And having to work, the media got their wish last night with Miami winning, so it’s onto tonight for the opponent in the championship!
I’ll have to catch the highlights. For another year, at the very least, the SEC types can EAT IT.
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And barring a meltdown by IU in the second half here, I think you called it!
The media and the country will get their scripted championship match-up!
GO HOOSIERS!
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Cross-link - staying in school is paying off more already.
And there is absolutely no exodus to any pro league other than the NFL, including especially NOT the UFL.
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Mixed reviews for me - the fans and the hype have never been worse, in my opinion.
Now to see how the discussions go for what I think is a sorely-needed expanded College Football Playoff. It will be likely going from 12 to 14 teams in the mold of the NFL playoff bracket. There is discussion of 16 teams, but I feel that is far too bloated, not that Disney and ESPN cares about blowout games in the first round with all the hype and money to be made.
The real problem that has to be solved is to NOT have the entire playoff with one media partner, which has a great record of promotion and growth of interest in college football, but a shitty record with undue influence in selection of supposedly qualifying teams back to the days of even that stupid BCS bullshit, plus their clear SEC homerism.
I’m cheering for a Super League by the top 48 or so programs in FBS, including the SEC and Big Ten teaming up, so as to ditch the NCAA altogether for what we have known as openly pro football since 2021, and to form their own damn playoff, dividing up the rights across media partners, and eliminating ESPN’s monopoly on the playoff. Gee, from whom would they simply copy that successful model? Yeah.
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I’m putting this here even though it is basketball.
We foresaw this news coming back in 2022. It was not hard to connect the dots, except by the greedy and the corrupt.
Now as not referenced in the article and most interesting is the nature of the list of schools.
None of these are top schools in football or basketball in most years, though Tulane did have a good run this season to make the College Football Playoff, and you probably recognize some of these schools as lower seeds making the cut for March Madness in any given year.
Essentially the criminal elements have figured out to target largely only the off-the-heavy-radar action not involved the power conferences and the heat that comes with those rackets.
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And this is so LAME!
Dare I say the SEC has it close to right, for a 24-team playoff is serious overkill.
Just put a 48-team Super League together then and have a 16-team big show.
A year of back-and-forth discussions, a betrayal or two and a compromise in the 11th hour still wasn’t enough to make wholesale changes to the College Football Playoff.
The 12-team format will continue through at least the 2026-27 season after the Big Ten and SEC failed to reach consensus on expanding the playoff before a deadline Friday. The SEC preferred 16 teams and the Big Ten demanded 24, but the path to the inevitable wasn’t so cut and dry.
A year of boardroom meetings boiled down to a philosophical difference between the Big Ten and SEC, which were given decision-making power over the CFP system by its colleagues several years ago. The Big Ten wanted more automatic berths and the SEC wanted more opportunities via at-large spots. In the end, the deadline came and went, resulting in the default settings being implemented: a 12-team field with straight seeding, automatic berths for the power conference champions and an additional spot for Notre Dame if it finishes in the selection committee’s top 12.
@Paolo_X - pretty sure you touched on this or something adjacent to this one.
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There’s not much really coming here until perhaps September, when the media start all the hype again with big-time matchups especially out of conference and the peak advertising for all that betting before most blow their budget by the end of September.
Via the NCAA College Football Playoff even before expansion to 12 teams, NCAA Football has been essentially marketing itself as the SEC + Big Ten + Notre Dame + Miami, with the occasional outlier during the season hyped up as some sort of “Cinderella.”
Even the staid “60 Minutes” is in on the act with some seasonal expose` about some college program or coach.
The marketing and commercials during games are distinct from the ads during the NFL games, save for perhaps some pizza ad, and targeted for a seriously cheesy audience that is different than for NFL games.
I have to wonder any more, aside from those who are simply betting all football on weekends, how many real fans there are every weekend of both the NCAA and the NFL, which was the norm until starting perhaps about 20 years ago and became far less the case about 10 years ago.
