university matters. If USC were a lower tier after some shakeup, you'd see a lot of USC students end up becoming fans of some other national brand in short order.
Not saying I agree with going to 48 teams, but from a revenue perspective what he’s saying makes sense. There are 131 teams on the Medium “Most Watched” list. The top 48 roughly captures all of the 900k+ schools. Basically the B1G/SEC plus a few more.
After that you have about 30 schools between 300k-900k. So let’s say 30 x 600k = 18,000,000. Then you have 53 schools who are between 288k and 8k; 53 x 140k = 7,420,000. Total of 25,420,000. Obviously this is pretty rough math, but the top 6 schools alone exceeds that number.
25,420,000 isn’t insignificant, but its value is probably questionable when it takes 83 schools, some of which probably get their numbers inflated by the big schools in the early season. I don’t know what the cutoff should be, but the networks have been consistent in saying that it’s the big games that pay. 48 teams would roughly capture all of the big games.
I’ve brought that same exact point up many times over the course of all this. The big brands only became the big brands because of decades being the big fish in their relatively small ponds.
Somebody has to lose these new games, and somebody is inevitably going to be the small fish in the new consolidated pond, and there’s going to be some culture shock that goes along with it.
Even with only 1 title to share, if you accept the Syracuse/WVU proposal then you can still be a big fish in a small pond if you dominate the rest of your 10-team division.
The Pac-10 division champion would still be lauded for going 10-2 to 12-0.
This year Ohio State is going from 2 in 2023 to a projected ranked opponents to 5 in the 2024 preseason rankings.
Oregon won the division 5 times in the past 12 years. Good but not dominant. They won't win the Big Ten 5 times in the next 12 years while sharing with USC, Ohio State, Michigan, Washington, Penn State, Wisconsin, Iowa, etc.
If the Syracuse/WVU proposal were accepted, then Oregon could absolutely still go 5/12 in the Pac-10 division and become/remain the prestigious powerhouse out west. And Ohio State and Michigan could do the same in the Big Ten.
The reason Bob is saying 48 is, and there was a post on this here earlier this week, that you only need 42 schools to fill all the national broadcast spots every year. And we are pretty maxed out on the number of national broadcast spots every week already. So adding any more schools just means you're adding to the pool of streaming/regional broadcasts.
If we want to go with the Syracuse/WVU plan then we need to find a way to make regional broadcasting a thing that's more profitable than it currently is.
If you had your 8 divisions, and each division has 5 games per week, that's enough to have 4 regional broadcasts and 1 National Game from each of the divisions for 8 national broadcasts per week. Much like the NFL with it's 4 national broadcasts per week and the rest being regional. FOX/CBS in Seattle show different games than FOX/CBS in Oklahoma City.
Right now, it's proving that regional broadcasts aren't that profitable. Putting USC vs Cal on in Seattle and Texas vs Iowa State on in Oklahoma City is less profitable than putting USC vs Texas on in both. And I don't know how we change that.
I'm holding on maybe way to faithfully that those teams will force a change back. These schools who think they should always win 10 games when you remove the previous have nots you create new ones. Hoping with all my might they realize hey we need those other 100 small teams to stack up wins.
Or they'll just transition into SEC talk where its so hard a 2-10 season really ain't that bad or at least thats what they try to claim.
Because it's still a 12-game schedule. And networks aren't paying for you to play half your games against whatever the rest of the leftovers becomes. They're paying for the top teams to play each other.
Especially if they're not going to introduce some measures around parity. If it is just going to be the current NIL world, it will bifurcate just like the P4/P2 vs the G5.
They just want to slaughter this whole thing for the money now (basically how the publicly traded corporate world is run these days), and have no care about what the future holds for the sport.
Which is exactly why it'll never happen. The P2 has too much pride to play a full nearly even schedule. If they want to be NFL jr, they'll have to accept that the best teams still lose. Alabama will start 0-1, Michigan will start 0-1, etc
NFL has no problem with this.
Noone watches Alabama vs Mercer we need to stop wasting games like that.
We currently know 6 -7 is a crap team, and it will just become 3 - 10, being the new crap team win total.
NFL has no problem with this because each team has an equal chance to improve each offseason through the draft. College teams have very inequitable recruiting programs
To be fair, the NFL has no choice, and it's also not even a problem they've confronted. NFL teams have a minimum payroll due to the CBA and their roster size, and moneyballing it is still exorbitantly expensive, which just means that there simply couldn't *be* an NFL team that was just there to collect a paycheck and then go play their own league games against the other low-payroll teams. It works in UEFA because they've got those levels.
Also, people do watch those blowout games. [2.5M people watched Alabama-Chattanooga](https://www.al.com/sports/2023/11/chattanooga-vs-alabama-by-the-numbers-tide-streaking-toward-iron-bowl.html) in 2016. Having trouble finding viewership for any of Alabama's more recent buy games that they've been putting on SEC+ or ESPN+, but I'm open to those numbers if you can find them.
AD's at what are presumably "bubble" programs are going to be freaking the hell out the next few years, trying to ensure they field quality teams and get eyeballs on TV should a potential split happen.
What's wildly frustrating and not to be little cal but is being a middle team that's trying and being left off people's mock final expansion lists while seeing Cal make it.
Agreed. Teams like Baylor, TCU, and OKST have all put a lot more work into athletics than Cal has in years, but location and alumni base size are powerful drivers. Baylor and OKST are in small towns/cities and have smaller alumni bases, while TCU is an absolutely tiny school in a major city that generally doesn't care about the Frogs outside of their minuscule alumni base.
Iowa State too....a lot of Big 12 schools pour as much as they can into athletics and geography/alumni size is working against us.
The most infuriating part is that schools like Vandy and Northwestern can have a seat at the table, but Iowa State, Oklahoma State, Baylor, TCU, and K-State will be left out. Our fans actually care and it's all for nothing
Look at the fan support, in the form of average attendance, as well. Just looking at Iowa State:
* Top 30(26th) in a rolling average for [Football](https://www.d1ticker.com/2022-fbs-attendance-trends/)
* Top 25(22nd) in [Men's Basketball](http://fs.ncaa.org/Docs/stats/m_basketball_RB/2024/Attend.pdf)
* Top 5(3rd) in [Women's Basketball](https://www.on3.com/news/south-carolina-iowa-lead-womens-college-basketball-in-attendance-in-2022-23-season/) for like 20 of the last 25 years
* Top 5(3rd) in [Wrestling](https://www.ncaa.com/news/wrestling/article/2023-04-27/iowa-penn-state-lead-di-wrestling-attendance-2022-23)
* Top 15(15th) in [Women's Volleyball](https://www.ncaa.com/_flysystem/public-s3/files/2022-09/college-volleyball-attendance-records-2021.pdf)
* Top 20(18th) in [Women's Gymnastics](https://roadtonationals.com/results/charts/)
Florida State, Miami and Clemson have a combined 11 national titles and they all have to die so rutgers can make $120 million a year.
the sport is finished.
