Collegiate athletics in the United States are unlike anything else in American sport.
Tens of millions tune in and millions more attend stadiums every college football Saturday to watch student athletes play for America’s immovable sports institutions: universities. These teams are not franchises. They will not relocate. They are unique in the cut-throat, corporate landscape of American sport.
The deep connection between college teams and their communities is the closest American sport comes to replicating the bond between football clubs and fans outside the US, where teams are similarly rooted in folk culture.
This hasn’t prevented European football from developing pan-regional and global competitions designed to serve fans more of what they want. The advent of the Champions League in 1992 revolutionised European club football and provided more best-on-best competition, while the creation of the Premier League supercharged club football in England.
College sport, on the other hand, has stuck with the competition structures it began with. The regional ‘conference’ system has been sacrosanct for over a century, dividing universities by locality rather than size, ability or commercial pull.
But as college football has grown into America’s third-biggest sports business worth billions in TV rights and sponsorship, the tectonic plates have begun to shift. Schools are manoeuvring between conferences to create more competitive, and lucrative, competitions.
Nebraska’s women’s volleyball team plays in front of 92,003 at the school’s football stadium, Memorial Stadium in August 2023, setting a worldwide women’s sporting event attendance record.
Shifting sands
The five most high-profile conferences in Division I NCAA athletics (the Big Ten, Southeastern, Big 12, Pac-12 and Atlantic Coastal) had been unchanged for the better part of a decade. But as conference media rights deals continue to grow, universities are taking control of their own destinies.
In July 2021, the structure of college sport conferences began to unravel. Texas and Oklahoma – the biggest football schools in the south – announced they would leave the Big 12 Conference for the Southeastern Conference. These moves were followed a year later by the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and University of Southern California (USC) – two of the most high-profile schools in California – heading to the Big Ten.
Steve Olson, partner at global law firm O’Melveny, who worked on UCLA and Stanford’s moves, says that these moves partly considered travel impact and the health of student athletes.
However, he continues: “One would be naïve to think this is not also about money. It’s true for all of these programmes. It costs a lot to run these programmes. They’re very expensive to run. Football is about 85 per cent of the money in college athletics, give or take.
“The reason these schools are looking to make these moves are so that they can maximize the revenue which is used for every other sport. It’s not just about football. Without football, you wouldn’t be able to play all these sports at the level you play them at.”
The regional conference system was mostly created for convenience, preventing students from having to travel thousands of miles each week to compete. For well-resourced football teams, flying upwards of 3,000 miles for competition is no longer an issue in 2023, but it will be a heavy burden for Olympic sport athletes.
“The vast majority of Olympic development happens in colleges,” Jackson notes, citing that at the Tokyo Olympics, 77 per cent of Team USA developed through college sports.
Now, with college football taking precedence over all other sports, the collegiate conference system is no longer fit for purpose.
College sports are going to emerge on the other side in however many years looking very different to how they do now
– Victoria Jackson
Victoria Jackson, sports historian and clinical associate professor of history at Arizona State University, says college sports’ future will look very different to the present.
“My sense is that there is an understanding that all of this is temporary,” Jackson says. “College sports are going to emerge on the other side in however many years looking very different to how they do now, and football will most likely be separate from the rest. “I don’t understand why we’re going to put current college athletes through something that clearly is not serving them in the meantime.”
Time for change
Plain and simple, the commercial might of college football means that realignment is the first step on a long road to the inevitable: a singular national college football competition.
Professor of sports journalism at Arizona State University and former College Football Playoff voter Paola Boivin says that the power of college sport lies in its ability to produce underdog winners, making a similar argument that European soccer fans made in halting the launch of the European Super League.
“I’m just afraid that a super conference would suck the life out of college football,” Boivin says. “We care about teams because there’s always that hope. Sports fans are eternal optimists. There’s always that hope at the beginning of the season that your team can win it all, even if the odds in Vegas say differently. To take that away from a lot of teams would be terrible for the sport. As cheesy as it sounds, the tradition and pageantry of college sports is still really an important thing.”
A Super League would undoubtedly appeal to elite universities in the same way guaranteed participation appealed to European Super League football clubs. As with the ESL, a college football Super League would go against the tradition of the sport.
Should college football continue on a path to a top-tier national division, it could – and should – give a promotion and relegation serious consideration. The concept is not as foreign to Americans as it used to be, with the growing popularity of European soccer in the US making it seem increasingly normal.
A top-tier competition comprised of 25-40 universities, ending with the College Football Playoff to decide the champion, would not be a revolutionary idea. But to add jeopardy – and value – a relegation bracket to a national second division would keep underdog universities in the mix. Universities already support the creation of more pathways to become college football national champions. The College Football Playoff’s recent expansion from four teams to 12 will be a major money-maker and provide more chances for universities to take the title than before.
As much as the commercial arguments make sense, there are plenty of benevolent arguments for an expanded national college football competition.
College football revenues already trickle down to other university athletic departments, and Jackson believes that with subsidisation kept intact, it could be time for each college sport to govern themselves on a standalone basis.
“I would like to see more sport-by-sport organisation and governance and subsidisation models in the collegiate space,” said Jackson. “That can be in partnership with the national governing bodies. USA Track and Field is working with the collegiate part of track and field in potentially even the running of championships. There is a future where we probably don’t need the NCAA anymore.”
Recent name, image and likeness (NIL) laws now allow student athletes to make money off of their contribution to the business of college sport. With the genie out of the bottle, Jackson and Olson believe it is only a matter of time before college sport becomes professionalised.
“It already is professional sports,” Jackson observes. “It’s professional for everyone but the athletes. If that is going to be the new model, then that model needs to include employee status and benefits and salaries and an ability to sit at a bargaining table and negotiate things.”
A national, professional college football division won’t happen before current TV contracts expire near the end of the decade. But given the haste and unexpected nature of conference realignment in the past two years, nothing can be ruled out.
Not even promotion and relegation in a professional American college sports league.