This is not still “college” football. Take a look at this — a starting SEC quarterback is openly valued at $2 million a year and suing for eligibility on the grounds of lost earning potential — the NCAA at this point is a failed labor cartel that is still trying to enforce outdated amateurism rules on what is now a de-facto professional league. Then throw in the courts which over the last decade are increasingly siding with players. And this is not because judges love chaos, but because the NCAA’s eligibility old school rules framework was never designed to coexist with NIL money at this crazy scale.
The real issue isn’t Joey Aguilar’s age, JUCO time, or whether Tennessee “has a spot for him.” What is boils down to is that the NCAA wants all the control of a pro league with none of the responsibilities—no contracts, no collective bargaining, no standardized compensation rules—while schools and boosters are forking over cash and NIL deals that are paying QB1s like NFL backups.
As we crawl forward lawsuits like this aren’t a bug — they’re the inevitable outcome of the billions that have been flowing into college football over the decades while everyone was pretending it’s still a scholarship activity.
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College sports are in this fake limbo phase, with the media simply going along like it’s still amateur with most of those bums holdovers from the “student-athlete” and “amateur” era, as the NCAA and various corporate interests, who advertise heavily during live college sports, are simply biding its time before young athletes are simply considered employees like well…other people paid for their labour!
How else would they come up with stupid terms like “transfer portal” instead of what it really is - free agency?
Then you have one faction of generally older fans who still fawn over “the good old days” and laud the likes of Nick Saban and Paul Feinbaum and other bygone cheating SEC homer trash.
The recent results include the most trashy advertising ever during college sports and a trashy subculture, all absurdly chalked up in the name of a tradition that is long gone and has been since about the time broadcasting legend Keith Jackson retired from national duty in 2006 when Disney merged ABC Sports into ESPN Sports, with the hype and influence of ESPN on college sports taking a whole lot of coverage of college sports into the shitter.
They still have yet to figure out a decent College Football Playoff format after all these years after that absurd BCS and then the 4-team playoff format, plus that stupid bowl system with participation trophies. TRASH sports!
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Cross-linked here …
So now we have crap that would be along the lines of BS like “The NCAA is not pro, you know …” 
and “Well, he played professionally but he’s not a STRONG PRO” 
and “Oh no, he was pro and a STRONG PRO too, so we can’t have that of course.” 
The NCAA can piss off.
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When the Pac-12 collapsed in 2023, Washington State and Oregon State were more or less left for dead in the College Football battle arena. Ten schools bolted for the Big Ten, Big 12, and ACC, and the national media narrative was that the remaining two programs would eventually be broken and crawl into the Mountain West. Instead, WSU and OSU went all-in legally. They hired a heavy-hitting take no prisoners scorched Earth law firm and filed suit to retain control of the conference. The two schools ended up keeping the Pac-12 name, the conference assets, the remaining media revenue, and—most importantly—control of the Pac-12 Enterprises production arm.
From there WSU/OSU did a hard pivot — Rather than dissolving the league, they rebuilt it from the ashes. WSU/OSU raided the strongest programs from the Mountain West—Boise State, San Diego State, Fresno State, Colorado State, and Utah State—added Texas State for market growth, and landed Gonzaga as a basketball-only member. Suddenly the Pac-12 wasn’t a conference waiting to die anymore; it was a leaner, regional league with recognizable brands and new TV distribution deals with CBS, The CW, and USA Sports.
Which gets us to what I think is the hidden gem in all of this — Pac-12 Enterprises. Before the collapse, the conference invested heavily in a modern broadcast production facility in San Ramon, California - which had been capable of producing hundreds of live sporting events each year. This facility is not cash cow by itself under any stretch of the imagination, but it’s a powerful asset because the conference can produce its own games and deliver finished broadcasts directly to the network partners. By having this infrastructure in place this allows for the lowering of costs and making TV deals easier to secure.
On top of that, the Pac-12 has partnered with Goal Line Studios—founded by the late John Madden and now run by his son—for pregame and halftime programming using large virtual production sets. Together, those pieces form a pretty sophisticated media operation for a conference that was left for dead.
While we are going off into the weeds — Another piece people forget is that Washington State and Oregon State didn’t just file a routine lawsuit — they hired Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP, an international knife fight litigation firm known for handling massive corporate battles. That signaled immediately that this wasn’t going to be a small college sports dispute. A firm like that is built for deep discovery and multi-year legal fights, which means depositions, document requests, and internal communications getting dragged into the open.