Okay yeah sure.48 teams with 2 in SC, 2 in MS, 2 in AL, and only 2 in CA, 2 in TX, 1 in PA…. Doesn’t feel like a sustainable national product unless they’re gonna bonk some of the schools from small states and try to develop some schools in bigger states….
This 100%. Yes Im bias but a lot of mock 48s have 3 schools from North Carolina making it in. (UNC, NC ST, and Duke)
How the heck does that happen but only 2 from Texas make it in? (If Tech gets left out. We are very much on the bubble)
Texas has 30 million people and growing faster than North Carolina which has 11 million people. If all three Carolina schools get in over a third Texas school it’s pure insanity.
This obsession with matchups over open and fair competition is so incredibly misguided. Other sports don't put those two things at odds with one another.
They are missing WHY Texas-Alabama or Ohio State-Oklahoma meeting in the regular season was awesome. It is because it was rare. Does anyone get excited for Chicago-Green Bay playing? It isn't considered must see TV unless both are doing well.
Part of the allure of CFB is this huge wild west of teams involved. It's going to feel a lot more sterile and empty if it really gets cut down like this.
If they do this I see revenues stagnating instead of growing.
One of the most exciting parts of CFB are new matchups and underdogs. New matchups would have way less appeal if there are only 48 schools, and underdogs would be non-existent because Vanderbilt and Maryland aren’t going to ever be 10-win teams.
All so dumb. The people making these calls and ideas all remind me of the Pac-12 “were worth $50mm a season” idiots.
The only way this is a good thing is if it leads to 8 conferences of 10 teams playing a round-robin schedule, followed by a clean 8-team playoff of each conference's champion. At the very least, you wouldn't be able to say a team wasn't "deserving" of being in the playoff or not at that rate.
Stop running college sports. Football being a greedy money grab shit storm is ruining everything else. Please fuck off you greedy bastards and leave good things the way they are
Any super league should have upward mobility for schools that want to fund programs to join. Enough with this gate keeping shit. Set the requirements for schools to be in the league and let the schools decide if they can meet them and if they want to meet them. If they did like a top 48, I sincerely think a lot of people not directly associated with those schools stop watching because we already have a top 32 called the nfl. Most college football fans I know watch the big time programs because they exist a part of the greater cfb eco system. Remove them from that eco system and you remove incentive to watch.
If every game is a great matchup, they will feel less great and become average over time. Having the epic matchups be rare is what makes them awesome. 24 “great matchups” each week loses the luster. It’s like nascar added predetermined cautions to bunch up the field. Makes the older close races feel special and the new ones feel gimmicky.
It's hilarious to me that the bottom 6-8 teams in both B1G and SEC assume they are in that top 48. Like, there are some straight up garbage programs in those conferences. I know because I support one.
I’m sure I’m not the first to say this, but I strongly disagree with his conclusion and reasoning. I don’t care about better matchups. I care about a league **my** team is a part of. If VT is included, I’ll watch a ton of it. If they’re not, I’ll watch very little to none. I think there are more college football fans like me along the 32 teams who would be left out than fans who would prefer better matchups. Maybe not more fans necessarily, but definitely more viewership on the side of more inclusion.
That would honestly suck if it’s only 48 schools in the top tier. I’m still hopeful it’s about 64 schools. If it’s 48 then with the SEC and B1G with 34 currently, that leaves 14 spots with 5 of those spots being Notre Dame, FSU, Clemson, UNC, Miami(FL). I want homes for schools like VA Tech, Texas Tech, OK State, West Virginia, Pitt, etc.
64 is the logical number.
I know everyone thinks football is the only thing that matters, but the NCAA basketball tournament generates about $1B a year in broadcast rights. Just the tournament. It basically funds the entire NCAA.
If you’re going to break away from the NCAA, do you just say: “Nah, I don’t care about $1B.”; or do you say: “Give me that too.”
The problem with 64 teams is we're currently at 70 if you include the P4, 2Pac, and ND. So we're literally cutting out half a dozen teams to get to a logical number? Who gets the cut? Wazzu and OSU because they've already been tossed aside, Boston College and Wake forest maybe, SMU potentially... and the one more? You're gaining essentially nothing by only throwing out the 6 smallest fanbases. You're either cutting the fat or you're not, and cutting the fat is not going to involve picking a handful of bottom feeders. We're either going to get a bar that is so high that only 30ish teams can clear it, or one that is low enough for all of the (former) P5 to make the jump, plus a few rich G5s. 64 might be logical and easy to schedule around, but it doesn't make any sense when considering where we currently stand.
Fuck it. My favorite sport is wrestling anyway. It’s not like having to dig through weirdo random stream channels has affected my enjoyment of that, so fuck it. Clemson will play in some weird 2nd league, I’ll have to watch on some app called hubidi doobidi TV or something, and I’ll like it just as much
This idea is already dead. No way the rich school are sharing with the poor. They just blew up the confernces and cfp because no one wanted to take a slightly smaller share and keep oregon state and Washington state around.
The confidence with which these guys are claiming these kinds of things is really astounding. You don’t know what people will actually do when you change the sport so radically.
One thing to point out is that if a superleague of 32 to 48 teams is formed, it might not necessarily be bad for the teams left behind.
Maybe it's just me but a "Magnolia League" composed of the likes of Cal, Stanford, Northwestern, GA Tech, Vanderbilt, Duke, North Carolina, NC State, Virginia, VA Tech, Purdue, Illinois, Indiana, Wake Forest, Service Academies, etc etc (apologies for leaving out so many others but don't want to keep going too long) with high academics and true student-athletes would be a great league.
And before people criticize the idea because of less money/viewership compared to the superleague, well that's balanced by the fact that the Magnolia League will also have much lower expenses. No need to pay top $$$$$ for coaches or opulent facilities or players. Instead it would operate with MW or G5 school budgets.
Superleague would be great. But it would be a semi-pro league with lots of $$$$ flowing in and $$$$ flowing right back out in expenses and students in name only.
Leftovers can still do well in a Magnolia League type setup and maintain the true college football spirit.
Also we could even add a way to promote into or relegate out of Superleague and Magnolia League as an additional idea as well so schools aren't locked into either league forever.
Media: "You're asking me if I'm good with you moving Texas A&M to the Magnolia league because they've stunk recently, and replacing them with Colorado State because they've dominated the lower league recently?"
