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A collective including several college presidents and a senior National Football League (NFL) executive are reportedly devising a new college football league to replace the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) and the College Football Playoff (CFP).
According to The Athletic, the group called ‘College Sports Tomorrow’ (CST) is putting together a new system that would establish a two-tier college football competition involving all 134 schools playing in the NCAA’s Division 1 Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS).
The 20-person CST group is said to include the NFL’s chief media and business officer Brian Rolapp, Philadelphia 76ers co-owner David Blitzer and Len Perna, founder and chief executive of the TurnkeyZRG agency.
The CST’s plan would see the top 70 programmes, consisting of all members of the five former Power conferences, alongside Notre Dame and Southern Methodist University (SMU), become permanent members of the league. The 70 colleges would be sorted into seven ten-team leagues, joined by an eighth division to be made up of teams promoted from the second tier.
The second tier would be made up of over 50 schools who would fight for progression to the upper level, as part of a similar promotion and relegation system deployed in European soccer. They would compete to play in the eighth ten-team league, with the 70-strong group of elite programmes not at risk of losing their place at the highest tier.
With this structure, the competition would not employ a selection committee for the playoffs, with the eight division winners to be joined by eight wild card entrants decided by their league record and tiebreakers.
As part of their model, the CST would additionally establish a single entity to negotiate with a prospective player union on name, image and likeness (NIL) rights, salary structure rules and a player transfer portal. This could allow the new league to bypass any antitrust concerns that have crippled the NCAA’s jurisdiction on player rights. Meanwhile, non-football sports would remain in their current conference structure.
Those within the CST collective are of the belief that the proposed league would also boost television rights value and financial sustainability for colleges. They contend that the competition would gain from negotiating TV deals as a singular group, although their revenue distribution model would not currently see schools share proceeds equally.
“We’ve been looking at something that’s large enough that it gives everybody a chance to compete, and that does translate into about 70 schools,” Kent Syverud, Syracuse chancellor told The Athletic.
“That also creates content that’s more valuable so that it generates the resources to do more things that the university presidents think are important for college sports. It is not the case that the money to do what’s right for our college athletes in football is just going to emerge from nowhere. Somehow it has to be generated – that’s what we are trying to figure out as well.”
The Athletic reports, however, that the CST proposal is failing to attract support among schools. The Big Ten, Southeastern Conference (SEC) and Big 12 all cancelled planned meetings, with the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) the only conference to have been briefed on the plan.
According to The Athletic, conferences have not met with the group so far in fear of upsetting their respective broadcast partners.
The need for reform currently unifies all college athletic conferences, with many worried about the growing number of lawsuits filed against the NCAA. In February, the Big Ten and SEC formed a joint advisory group aiming to tackle the legal and governance issues currently facing college sports, as the NCAA’s authority comes under increasing scrutiny.
Evidently, some feel a new league structure for college football is the best way to ensure healthy finances and increased TV rights revenue going forward. The sport is the closest of any US-based property to challenge the popularity of the NFL, with broadcasters seeing it as close to a guarantee when it comes to generating huge audiences and keeping subscribers.
However, it is highly doubtful that the CST proposal can extract more money from broadcasters, who have already invested significant sums for long-term deals with conferences. The SEC’s US$3 billion deal with ESPN does not expire until 2034, for instance, with the Disney-owned broadcaster also recently agreeing a lengthy broadcast agreement reportedly worth US$7.8 billion for the CFP.
With an expanded postseason and bigger conferences already on the way, there isn’t a pressing need for a single college football competition. But while the CST plan may not take off, the idea that colleges are actively plotting alternative structures should be of major concern for the NCAA, which risks being left behind.
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