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This week Nebraska AD Trev Alberts had some incredibly revealing comments about the current state of college football realignment. Alberts has the unique experience of being on all sides of the college football industry as a player, ESPN analyst, and now administrator. And while it seems like nothing could surprise us in conference realignment, it seems as though we’ve only reached the end of the beginning.
In particular, Alberts’ vision of where college football might be headed is stunning to see from a major program athletic director.
“We’re moving to a 35 to 40 top brands being part of something. If you just look at football in isolation, eventually conferences will matter less in a sense. If we can find a way to take football and have that be this entity here, I think then you can get back to doing some much more intelligent thinking around the rest of the sports, which should be regionally based.”
What Alberts is talking about is no more and no less than the complete demolition of college athletics as we know it. But at the same time, it almost seems inevitable doesn’t it?
With college conferences now unsustainable national behemoths, it’s a race against the clock to decide who gets a golden ticket from network TV money and who doesn’t. And while the current Power 2 of the Big Ten and SEC might be looking down at the rest of college football, one only has to look at the sudden end of the Pac-12 to realize it might not be this way for long.
Let’s be honest, how much longer do Fox, NBC, and CBS want to foot the bill for Rutgers, Northwestern, and Indiana to get almost $60 million each per year? How much longer does the SEC want to cut a $50 million check to Vanderbilt? Or Kentucky? Or even Mississippi State? The driving force in realignment isn’t getting BTN on New York City cable systems, it’s creating as much valuable must-watch inventory as possible.
Taking conference realignment to its logical conclusion leads to one place – a College Football Premier League where the bluest of the blue bloods finally decide that they’re done carrying their conferences and want all the money for themselves. The NCAA could be out of the picture, the conference maneuvering would be in the past, and the TV networks and streaming platforms would love it. Let the Boise States and Stanfords and Wake Forests fight it out for an FBS title while the Alabamas, Georgias, and Michigans fight for the real prize. Barring a miraculous year from Cincinnati to make the playoff, isn’t this how college football pretty much operates anyways?
A College Football Premier League would guarantee top games every single week, build towards a legitimate playoff, and could theoretically mirror the NFL in every single way. Maybe they would even decide to pay the players too with all the extra cash that would come in.
Once we reach a plateau from this current peak of realignment, the power brokers in the sport will all look around at each other and say to themselves that they want more. There will be nothing standing in their way – not tradition, not fairness, not feeling sorry for those left behind, not everything that makes college football unique, not even the sanctity of amateurism – all those have long fallen by the wayside. There are too many good TV shows to make and too much money still to earn to not go all the way.
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