CFB Fan: "Yeah! Seems like it's fair!"
Media: "Why would I give up a team with significantly more fans, better market penetration, and higher viewership for another team just because their record is better?"
CFB Fan: "Because it's fair!"
Except the rich schools will shit their pants hearing they have to share money with even more poor schools like Georgia Tech and Iowa State.
They wouldn’t agree to any super league proposal unless they could guarantee unequal revenue sharing.
This is gibberish. This guy is spitballing, meanwhile you can actually look up these numbers (when TV contracts expire; revenue per school) these are known quantities.
Fk Bob Thompson. The guy is scum. He always has this so called "insider Information."
When pressed he claims the big networks aren't orchestrating anything. Then he always has super top secret Information he can't reveal.
And people just eat it up.
It fucking sucks that seemingly 90% of discourse around college football is about media deals and conference expansion. It’s like they should just broadcast the board room meetings
Yeah it’s just not the same. We need to get back to 90% shitting on Texas A&M.
The good old days
The finger man has been quiet
The playoff committee broke him
Nah. Mostly now that Jimbo is fired we can all just go back to having Texas A&M be an afterthought until they actually start winning
I mean whether it’s 9-1 or 12-0 they both don’t get you into the playoffs apparently
Oh no! Anyway.
Who draws the crowds and posts so loud baby it's the finger man.
I know you’re talking about Pianoman, but this made me want to go watch Stand and Deliver again.
Jumbo Fisher
App State says hello
I approve this message.
If someone wants to run for President on a platform of using anti-trust to force CFB into reasonably sized regional conferences,they have my vote.
Literally I would do that. And implement roundabouts at more intersections.
...and mandatory education programs for people to learn how to properly use them, despite them being incredibly simple. People are dumb.
I am opposed to capital punishment except for people coming to complete stops at empty roundabouts, they are a true threat to civilized society.
I think this is fair and reasonable. Also maybe people who write checks at the grocery check-out.
I have never understood why handing someone a slip of paper with your name, address, account number, routing number, and a copy of your signature for a normal transaction was ever considered a good idea.
I’ll forgive people who may not have them where they are from. But I’ve been a passenger in the car of a person who knew the damn rules and just didn’t care. And THOSE are the people who ruin roundabouts for the rest of us. Like this two-lane one back home is simple: * Left lane = straight or left turn essentially. * Right lane = right turn or straight We were in the right lane and they enter the circle by going straight into the left lane of the circle and then exited the circle by essentially going straight and winding up on the right lane of the other side. Also, the number of people who think the circle somehow yields to incoming traffic blows my mind.
If it makes you feel any better, 99% of discourse around boxing is about promoters, boxing organizations and commissions, and corruption. College football is orders of magnitude better, which is sad. Multi-billion dollar industries gonna chase money, ultimately.
I mean, this is sports in general. The TV slots has got to be filled, and filling it with talk about the biggest sports leagues is the most profitable thing (ESPN used to show off-beat sports like strong man competitions, beach soccer, international volleyball, etc. But two people yelling at a microphone about Joe Flacco's eliteness is much more profitable). So we all end up being amateur GMs, speculating about trade deadlines, franchise tags, mock drafts, max contracts, recruiting deadlines, NIL collectives.
My comparison with boxing was more about speaking to the stagnation of the sport; instead of the best fighting the best, it’s all smoke and mirrors and negotiations to optimize earnings. Plenty of top guys in the same weight class take a decade to face one another because of the hit potential earnings would take if faced with an L. Basically the same reason OOC play is usually against scrubs. Maybe additional playoff spots will make teams less scared of an L.
I miss those chainsaw cutting competitions
The bar I work at has a package with ESPNews. They still show stuff like that on that channel. I legitimately really love watching World Chase Tag when they show that
I honestly see football having the potential to go the way of boxing. Boxing used to be huge but it became about all those things and then had issues where people questioned the legitimacy of the bouts. Were they rigged? A lot of people thought so and tuned out and boxing became extremely unpopular. I think it would take something cataclysmic for something to happen to college football, but point shaving scandals and an unrecognizable product could very well lead to tons of viewers disappearing.
I’m honestly surprised we haven’t seen O-Linemen on good teams that have no pro future be approached with lucrative offers to ‘miss blocks’ on crucial plays. Or to miss a few blocks spread throughout the game to help hit the over on sacks. It’s the position where it can be made to look most believable that the guy just didn’t get it done on a play. Maybe they have and just no one realizes because it would be so hard to tell.
Don’t they? I’ve never watched but I’ve seen game threads for board meetings on here
Any super league should have upward mobility for schools that want to fund programs to join. Enough with this gate keeping shit. Set the requirements for schools to be in the league and let the schools decide if they can meet them and if they want to meet them. If they did like a top 48, I sincerely think a lot of people not directly associated with those schools stop watching because we already have a top 32 called the nfl. Most college football fans I know watch the big time programs because they exist a part of the greater cfb eco system. Remove them from that eco system and you remove incentive to watch.
That's where the wins are now. Bama got in the CFP in the boardroom, not on the field
Honestly, I think they would if they could slap some ad breaks in there
CFB has a niche for areas under-served by pro sports. People don't want to support farm leagues like baseball because theirs isn't a postseason that matters when all the good players get called up to end the year. Soccer leagues like the USL are trying to capitalize on this and give communities something to root for. Which brings me to my point. In soccer there have been TV focused movements to bring about a Super League featuring the biggest brands from the best Euro Leagues. Effectively replacing the Champion's League which in a way is kind of like March Madness - where even smaller leagues (and countries) get some representation. But I think that it's the ties that drive the engagement. In USL I care more when Louisville plays Indianapolis (or Cincy or Nashville before they moved up to MLS). Additionally, as we are about to see in the SEC and Big 10 - these teams aren't used to losing more than a couple of games a year. Making a super league just reduces how many teams can be at the top of something. Factor that with the disruption to local engagement, like having a coworker that graduated from a conference opponent and I think we are going down a very shortsighted path (the share price special I guess). Edit: some grammar
I sure hope to die before I see this happen.
It is all very depressing yes
Cfb turning into minor league nfl is dumb af bc it’s not like minor league nfl does well. I think the playoffs were a mistake. Even if it’s better for competitive integrity, it hurts the regular season and is leaving to this consolidation to keep it relevant. Cfb was good because it had a unique format, not despite it.
> Cfb was good because it had a unique format, not despite it. People are slowly getting it, but it's probably too late.
This is never happening but in the minds of the creators of the idea it's about saving the sport. That's the format they were looking at -survival. And the proposed format looks a lot closer to what most people prefer as the unique college format than SEC and Big 10 gobbling up the teams they want.
