When I was in college, my friends and I would talk about how to make college football better. Nobody liked the BCS. Well, college football is much different from when I was in college. It’s not better. It’s like somebody put Rob Manfred in charge of college football. The people making decisions have taken something great and made it much worse. I would absolutely go back to college football in the BCS era if I could. This post is going to be rambling and probably unorganized because I’m pretty sad about the state of college football and college sports in general.
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| This is always how I feel about Rob Manfred, but now it’s how I feel about college sports also. |
It’s not just college football that will be worse, it’s all college sports. The Pac 12 will be dead a year from now and college sports might not have much longer to live than that. They will continue to play college sports, but they won’t be what made college sports great. They will be very different and much worse. I can think of two blog posts about college sports where I was definitely wrong. In December 2012, I lamented the death of the Big East. The Big East is not the same as it was back then, but it’s definitely not dead either. I wish Notre Dame was still in the Big East and a 16-team tournament over five days at Madison Square Garden was awesome. Those days are gone. But the Big East remains an excellent basketball conference. The current Big East teams have a 7-1 lead in football/men’s basketball/women’s basketball national championships over the current Big 10 teams and their west coast additions in the past decade (and of course the Big East doesn’t have football anymore). It’s still a 3-1 lead if you take out UConn’s national championships when they weren’t part of the Big East. The other post that I was wrong about was lamenting the loss of college sports in July 2020. As it turned out, Notre Dame saved that college football season by joining the ACC and playing that year. It’s been interesting to see some people realize that Notre Dame’s independence is a good thing now. Maybe we could save the ACC now, but I don’t really want to. We probably can’t save all of college sports.
So yeah, I hope I’m wrong about the future of college sports, but I don’t think I will be. I’ll focus mostly on football, but I’ll talk a little bit about basketball and the other sports also. There’s so much about the present state and the future of college football that’s bad. Rivalries have been killed by conference realignment. Decisions are being made based only on TV and money and not what’s best for the students and fans. The Big 10 is the biggest culprit in all of this. Two years ago, I had a post dealing with many of my concerns about college football (I was more worried about the SEC, but the Big 10 turned out to be the biggest villain by far). It was right after the ACC, Big 10, and Pac 12 agreed to the Alliance. That alliance was as real as Jim and Dwight’s alliance in season 1 of the Office. It lasted for less than a year before the Big 10 stabbed the Pac 12 in the back. The Big 10 killed the Pac 12. Let us never forget this. It was not the Big 12, it was the Big 10. The Big 12 was fighting for survival and they took Colorado (hardly a death blow). Now they’re taking three more Pac 12 teams after the conference is already dead. The Big 10 did not need to expand. They took USC, UCLA, Oregon, and Washington entirely because of greed. The Big 10’s greed and the incompetence of Pac 12 leadership is what killed the Pac 12.
So now the Big 10 will go from New Jersey to the west coast. There will be too many teams and too much travel. In football, the travel is not that big of a deal. For teams to have to travel for six road games a year on Saturdays is not too bad for the players, but it is kind of bad for the fans. Like if you’re a USC student, alumnus, or fan living in the Los Angeles area, the only easy road game to get to will be UCLA. Are Michigan State fans going to like staying up for a night game at 10:30 in Washington? It’s not terrible for the players, but it will be rough for the fans. And for the other sports, the travel is going to be crazy for the players.
What even is an 18-team conference? I’m sure they’re going to have protected rivalries in football. Like Michigan and Ohio State will play every year. But how often are you going to play the other teams in the conference? It’s a little like Notre Dame’s ACC arrangement. I would like Notre Dame’s ACC arrangement in football more if we didn’t have to cycle through every team. Since we play an average of five ACC teams per year and we play each team, we pretty much cycle through the conference every three years. Playing Duke and Syracuse as often as we play Florida State and Clemson is not interesting. I would like it a lot more if we didn’t have to cycle through the whole conference. Like if we could play Miami like six years in a row and revive that rivalry, that would be cool. We’ve developed a little bit of a rivalry with Clemson with regular season games in 2015, 2020, 2022, and this year plus a playoff game in 2018 and an ACC Championship game in 2020, but after this year, we’re only scheduled to play them five more times in the next fourteen years (we’ll see if those games happen or not). So unless we get some playoff games, that rivalry is probably going to fizzle out. How are rivalries going to develop in the Big 10 with that many teams?
This whole wave of conference expansion started more than a decade ago with the Big East and Big 12 getting raided. Boston College, Syracuse, Pittsburgh, Louisville, Miami, Rutgers, and Virginia Tech left the Big East. Colorado, Nebraska, Missouri, and Texas A&M left the Big 12. We can add in Maryland leaving the ACC. Has that worked out for any of those teams? Are any of them better off in their new conferences than they were before? Yes, many of them are making more money. But are they doing better in football? Some of them maybe are the same, but some of them are much worse off. Leaving the Big 12 worked out so well for Colorado that they went back to the Big 12. Leaving the Big 12 has been a disaster for Nebraska on the football field. If you look at the four West coast teams going to the Big 10, I could easily imagine at least two of them becoming like Nebraska in the Big 10.
Oklahoma dominated the Big 12, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see them become the Nebraska of the SEC. Most of the teams that left the Big East are worse off in basketball than they were in the Big East.
