Hello, SporticoU readers! My name is Molly Geary, and I’m taking the reins of this newsletter from Emily Caron. Let’s get into it…
College football returns this weekend with seven Week 0 games (including Notre Dame vs. Navy in Ireland), which is normally a time for much of America to rejoice. There’ll still be plenty of that this year—all the way through January’s title game in Houston—but for some, the events of the next four-and-a-half months will be tinged with the knowledge that the current iteration of the sport is on its final legs.
Conference realignment has long been altering college football’s status quo, but this time next year, things will look radically different (and not just in football, of course). Oklahoma and Texas will play in the SEC; UCLA, USC, Oregon and Washington will play in the Big Ten; Colorado, Arizona, Utah and Arizona State will play in the Big 12; and there’s a real chance the century-old Pac-12 no longer exists at all. Will that leave the Power Four in 2024, or will so-called Big Ten and SEC super conferences be fully running the show? Traditions will be tested, rivalries will be reimagined and fans will need to get used to matchups such as USC-Northwestern and Oklahoma-Missouri instead of USC-Stanford and Oklahoma-Oklahoma State.
We’re almost certainly not done with realignment; more moves out West will likely happen, and the future of the ACC is also in question. But whether additional changes go into effect next year or later, it would take a lot for the landscape to shift quite as drastically as it’s due to next season.
Another reason for that: This will also be the last season of the four-team College Football Playoff. Debuted in 2013 to replace the BCS system, the CFP never quite escaped the kinds of inclusion debates that brought criticism to the previous postseason format. But while that change only doubled the number of teams, from two to four, the expanded version of the playoff that begins with the 2024 season will triple the number of participants, from four to 12. It’s a seismic change that will open up CFP dreams to a wealth of other teams, while having ramifications on the stakes of regular-season matchups and even conference championships. No longer will two losses torpedo a school’s season—but a 12-team field is no guarantee that the sport won’t still be dominated by a handful of largely Southern-based teams, either.
A larger playoff also means a new revenue distribution model will have to be ironed out—at least until 2026, when the CFP’s current media rights deal expires and it signs a new one that could be worth more than $2 billion annually thanks to the super-sized field.
In short, enjoy this season while you can. Because after this, all bets are off.