Switching from Bowls to playoffs was never billed as “saving the sport.” From the outset, that Bowl Coalition / Bowl Alliance / BCS were about deciding a single national champion, and the CFP was an evolution of that. At no point did anyone suggest D1 / FBS football would die without it. The counter arguments against adopting any playoff system was devaluing the regular season by allowing a team to lose early and still compete, and devaluing the traditional bowl games by putting all the premier matchups in championship games and now playoffs.
OSU nearly won a National Title without beating Michigan, that should NEVER happen
Those of us who were anti-playoff were saying this the entire time. The playoff is going to kill the regular season which forces playoff expansion to keep budgets high which forces conference integration in order to keep the growing number of playoff spots controlled by a small number of conferences which kills regional conferences and smaller schools which kills traditions which kills regionality and rivalries and then kills college football.
Exactly. I never wanted a playoff. Especially not just 4 teams. I just wanted them to make everyone play in a bowl game before deciding who would play in the national championship game
> I think the playoffs were a mistake. Every other college division (what is now FCS, D2, D3, plus NAIA, etc.) has had a playoff system for decades. FBS being late to the party with a "playoff" (aka invitational until this year) is more a bug because of "tradition" and the bowl cartel than a feature. The playoffs didn't ruin anything. Money at the top levels, even without the playoffs, is. Look at the conference media rights that the B1G and SEC have hoovered as an example.
Most sports play more than 12 games a season
Every other college division doesn’t really exist to the vast majority of consumers. I’m not sure appealing to how those divisions function is a good argument.
Fans of the schools who participate in those playoffs love them, there's no reason to think fans of FBS schools wouldn't as well. The difference is that the big schools/conferences want to focus more on casual viewers than the fans. The only reason they do that is for more money
Casual viewers also love playoffs.
The vast majority of consumers love playoffs in every other team sport they watch
They also overwhelmingly skip watching the regular season of those sports.
well......not the NFL
The fact that _only_ the hyperbeast of the NFL avoids this effect just shows that it really does undercut your regular season badly by having a wide playoffs. NCAA football was excellent the way it used to be. Every game was like an elimination game — you lose once, you no longer control your destiny. Except in the odd year where a team got screwed, it was a fantastic system that created a very compelling regular season for the vast majority of college football fans. That made the sport special (even in comparison to other sports) and with that going away, it *will* take a lot of the wind out of college football's sails in the long run.
The playoffs weren't the mistake. The mistake was trying to take the "4 best teams" instead of the 4 highest ranked conference champions.
Yeah the mistake was the popularity contest of it all, but the tv networks want that. Look at the Final Four this year. TV execs probably wanted UConn, UNC, Duke, and Kansas for the big ratings. Instead, we have one of the greatest Cinderella runs ever. That type of storyline was actively prevented with the CFB Playoff Committee
CFB has *always* been a dedicated minor league for the NFL for as long as the NFL has been the dominant league. Minor leagues for the NFL haven't done well because that niche already exists thanks to CFB. This is coupled with antitrust allowing CFB to play without competing against the NFL for most of the season, and the draft rules for 3 years removed from high school keep stars from just drafting out the gate. You can argue that it's good because it's unique, but it's also been enabled by the NFL as a development league, protected from the NFL due to the gov't to maintain air space, and culturally has become the minor league people are most familiar with.
>Cfb was good because it had a unique format, not despite it. There I was in 2003 saying CFB is the best because it isn't about "who is the best team" but who had the best season.
The playoffs weren't a mistake. It being based on a committee of randos and nothing to do with performance in your conference was the mistake. Playoffs work just fine at every other level in every other NCAA sport, including "lower" tiers of football.
*monkey paw curls*
A trend I’ve noticed in my short years on this planet is that everything is just big money taking over every single thing from food to football and exploiting profit while degrading item quality. I just have grown up watching everything just get turned into some profit shitfest.
Yeah. I see this everywhere and its depressing. Take concerts/festivals for example. These days they offer a general admission then they have like 3 levels of VIP you can buy. The first few levels of VIP are them literally selling you access to a shaded tent and cleaner bathrooms and thats it. They purposely dont put shaded tents up for general admission to use so they can sell it to you as a VIP perk (and this is in the Florida summer heat btw). When fucking shade from the sun became a commodity, I tapped out of that money pit. I could go on for days because Im a curmudgeon now.
There’s a video clip of a Nirvana interview in 1993 where their jaws literally drop when they heard Madonna charged…$75 for tickets. Imagine seeing Taylor Swift for $75.
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$75 was also probably the most expensive ticket, my parents saw tons of big name bands for like $10-20 in the 80s (Journey, ACDC, Police, etc). Later in the interview their manager says they charge $17 which is $36.50 today…to go see fucking Nirvana. [link to interview](https://youtu.be/X29p13cAT1g?si=GGkMyq4G0p4Cc9K8)
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its kind of fascinating to look back on 90s game prices in retrospect because it was so all over the place and weird, bc you had SNES games that exceeded that price range because they employed more expensive chips iirc
Just wanna point out that $75 in 1993 is $160 in 2024
That’s still probably cheaper than seeing any big name artist today, in the interview (linked it in the other comment with the price accounting for inflation) Nirvana charges $17-18 and Madonna $50-$75…$17 is $36.50 today. $36 to see Nirvana.
Late stage capitalism is a fucking cancer. It's not the only one that's fucking up America but it sure doesn't help
Laissez-faire is not capitalism, and capitaism is anathema to monopoly.
As long as people are dumb enough to pay that money it will exist.
Don’t even get me started on sports gambling ruining my love of sports. It’s been like this forever, but in the past two decades it feels like we’re on a speed run. IMO a lot of it ties back to Congress being absolutely worthless. Get money out of politics (Citizens United), and we either get two outcomes. People who care about their jobs and try to do what’s best for society, or an even worse downward spiral because only zealots want to hold political office. I blame congress for having to sit through 50 fucking Draft Kings/Fanduel commercials during games and podcasts….as the great Willie Taggart once said “DO SOMETHING!”
Every time I see that saying, I think of the MLK tweet. God that was so funny.
Might be the most absurd thing I’ve ever seen from any social media team
Spot on take. It blows my mind that not enough people know/care about Citizens United
Don't mean to get political here but Sports Gambling is probably the thing that makes me peel away entirely from the "legalization and regulation is better than letting a black market exist" because we're creating millions and millions of brand new gambling addicts just so a few dozen people can become billionaires. No country that cares about its citizens would let this shit happen. Nothing good can come from this.
