Gary Danielson says free-market system has helped college football

Gary Danielson spent two decades calling SEC games for CBS, a front-row seat to college football’s most predictable era. The same handful of programs cycled through the top of the sport year after year, stockpiling five-star talent and turning Saturdays into a familiar exercise in inevitability.

Now retired, the six-time Emmy winner thinks college football is finally breaking free from that cycle.

During an appearance on The Dan Patrick Show on Monday, Danielson predicted the College Football Playoff would expand beyond its current 12-team format within the next five years, potentially reaching 16 teams with eight receiving first-round byes. But more importantly, the six-time Emmy winner argued that the combination of NIL money, transfer portal freedom, and playoff expansion is solving a problem that plagued college football since he was in high school.

“I thought college football kind of got stuck where all the great players were gravitating to eight, 10, 12 schools,” Danielson said. “I remember I did a seminar at CBS maybe four or five years ago, and they asked us to pick our top-10 going into 2019 or something like that. And I went out and sought out [Sports Illustrated] when they had their preseason top-10 from the year I graduated from high school, and eight of the 10 teams were the exact same teams that were preseason this year.”

The same programs stockpiled five-star recruits who often never saw meaningful playing time. Elite quarterbacks sat behind other elite quarterbacks. Offensive linemen who would start anywhere else served as backups at powerhouse programs. The rich got richer while everyone else fought for scraps.

The transfer portal and NIL changed that calculus overnight. Players no longer have to wait their turn or accept backup roles at prestigious programs when they can start immediately elsewhere. Money is no longer the exclusive province of traditional powers. And the expanded playoff means more teams have realistic championship aspirations, making it easier to recruit players who might otherwise choose a blue blood program.

“There’s just a lot more players that were stuck in Division II or in the MAC that are now getting their chance to go to these major colleges that we watch on TV,” Danielson said. “They’re not all bad football players.”

He pointed to Trinidad Chambliss as an example — a player his friend covered in high school who “was good, but not ready for Michigan.” Chambliss went to Ferris State, developed for a couple of years, and eventually became the starting quarterback for a team in the College Football Playoff semifinals.

In the old system, that pathway didn’t exist.

The sport has evolved — for better or worse — and Gary Danielson framed the sport’s evolution through a free-market lens, arguing that “freedom and capitalism have a great way of figuring things out and it ends up going to the perfect spot, the perfect price point.” He likened it to the sports media landscape, where ESPN once dominated before personalities like Pat McAfee — who now licenses his show to Worldwide Leader — could bypass traditional gatekeepers and build their own independent platforms.

Of course, the free-market argument has a massive blind spot. NIL hasn’t democratized college football so much as it’s turned boosters into bidding wars, where programs with the deepest pockets can poach talent from smaller schools that developed them. The portal creates mobility for elite players while leaving everyone else scrambling. And calling it “freedom” ignores that most players still have limited options and zero bargaining power compared to coaches who’ve always been able to chase bigger paychecks.

But Danielson’s right that players at least have more paths now than they did when eight programs controlled everything. And like media personalities no longer needing ESPN to reach an audience, players no longer need a blue-blood logo to prove their value or reach the sport’s biggest stages.

Whether that makes college football “better” depends entirely on what you valued about it in the first place. But Gary Danielson believes the sport is closer than it’s been in decades to a system where more than eight schools can realistically compete for championships. That might not be perfect, but at least it’s progress.