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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