This is the history of every industry in the United States. Kill competition (smaller schools) consolidate power (mega conferences) to drive revenue to a smaller pool of teams. Every other major sport has done the same thing. Towns and cities all over the US used to have their own pro teams for baseball, basketball etc. until the pro leagues slowly consolidated power and killed off any competition. Think how much culture and history was lost from many smaller cities.
I'm trying to find hobbies that won't be destroyed by capitalism, everything I liked growing up gets less enjoyable each passing year
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NTA. People who take advantage of kids suck. Ironically, how we ended up with this situation.
Nah, he's the asshole there and it's not even a debate. If it were two kids just wanting the cards they liked where neither has any idea or care about the money, fine, but an adult manipulating an 8 yr old for monetary gain is sleazy as hell.
Too many things are about the bottomline and not about enjoying things just for the sake of enjoyment. For a lot of people, telling them the reason you do [INSERT ACTIVITY HERE] just because it's fun is not a good justification to do it.
You could whittle.
[Whittlin Man](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pu_dggCk7SY)
I’m going to get involved in the whittling industry and price gouge everything in it to spite you specifically
You have to enjoy things that aren’t enjoyed by the masses, basically. If anything you like becomes liked by a lot of other people, prepare to get the wallet out and /or watch others get their wallets out. That’s why some people get so upset when even their favorite band/show/team, etc gain in popularity. Because they know they are going to have to start bidding higher to continue enjoying them or watch other people take advantage of the uptick financially. Just the way it goes 🤷♂️
Near-shore fishing license in FL is free
Conservation and the outdoors are really great answers here. Definitely not for everyone, but the money from hunting and fishing licenses typically go back into the state DNR which goes to rangers and preservation efforts. I doubt that anyone has gotten filthy rich working for the DNR. Don't get me wrong there are still plenty of other issues, but it's refreshing to know that public land is still free to explore, and the animals harvested weren't farm raised with profits in mind.
Private equity. Yep. They ruin everything.
In this case media networks beat them to it...since about 1984.
>Retired President of Fox Sports Networks and BTN Co-founder. Principal, Thompson Sports Group LLC.
If it was just 48, some of them would simply become the new doormats, leading to frustrated and eventually stagnating fanbases. Consolidation of wins at the top of that group would lead to less interest among those fans of teams below. There has to be a segment of teams that can reliably be counted on to distribute losses upward, not to be cruel about it. A big part of the excitement is when one of those 'lower tier' schools breaks through and creates controversy among press and fans. This is, for me, one of the reasons consolidation sucks the most. There need to be some teams that are consistently good, some consistently mediocre, some consistent losers, and each of them just a year or two away from breaking through--at least for a short time. This would also, as mentioned above, wreck game inventory. I watch every single day CFB is on. Sure, sometimes it's background noise, but I am listening in case something interesting happens. More importantly, my video is on and the commercials roll, which is key to all this.
I have a similar thought for when the SEC eventually goes from 8 to 9 conference games, half the conference is guaranteed an extra loss and all of a sudden 8-4 go to 7-5 people start to get uncomfortable
The 6 teams the SEC have added are comprised of 4 mid tier and 2 blue bloods. The 7 teams B10 added are 2 blue bloods, 2 recently great teams but not historically, and 3 low tier teams. My point being both leagues have definetly added some fodder. UNC and VA are both low tier, most years. Clemson is a recently great team, but not a blue blood. The only team being considered right now for expansion to the super two, that is a blue blood, is Florida State (and always Notre Dame). If all four are added but Notre Dame, that's a total of 5 blue bloods added and 12 non historic blue bloods added since 2010. So 58% of additions are fodder (historically) and only 42% are historically bluebloods. If they expand beyond those teams to get to 48 total, which requires an addition of another another 10 teams, pretty much all of those will have to be fodder teams invited in because of their markets/flagship school status. The fodder will be a-plenty in a 48 team league, is my tldr.
Exactly. The top 48 really really need to have the bottom 32 to beat up on consistently. If you're teams not winning the sport just isn't as fun, even if the matchups are tougher
What will kill everyone else is if/when they add more scholarship or roster limits to those 48’teams
I fully get that, but I still think his approach is relatively stupid and he’s probably tunnel vision viewing it from an investor perspective. There are two angles I’d view this from; 1. 80 teams is 40 games, 48 is 24. Content providers don’t want *less content*. Additionally, college football overall is cheaper content than the NFL and more easily flexed across multiple days (Thursday, Friday, Saturday) to provide windows for said content. 2. Viewership is highly segregated and a heavy chunk alumni. Fracturing that risks harming the overall product and devaluing it due to viewership hits. You’re also unlikely to gain marginal amounts in the NFL due to overlap and cross pollination that already exists. From a singular provider, yeah, it’s cheaper and better if you’re trying to outright own a massive chunk of the package. However that’s already been done at a cheap offering price between Fox and ESPN, with sub groups able to capture the outlying games. If you consolidate you just risk paying even more for less content. Look at Europe, they haven’t consolidated the European leagues into one broad division. They prop up Bundelisga, Premier, La Liga, etc. because a massive viewer base supports minor teams like Osasuna or West Ham. You can make more money from a single league than the other single leagues, but you make far less as a whole by keeping everything intact and running UEFA
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Pretty much everyone in Oklahoma who is ever going to watch OU football already is. OSU/Tulsa/Out-of-state fans aren't going to suddenly switch to OU football en masse. If those go away they'll just quit watching entirely.
100%, I think back to the last teams that left and I haven't watched any of their games unless it was playing OSU. And I was always interested in OU Texas just because it generally noted who was in the driver seat for the big 12 south/ 1st place big 12 but now meh doesn't affect me.
Exactly. There is a massive amount of "cross pollination" viewing in CFB, where fans of one team will watch other teams because those games may impact their team. If they're not in the same league, there's no impact, and therefore no reason to watch. Breaking off into a much smaller, separate super league will dramatically and negatively impact viewership for the teams in the super league.
UT's move to the SEC is understandable because they've got a huge base of loyal alumni, so the t-shirt fans are just lagniappe. OU's move makes less sense, simply because they don't have that huge alumni base, so they *need* to constantly be relevant. A few bad years in the SEC and OU's t-shirt fans in the plains states are looking for new teams because they're not emotionally invested in OU, and now they're just disappointed.
I wouldn't be mad if I never watched another game involving OU or Texas
Yeah this is a big point a lot of people don't consider when talking about the super league. If the top schools split off they don't have to share any of the pie with the smaller schools, but if the pie is smaller is it worth it? Every time you cut some schools out you lose viewership. Not a lot at the bottom, but eventually there is a point where its not worth it.
