College Football is in Purgatory, But Don’t Despair About its Final Destination

Anybody who pays any sort of attention to the beautiful, bountiful, buxom spectacle of college football knows that the sport is currently undergoing a seismic shift. In fact, it’s undergoing several seismic shifts at once. I know that’s scary to many of you, and perhaps that fear is a good thing…We should ask questions when the walls around us start to uh-shiver and shake ::swivels hips like Elvis, looks at your girl::.

But here’s my thing: college football is always changing. It’s never stopped changing. From well-heeled chaps in itchy sweaters on the quads of Harvard and Yale, to segregated “champions” chosen by regional, politically motivated sports writers, to the explosion of national interest—and the resulting explosion in TV revenue, coaching salaries, etc.—of the BCS era, to the long-thought-impossible advent of a playoff (but the old rich guys in bowl game sport coats told us it wasn’t possible!), seismic shifts are the norm in college football. And to be honest, they tend to move us toward a better future (the Pop Tarts Bowl notwithstanding. You know what? Fuck that. We’re in on the Pop Tarts Bowl too).

Here’s what’s different about this particular quake though, and why it’s so scary to so many: The emperor’s not wearing any pants. He’s butt naked out in the garden talking to the pandas. It feels like no one’s in charge. And to an extent, that’s true. The NCAA has been neutered by a number of factors, groundbreaking court decisions (hello NIL) and the growing clout of a pair of juggernaut conferences among them. That’s left a power vacuum at the top of the sport, as many arbitrary and frankly outdated NCAA regulations—like a downright unpatriotic prohibition on players receiving any portion of the now-massive pie that wouldn’t and couldn’t exist without them—fall away.

The thing about power vacuums is…they get filled. Forces with an interest in occupying these spaces move in to plug them (calm down)—especially when there’s billions of dollars on the line. It’s impossible to know exactly what that’s going to look like, but I think it’s more than fair to speculate that while the NCAA might retain the gavel in non-revenue-generating sports like softball and swimming, the new rules in football are more likely to be drafted and agreed upon by some sub-grouping of serious football programs (call them…the Teams That Matter), with the SEC and Big Ten likely leading the way. Hell, the aspiring “Power Two” announced over the summer that they’re forming an “advisory group” to address the challenges facing modern college athletics. Something tells me college football is going to drive that bus…

For those in despair over the current state of the sport—and I do often hear from friends, family, and anyone else who shares my Saturday Sickness that, given the nature of these tectonic shifts, given their big-money, corporate flavor, that we’ve lost the plot, that the game has lost its soul, that it’s lost what made it special in the first place—your saving grace is the simple truth that most of the trends that are currently burning your buns are also completely unsustainable.

Coaches cannot be expected to re-recruit their current roster every single day, so the transfer portal and recruiting calendars as they stand should and will be fixed, and portal activity in general will moderate as hundreds of cautionary tales emerge each year of kids who had scholarships at their first school but then entered the portal and unfortunately didn’t find a home (to wit, portal activity was way down this spring).

Scholarships and NIL deals will become somewhat standardized so that a disgruntled five-star freshman can’t take to Twitter after one bad day at practice and announce he’s entering the portal (respect his decision), and also so that some assclown collective—I’m looking at you, Florida—can’t make insane promises to a kid that they won’t be able to keep once he’s on campus.

Perhaps more importantly, the admittedly very weird arrangement whereby fans are currently financing the construction of college rosters will transition to a more sustainable model—likely one based on the sharing of college football’s massive TV revenues with, you know, the guys who risk their physical health on the field.

Conference realignment will settle down once the current re-shuffling toward a tiered system of big boys and mid-majors—which isn’t new, by the way, and is also quite capitalist, for you free-market disciples out there—is fully realized.

And some new authority—again, likely some alliance of the schools and/or conferences who are truly invested in competing at the highest level, with some elected leader (Saban, aka Little Nicky, for College Football Commish?)—will agree upon a set of rules that actually apply to the modern landscape.

On top of a natural calming of all these destabilizing trends, the expanded playoff, though it will devalue the regular season somewhat, will become a succulent holiday tradition of New Year’s Day triple-headers (sound a bit like the bowl games of your youth??). Only these heavyweight matchups won’t lead to a faceless collection of sports writers—or a computer formula run on a 1990’s Dell—choosing a champion—or worse, split champions—but will instead lead to semifinals and a grandaddy-of-them-all final (shoutout Keith Jackson) where a true champion is crowned. You know, like we do in EVERY OTHER SPORT.

Now, will billions of dollars change hands in the process, and is that a primary driver of this evolution? Absolutely. But that’s not new. College football became a big-money venture decades ago. Your fanatical love for the game—your ever-loyal eyeballs on the TV set—did that (look at what love did, babe).

Will the playoff be dominated by a couple mega conferences (and more accurately, their network overlords in ESPN and Fox), and will those conferences’ and networks’ teams get preferential treatment in selecting and seeding playoff teams? Yes. But again, that’s not new! The SEC and the Big Ten already receive favorable treatment—see the committee’s brazen, greedy, ludicrous snub of my undefeated Seminoles last year—and will continue to receive favorable treatment as both the largest drivers of revenue and the largest investors into the sport.

But here’s a positive that no one’s talking about: For the first time ever, a school like Boise State, or even James Madison, will have a legitimate path to a national title. In the past, an undefeated season for one of these football-devoted but non-power-conference programs meant making a BCS bowl and then, if they won it, being faced with the lamentable decision of either accepting their lot in life as a non-contender, or claiming a meaningless national title to the laughter of the rest of the college football world (I see you UCF!). If Boise State goes undefeated in 2025, they will win the national title (they won’t, but they could). THAT’s new, and it’s a good thing.

Here's how I’ll leave it, because this has gone on for too long already: I fully cop to the fact that the current iteration of college football is rife with flaws and contradictions. (Again…it always has been.) But I disagree with the notion that the sport is structurally broken.

Instead, I’d contend that its current warts are not structural maladies in themselves, but are actually the external manifestation of structural changes that needed to occur to move the sport forward (at least, with respect to NIL, the transfer portal, and the playoff—conference realignment is a bit more complicated, and something we’ll explore more later). Besides that, and actually more importantly, I’d argue that beneath this damaged tissue are bones, and to quote pop-country sensation Maren Morris (trying to score some points with my wife here), in college football, the bones are good. They’re the bones of pride for a university, yes, but more so pride for a place, pride for a culture, pride for a shared experience. College football teams have for so long served as an expression of pride and identity for regions and towns excluded from the professional sports apparatus. They’ve served as unifying forces in areas with troubling histories of inequality. They’ve served as symbols of hope for areas that feel left behind by the relentless drive toward a “better” economic future.

Does the fact that players are finally—and legally—getting their piece of the pie fundamentally change that equation? Hell no. Not for me. Florida State is Florida State and it will continue to represent the same things it represented for me growing up: It will represent my dad and my brother (and my sister and my mom—down here, the ladies care too). It will represent my entire family running through the house like lunatics when we scored a touchdown against Steve Spurrier’s godless Gators. It will represent the pure anguish—a life lesson, in many ways—of far too many national title game losses. It will represent absurd tailgating memories in the shadows of Sanford Stadium (Florida State’s my childhood love, but Georgia’s my alma mater…more later on that complex setup). It will represent many of the happiest moments of my life.

Does College Gameday draping itself in Home Depot orange ruin that spectacle for me? Do I even care what Bad Bunny says when he comes on as guest picker? No. I care about how a college football Saturday makes me feel. And though the sport will continue to change, that feeling never will.