At that point the risk assessment calculation for the departing schools flipped and flipped hard: they had already found new conference homes, and the last thing anyone needed was a prolonged dirty bomb legal war shedding light on years of conference politics. Walking away and letting WSU and OSU keep the Pac-12 assets was probably the cleanest path for everyone involved.
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Chambliss’ attorney Tom Mars is confident the appeal will fail.
“Everyone remembers when the NCAA famously appealed to the Supreme Court in the Alston case and got their teeth knocked out by Justice Kavanaugh,” Mars told ESPN. “I expect the NCAA to be spitting chiclets in this appeal as well.”
The “Alston case” refers a suit led by Shawne Alston, a former West Virginia running back, who argued that limiting benefits to players violates federal antitrust laws.
Yes please because the NCAA, who were present in Washington this past week at a roundtable hosted by President Trump.
I heard some of the speeches by the usual suspects noting the value of “tradition” and all that bullshit they had used for decades not to pay players and so forth.
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Did anyone watch the Duke vs. UConn basketball game? It was totally crazy. Sorry for the off-topic post, but there isn’t a thread for that, and I didn’t want to start one just to talk about it.
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The NCAA is basically done with the Wild Wild West eligibility era. They’re trying to implement a hard five-year clock that starts at your 19th birthday or when you graduate high school—whichever comes first—and that’s it. No more stacking redshirt years, medical waivers, COVID years, or legal loopholes to stretch a “college career” into six or seven years. You get your window and you are done when you are done at 24, you play your years, and when the clock runs out, you’re done. The NCAA is done getting drug into court for every 25 year old that wants two more seasons on campus.
What this really does is shut down three things people have been quietly exploiting: 1) parents reclassing kids early just to show up older and stronger, 2) the 24–25-year-old “super seniors” hanging around forever, and 3) international hoops players playing in the euro league then showing up as grown men with a full 4 year eligibility runway. Now if you show up late to the party —whether you’re 20, 22, or coming over from Europe — you’ve already torched part of your NCAA eligibility clock. It puts everyone back on the same timeline. You want to play college ball? You’ve got five years—use them or lose them.
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I think this is a good step.
It seems like the NCAA went, in a span of less than 10 years, from draconian to anything goes.
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As referenced back in 2022 at the old place, oh yeah, the NCAA and the NFL are in direct competition ever since the NCAA went openly pro in 2021.
Schedule remains one of the greatest complications. Historically, the national title game was set for the second Monday of January. With the 12-team playoff, it’s pushed at least two weeks later. Additionally, as the season goes longer, the NFL starts to encroach.
The NFL starts playing games on Saturday in December, which has become a major complication for the college football postseason. Each of the past two years, two of the four first-round games have gone up against NFL matchups; they have drawn substantially fewer viewers. If the playoff were to add another round, it would either have to play on weekdays or risk some of its most valuable games against the most powerful league in sports.
Here’s another 2021 memory. I remember talking to a friend in July 2021 after watching Euro 2020 as played in England, full of fans standing together mind you, commenting that there was no way in hell college football stadiums would not be packed full of fans in 2021, which indeed they were like nothing ever happened or was still happening. Ha ha ha.
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The idea here is to standardize the college football season for all teams and eliminate those added games, which makes sense like for any pro league.
On Thursday, the Division I FBS Oversight Committee recommended moving up Week 1 to the week typically reserved for Week 0, starting with the 2027 season. The proposal would standardize schedules and eliminate the patchwork of waivers and exemptions that has defined Week 0 for years. The DI Cabinet is scheduled to consider the proposal in June.
The FBS regular season would be standardized to 14 weeks, with two bye weeks in a 12-game schedule. The season would open on the Thursday of what is currently designated Week 0 in late August and close on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. It preserves conference championship games and the exclusive window for the Army-Navy game in early December.
Player health is the primary push for the changes. Coaches and athletic directors have long campaigned for an earlier start to the season to allow more flexibility in scheduling and recovery time with two bye weeks.
After November, I don’t give a damn about pro college football until perhaps the College Football Playoff games, for which they have not figured out a good format.
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