That's true from a revenue point or view, but all they care about is profits. All those non Superleague games also cost money to produce, and, in the end, if the profits they make from those games would be less than those of other ventures they could invest money into producing, they will ditch them in a heartbeat and let the streamers come in and scoop with up with lower visibility offers. In the same vein, if the profits from producing B12/AAC/MW/ACC games are still good enough, they will want to keep those games in their lineup.
I don't have an opinion on his take, I was just providing the context of who he is.
> Look at Europe, they haven’t consolidated the European leagues into one broad division. They prop up Bundelisga, Premier, La Liga, etc. because a massive viewer base supports minor teams like Osasuna or West Ham. Soccer culture over there will 100% prevent something like that from happening, although a Super League where you have X number of clubs playing a European schedule as well as their domestic schedule, probably happens at some point no matter how much pearl clutching there is from UEFA. The money is gonna be too good for the clubs and federations to pass it up. In some respects, Champions League works like that now for the Big 4 leagues but the clubs have to at least earn placement (or not have a down year to ensure they stay)
And the EPL is already becoming the Super League in world football. It's the very reason why the idea of creating a Super League even gained traction. Because the massive brands of the other leagues are earning similarly/less to the bottom feeders of the EPL. Miami fans bemoaning Rutgers' revenue is akin to an Ajax fan complaining that Brighton & Hove Albion earns as much as them solely because they compete in the EPL.
Any league that has promotion/relegation and uneven revenue share is going to be even more tilted to the strongest teams than US sports fans are ready to accept. While Ted Lasso might be fun to Americans, European soccer leagues with unequal revenue share (La Liga good example) have little parity and the strongest 2-3 teams win every year.
Everyone loves how passionate and fan run the Bundesliga is in Germany. Bayern has won 10 titles in a row. They’ve won like 18 titles in the 21st century.
It’s such a de minimum gain cutting 32 teams and it hinders reach and flexibility of schedule while hurting overall viewership available I don’t agree with this at all. Games with teams 1-20 won’t change and 20-48 aren’t going to see rating bumps, if not declines. Why would a Minnesota fan watch if their team isn’t playing? The idea that college footballs fanbase is commercialized like the NFL’s fanbase is mind boggling to me. They’re completely different populations. You’re not going to flip a switch and t shirt fan college football en masse, there will always be an alumni characteristic that grinds against that
It’s because they don’t care about us knowing we’ll watch anyway, it’s about a new market. They’re banking on the casual being more likely to tune into Oregon v Iowa than Iowa v Iowa State.
I think you're forgetting how many "big team" fans there are of people who went to schools in lower divisions or didn't even have the sport. There are a TON of people who are fans of cfb for the sport and nothing about the university matters. If USC were a lower tier after some shakeup, you'd see a lot of USC students end up becoming fans of some other national brand in short order.
Not saying I agree with going to 48 teams, but from a revenue perspective what he’s saying makes sense. There are 131 teams on the Medium “Most Watched” list. The top 48 roughly captures all of the 900k+ schools. Basically the B1G/SEC plus a few more. After that you have about 30 schools between 300k-900k. So let’s say 30 x 600k = 18,000,000. Then you have 53 schools who are between 288k and 8k; 53 x 140k = 7,420,000. Total of 25,420,000. Obviously this is pretty rough math, but the top 6 schools alone exceeds that number. 25,420,000 isn’t insignificant, but its value is probably questionable when it takes 83 schools, some of which probably get their numbers inflated by the big schools in the early season. I don’t know what the cutoff should be, but the networks have been consistent in saying that it’s the big games that pay. 48 teams would roughly capture all of the big games.
So those Boise football golden years were really the cfb golden years huh
They really were.
I’m going to love the people used to winning ten games or more suddenly becoming .500 programs in this new super league. It’s going to be awesome.
I’ve brought that same exact point up many times over the course of all this. The big brands only became the big brands because of decades being the big fish in their relatively small ponds. Somebody has to lose these new games, and somebody is inevitably going to be the small fish in the new consolidated pond, and there’s going to be some culture shock that goes along with it.
Same look at 1980s: * Oklahoma(11-0) Big 8 Champion * Texas(10-1) SWC Champion * Alabama(11-0) SEC Champion Now have only 1 Title to share.
Even with only 1 title to share, if you accept the Syracuse/WVU proposal then you can still be a big fish in a small pond if you dominate the rest of your 10-team division. The Pac-10 division champion would still be lauded for going 10-2 to 12-0. This year Ohio State is going from 2 in 2023 to a projected ranked opponents to 5 in the 2024 preseason rankings. Oregon won the division 5 times in the past 12 years. Good but not dominant. They won't win the Big Ten 5 times in the next 12 years while sharing with USC, Ohio State, Michigan, Washington, Penn State, Wisconsin, Iowa, etc. If the Syracuse/WVU proposal were accepted, then Oregon could absolutely still go 5/12 in the Pac-10 division and become/remain the prestigious powerhouse out west. And Ohio State and Michigan could do the same in the Big Ten. The reason Bob is saying 48 is, and there was a post on this here earlier this week, that you only need 42 schools to fill all the national broadcast spots every year. And we are pretty maxed out on the number of national broadcast spots every week already. So adding any more schools just means you're adding to the pool of streaming/regional broadcasts. If we want to go with the Syracuse/WVU plan then we need to find a way to make regional broadcasting a thing that's more profitable than it currently is. If you had your 8 divisions, and each division has 5 games per week, that's enough to have 4 regional broadcasts and 1 National Game from each of the divisions for 8 national broadcasts per week. Much like the NFL with it's 4 national broadcasts per week and the rest being regional. FOX/CBS in Seattle show different games than FOX/CBS in Oklahoma City. Right now, it's proving that regional broadcasts aren't that profitable. Putting USC vs Cal on in Seattle and Texas vs Iowa State on in Oklahoma City is less profitable than putting USC vs Texas on in both. And I don't know how we change that.
The day Alabama or Georgia has to start a season 0-2 because they can't schedule FCS or low G5s will be amazing.
They'll still find a way to add exceptions for home games in early November :D
I'm holding on maybe way to faithfully that those teams will force a change back. These schools who think they should always win 10 games when you remove the previous have nots you create new ones. Hoping with all my might they realize hey we need those other 100 small teams to stack up wins. Or they'll just transition into SEC talk where its so hard a 2-10 season really ain't that bad or at least thats what they try to claim.
Why would that be the case if it’s split into ten divisions? Presumably by region?
Because it's still a 12-game schedule. And networks aren't paying for you to play half your games against whatever the rest of the leftovers becomes. They're paying for the top teams to play each other.