What should Notre Dame do? If we have playoff access as an independent, we should absolutely stay independent. If we can’t stay independent, then I would rather join any conference other than the Big 10. I would join the ACC, SEC, Big 12, MAC, Pac 4, etc. before I would join the Big 10. My ideal scenario has always been staying independent in football and going back to the Big East for all of our other sports. I’ve pretty much wanted that ever since we left the Big East.
Conference expansion is bad, but could we see conference contraction in the future? I mean, conferences should be smaller, but if it happens, they way they get rid of teams will not be a good thing. Like are Michigan, Ohio State, Penn State, and USC going to decide that it makes no sense for them to be sharing money with teams like Rutgers, Purdue, Northwestern, and Iowa? Are Alabama, Florida, Georgia, and Tennessee going to decide that it doesn’t make sense for them to be sharing money with Vanderbilt and Missouri? I really wish we could just blow everything up and start over. Maryland should be in the ACC. Rutgers should not be in a power conference. The Pac 12 should still exist. I would be okay with having football conferences that are totally distinct from the other sports. Like Texas and Kansas in the same conference in basketball makes sense, but it doesn’t really make sense for them to be in the same football conference.
I could imagine college sports dividing between two extremes. One extreme is NFL Jr./NBA Jr./minor league baseball. You could have two super conferences with professional players who aren’t as good as the best players in the world. There will be no connection between the academic mission of the universities and their athletic teams. You will have players quitting on their teams like they’re Kevin Durant, Kyrie Irving, and James Harden. You will have way too many teams in the playoff competing for a championship like in the NFL and that will destroy the value of the regular season. As you can see, we’re already very much headed in that direction.
Allowing players to get paid for their name, image, and likeness was a good thing. Like it was silly that EA Sports made a video game and couldn’t use the players’ names. Make the game, use the players’ names, and pay them for it. Nobody is against this. But the results of players making money off of their name, image, and likeness have been really bad. You already had college basketball teams built on hired mercenaries (Kentucky and Duke are the most obvious examples), but now you’re getting that in college football as well. Many players are deciding where to go to college based entirely on money and not at all on the educational opportunities provided for them. Dante Moore and Peyton Bowen would be at Notre Dame right now if that wasn’t the case.
The changes in transfer rules have been bad. As somebody who transferred twice, I’m not against allowing players to transfer. I am against NBA free agency coming to college sports. It used to be that schools could prevent players from transferring to certain schools. That is silly. I’m glad that’s not allowed anymore. But with no more requirement to sit out a year combined with money for name, image, and likeness, you have football teams built on hired mercenaries like basketball (USC) and players transferring all the time now and making decisions that probably aren’t best for themselves. Like Tyler Buchner transferring from Notre Dame to Alabama could easily work out poorly for him. He was close to graduating from Notre Dame and he might not even end up playing at Alabama. If players had to sit out for a year, they would be much more hesitant to transfer. I would make exceptions to that rule if a school changed conferences after a player signed with the school. There are a lot of families who will have to travel really far to see their kids play for schools after they leave the Pac 12 so I would definitely let kids in that position transfer and play right away. Before anybody could transfer and play right away, graduate transfers were allowed to transfer and play right away. That kind of makes sense. It’s a reward for players who have graduated and still have eligibility. The problem is that these players are transferring and just becoming hired mercenaries. They’re not real students. I mean, Sam Hartman is not really a Notre Dame student. He’s not working toward any degree at Notre Dame. He’s like taking a class or something. His academic workload is like Matt Leinart’s rigorous semester of ballroom dancing. I liked college sports when the athletes were actually college students. Many still are, but the best ones often aren’t. I mean Stetson Bennett was in college for seven years and didn’t graduate.
The 12 team playoff in college football is so stupid. I liked the four team playoff at first, but unless you have a 2004 situation with USC, Oklahoma, and Auburn all undefeated, the playoff isn’t necessary. The BCS was better as long as you don’t have that situation. The regular season was the playoff. I want college football’s regular season to matter. If we lose to Ohio State in September, I want it to ruin my week. But because we play a good schedule, we would still have a pretty good chance to make the playoff with a loss to Ohio State if we can get through the rest of the season without another loss. If we had the 12-team playoff this year, we could probably lose another game and still make the playoff. You will definitely have teams with three losses make it and maybe even teams with four losses. Losing a game will be like losing a regular season NFL game. It just won’t be a big deal.
The other extreme is college athletics becoming like the Ivy League. If you have two power conferences that break away from everybody else, that might be what happens to everybody else. They’re not going to be making significant money off of athletics. The players won’t be making much money off of their name, image, and likeness. The sports might continue with actual college students participating in them, but is anybody going to care? If we get to the point where the only other option is NFL Jr./NBA Jr./minor league baseball with professional athletes that aren’t really college students, I would rather see Notre Dame go the Ivy League route. But I probably won’t care about Notre Dame’s teams very much at that point. And my warning to the power conferences is that college sports might lose significant popularity if you keep moving in this direction. Does anybody care about minor league baseball? I like going to minor league games, but I have no emotional investment in minor league baseball. The NCAA Tournament is the best part of college basketball. If you kill that, are people going to care about what would essentially be the NBA G-League with more exposure? I like college basketball, but I also know that college basketball today is not as good as it was in the 70s and 80s. It’s never going to be as good as it was then. And it might get worse if you kill the NCAA Tournament.
I fear that we’ve reached the point of no return where college football will follow college basketball in becoming worse and worse over the years. College football is definitely affecting the other sports in a negative way. Anyway, I am looking forward to this college football season. I don’t know how many more I’m going to care about after this one. Go Irish.
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