• Lack of money for NIL and building another waterfall in the football facility. Hey, with a 12-team Playoff the money spigot flows even harder. The commissioners are leaving an estimated $450 million in new revenue on the table by failing to expand to 12.
The list could go on, stretching from Ann Arbor to Auburn. But the leaders of college football rejected it and stuck us all with the status quo, knowing that we will grudgingly accept it in the end.
Who gets the blame? Everyone, really.
The Alleged Alliance trio of the Big Ten, Pac-12 and ACC stood in the way most steadfastly, for a variety of reasons, some of which were valid concerns. ACC commissioner Jim Phillips’s point about asking collegians to play 16 or 17 games to win a national title ranks at or near the top of the valid concern list. Still, this was more an obstructionist stance than it needed to be.
Related: It became clear that the SEC’s summer plundering of the Big 12 for Texas and Oklahoma was a severe wedge issue. And it should be. Those schools blew up the map and the SEC was a willing participant, and it remains to be seen how that will help anyone other than a couple of elite programs at the top of the SEC (Alabama and Georgia get more money while already having the necessary advantages to win anything other than the NFC West, and aren’t affected by the addition of more competition within the league). The other 12 SEC teams will find life harder, and so will the Longhorns and Sooners. Meanwhile, the rest of the nation must deal with the next revenue and publicity boom coming to the SEC.
That was the latest betrayal of trust within the college leadership cabal. Make no mistake, the ACC would have gladly taken Texas and Oklahoma as well. All the conferences would have. The division between leagues has always been there, but the pandemic season of 2020 widened them, and the realignment spasm of ’21 made it a chasm.
The conferences can’t trust one another. And with the NCAA an empty leadership shell when it comes to football (among other things), nobody has the power to make them act cohesively for the good of the sport. So we get the athletic version of congressional gridlock. Isn’t that fun?
Presented with a grand plan and a grand opportunity, college football couldn’t get its act together sufficiently to seize upon it. We the fans are all the poorer for it. But we’ll be back in droves come fall, filling the stands and working the remote, watching everything they dish up—and they know it.
The problem child will still have a roof over its head and money in the wallet. Even if we know there are more disappointments ahead.
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