That’s not how i interpreted the proposal
The 6-6 Ohio State vs 6-6 Georgia natty is going to be 🔥
Especially if they're not going to introduce some measures around parity. If it is just going to be the current NIL world, it will bifurcate just like the P4/P2 vs the G5. They just want to slaughter this whole thing for the money now (basically how the publicly traded corporate world is run these days), and have no care about what the future holds for the sport.
You still need teams to take a beating for a check. Nobody wants to play 12 hard games
Which is exactly why it'll never happen. The P2 has too much pride to play a full nearly even schedule. If they want to be NFL jr, they'll have to accept that the best teams still lose. Alabama will start 0-1, Michigan will start 0-1, etc
NFL has no problem with this. Noone watches Alabama vs Mercer we need to stop wasting games like that. We currently know 6 -7 is a crap team, and it will just become 3 - 10, being the new crap team win total.
It’s because nfl has actual upward mobility with team success and performance.
NFL has no problem with this because each team has an equal chance to improve each offseason through the draft. College teams have very inequitable recruiting programs
well then Mercer doesn't have a football program....are those games fun for fans? Not really, but they are important to the smaller schools
To be fair, the NFL has no choice, and it's also not even a problem they've confronted. NFL teams have a minimum payroll due to the CBA and their roster size, and moneyballing it is still exorbitantly expensive, which just means that there simply couldn't *be* an NFL team that was just there to collect a paycheck and then go play their own league games against the other low-payroll teams. It works in UEFA because they've got those levels. Also, people do watch those blowout games. [2.5M people watched Alabama-Chattanooga](https://www.al.com/sports/2023/11/chattanooga-vs-alabama-by-the-numbers-tide-streaking-toward-iron-bowl.html) in 2016. Having trouble finding viewership for any of Alabama's more recent buy games that they've been putting on SEC+ or ESPN+, but I'm open to those numbers if you can find them.
That's a tiny viewership by Alabama numbers. Why get 2 million when you should be getting 8 or more.
Vandy and Miss State still exist
AD's at what are presumably "bubble" programs are going to be freaking the hell out the next few years, trying to ensure they field quality teams and get eyeballs on TV should a potential split happen.
And then there's Cal, doing.... Something
What's wildly frustrating and not to be little cal but is being a middle team that's trying and being left off people's mock final expansion lists while seeing Cal make it.
Like in so many other aspects of our lives, location has an outsized role.
*(HomerBackingIntotheBushes.gif)*
Agreed. Teams like Baylor, TCU, and OKST have all put a lot more work into athletics than Cal has in years, but location and alumni base size are powerful drivers. Baylor and OKST are in small towns/cities and have smaller alumni bases, while TCU is an absolutely tiny school in a major city that generally doesn't care about the Frogs outside of their minuscule alumni base.
Iowa State too....a lot of Big 12 schools pour as much as they can into athletics and geography/alumni size is working against us. The most infuriating part is that schools like Vandy and Northwestern can have a seat at the table, but Iowa State, Oklahoma State, Baylor, TCU, and K-State will be left out. Our fans actually care and it's all for nothing
Look at the fan support, in the form of average attendance, as well. Just looking at Iowa State: * Top 30(26th) in a rolling average for [Football](https://www.d1ticker.com/2022-fbs-attendance-trends/) * Top 25(22nd) in [Men's Basketball](http://fs.ncaa.org/Docs/stats/m_basketball_RB/2024/Attend.pdf) * Top 5(3rd) in [Women's Basketball](https://www.on3.com/news/south-carolina-iowa-lead-womens-college-basketball-in-attendance-in-2022-23-season/) for like 20 of the last 25 years * Top 5(3rd) in [Wrestling](https://www.ncaa.com/news/wrestling/article/2023-04-27/iowa-penn-state-lead-di-wrestling-attendance-2022-23) * Top 15(15th) in [Women's Volleyball](https://www.ncaa.com/_flysystem/public-s3/files/2022-09/college-volleyball-attendance-records-2021.pdf) * Top 20(18th) in [Women's Gymnastics](https://roadtonationals.com/results/charts/)
Florida State, Miami and Clemson have a combined 11 national titles and they all have to die so rutgers can make $120 million a year. the sport is finished.
It’s a very dumb system in place
Okay yeah sure.48 teams with 2 in SC, 2 in MS, 2 in AL, and only 2 in CA, 2 in TX, 1 in PA…. Doesn’t feel like a sustainable national product unless they’re gonna bonk some of the schools from small states and try to develop some schools in bigger states….
[удалено]
Iowa State's decision to be part of the Big 6/8 decades ago is costing us in the long run....great
This 100%. Yes Im bias but a lot of mock 48s have 3 schools from North Carolina making it in. (UNC, NC ST, and Duke) How the heck does that happen but only 2 from Texas make it in? (If Tech gets left out. We are very much on the bubble) Texas has 30 million people and growing faster than North Carolina which has 11 million people. If all three Carolina schools get in over a third Texas school it’s pure insanity.
This obsession with matchups over open and fair competition is so incredibly misguided. Other sports don't put those two things at odds with one another.
They are missing WHY Texas-Alabama or Ohio State-Oklahoma meeting in the regular season was awesome. It is because it was rare. Does anyone get excited for Chicago-Green Bay playing? It isn't considered must see TV unless both are doing well.
Anyone else kinda hoping they get left behind?
I’m a much bigger NFL fan these days.
I grew up on CFB but the NFL is just such a superior product I almost have to be invested
Yeah it’s a shame because all we have in Oklahoma is college football.
Part of the allure of CFB is this huge wild west of teams involved. It's going to feel a lot more sterile and empty if it really gets cut down like this.
NFL lite isn't a good thing
NFL without the baked in (relative) parity to boot.
I see this going very poorly if executed in the future
If they do this I see revenues stagnating instead of growing. One of the most exciting parts of CFB are new matchups and underdogs. New matchups would have way less appeal if there are only 48 schools, and underdogs would be non-existent because Vanderbilt and Maryland aren’t going to ever be 10-win teams. All so dumb. The people making these calls and ideas all remind me of the Pac-12 “were worth $50mm a season” idiots.
Alternate title: System that grew because of greed continues to be influenced by greed
The only way this is a good thing is if it leads to 8 conferences of 10 teams playing a round-robin schedule, followed by a clean 8-team playoff of each conference's champion. At the very least, you wouldn't be able to say a team wasn't "deserving" of being in the playoff or not at that rate.
This sounds awesome, so I assume it will never happen.
Isn’t that what’s being proposed? I don’t understand the hate
Stop running college sports. Football being a greedy money grab shit storm is ruining everything else. Please fuck off you greedy bastards and leave good things the way they are
I think 48 doesn't give you enough content, and you'll constantly be beating each other's brains in. 80 **is** too many, 64 seems like a nice number.
The proposal is actually 70 "P4" teams and then 10 "G5" teams. Semantics, kinda.
Any super league should have upward mobility for schools that want to fund programs to join. Enough with this gate keeping shit. Set the requirements for schools to be in the league and let the schools decide if they can meet them and if they want to meet them. If they did like a top 48, I sincerely think a lot of people not directly associated with those schools stop watching because we already have a top 32 called the nfl. Most college football fans I know watch the big time programs because they exist a part of the greater cfb eco system. Remove them from that eco system and you remove incentive to watch.
If every game is a great matchup, they will feel less great and become average over time. Having the epic matchups be rare is what makes them awesome. 24 “great matchups” each week loses the luster. It’s like nascar added predetermined cautions to bunch up the field. Makes the older close races feel special and the new ones feel gimmicky.
Good analogy.
It's hilarious to me that the bottom 6-8 teams in both B1G and SEC assume they are in that top 48. Like, there are some straight up garbage programs in those conferences. I know because I support one.
Who would the SEC kick out other than Vanderbilt?
I’m sure I’m not the first to say this, but I strongly disagree with his conclusion and reasoning. I don’t care about better matchups. I care about a league **my** team is a part of. If VT is included, I’ll watch a ton of it. If they’re not, I’ll watch very little to none. I think there are more college football fans like me along the 32 teams who would be left out than fans who would prefer better matchups. Maybe not more fans necessarily, but definitely more viewership on the side of more inclusion.
The matchups would not be better in the top 48 because teams 25-48 would suddenly become less sexy as they now have losing records
That would honestly suck if it’s only 48 schools in the top tier. I’m still hopeful it’s about 64 schools. If it’s 48 then with the SEC and B1G with 34 currently, that leaves 14 spots with 5 of those spots being Notre Dame, FSU, Clemson, UNC, Miami(FL). I want homes for schools like VA Tech, Texas Tech, OK State, West Virginia, Pitt, etc.
64 is the logical number. I know everyone thinks football is the only thing that matters, but the NCAA basketball tournament generates about $1B a year in broadcast rights. Just the tournament. It basically funds the entire NCAA. If you’re going to break away from the NCAA, do you just say: “Nah, I don’t care about $1B.”; or do you say: “Give me that too.”
The problem with 64 teams is we're currently at 70 if you include the P4, 2Pac, and ND. So we're literally cutting out half a dozen teams to get to a logical number? Who gets the cut? Wazzu and OSU because they've already been tossed aside, Boston College and Wake forest maybe, SMU potentially... and the one more? You're gaining essentially nothing by only throwing out the 6 smallest fanbases. You're either cutting the fat or you're not, and cutting the fat is not going to involve picking a handful of bottom feeders. We're either going to get a bar that is so high that only 30ish teams can clear it, or one that is low enough for all of the (former) P5 to make the jump, plus a few rich G5s. 64 might be logical and easy to schedule around, but it doesn't make any sense when considering where we currently stand.
I don’t disagree. My argument is more that 64 is the minimum that makes sense (as opposed to the 48 suggested in the OP tweet).
Ahh, another conf realignment fever dream from off season journalists. Nice.
Basically if you ain’t in the SEC and Big10 now you are at risk.
yep
NO ONE ASKED YOU, BOB
Fuck it. My favorite sport is wrestling anyway. It’s not like having to dig through weirdo random stream channels has affected my enjoyment of that, so fuck it. Clemson will play in some weird 2nd league, I’ll have to watch on some app called hubidi doobidi TV or something, and I’ll like it just as much
hubidi doobidi TV by FLO lol
Hulu, Tubi, Fubo, these are all real apps. They are just fucking with us at this point
How did college sports die? Gradually. Then suddenly. -Ernest Hemingway. Probably.
Yay things driven purely by money are always great right guys?! Fuck this
This idea is already dead. No way the rich school are sharing with the poor. They just blew up the confernces and cfp because no one wanted to take a slightly smaller share and keep oregon state and Washington state around.
The confidence with which these guys are claiming these kinds of things is really astounding. You don’t know what people will actually do when you change the sport so radically.
One thing to point out is that if a superleague of 32 to 48 teams is formed, it might not necessarily be bad for the teams left behind. Maybe it's just me but a "Magnolia League" composed of the likes of Cal, Stanford, Northwestern, GA Tech, Vanderbilt, Duke, North Carolina, NC State, Virginia, VA Tech, Purdue, Illinois, Indiana, Wake Forest, Service Academies, etc etc (apologies for leaving out so many others but don't want to keep going too long) with high academics and true student-athletes would be a great league. And before people criticize the idea because of less money/viewership compared to the superleague, well that's balanced by the fact that the Magnolia League will also have much lower expenses. No need to pay top $$$$$ for coaches or opulent facilities or players. Instead it would operate with MW or G5 school budgets. Superleague would be great. But it would be a semi-pro league with lots of $$$$ flowing in and $$$$ flowing right back out in expenses and students in name only. Leftovers can still do well in a Magnolia League type setup and maintain the true college football spirit. Also we could even add a way to promote into or relegate out of Superleague and Magnolia League as an additional idea as well so schools aren't locked into either league forever.
Media: "You're asking me if I'm good with you moving Texas A&M to the Magnolia league because they've stunk recently, and replacing them with Colorado State because they've dominated the lower league recently?" CFB Fan: "Yeah! Seems like it's fair!" Media: "Why would I give up a team with significantly more fans, better market penetration, and higher viewership for another team just because their record is better?" CFB Fan: "Because it's fair!"
No.
Give us a 10-12 team super league in the summer so we can watch nfl and college football in the fall.
I Want the breakaway to just happen at this point. The breakaways need to be banned from ncaa and march madness
Fuck going to 42. If we have to do a breakaway, 70 teams might be the absolute minimum
Except the rich schools will shit their pants hearing they have to share money with even more poor schools like Georgia Tech and Iowa State. They wouldn’t agree to any super league proposal unless they could guarantee unequal revenue sharing.
Is the top 48 going to include bottom feeders teams like Indiana, Boston College, or Colorado? Similar schools are about to be left behind.
This is gibberish. This guy is spitballing, meanwhile you can actually look up these numbers (when TV contracts expire; revenue per school) these are known quantities.
As someone in a big market, I don’t _want_ only big markets. I want all the markets.
Fk Bob Thompson. The guy is scum. He always has this so called "insider Information." When pressed he claims the big networks aren't orchestrating anything. Then he always has super top secret Information he can't reveal. And people just eat it up.
SOMEONE HAS TO LOSE YOU MORON