College Football’s TV Goals Are Devouring The Sport

College football has never been a sport or TV product littered with parity. The same teams usually appear on the national TV games each year, and the same teams compete for and win titles, too.

For instance: Of the last 40 FBS/I-A national championships awarded, 35 were won by just 12 schools (as you may have guessed, Alabama had the most, at seven). This is the case for other college sports, too, as the haves and have-nots have always had a clear line of demarcation.

The difference, of course, is that other sports (most notably, men’s basketball) at least play up the illusion of parity and anyone being able to win, before one of the same programs wins at the end. College football, meanwhile, appears ready to skip that song-and-dance, as conversations start to emerge around making its expanded playoff format more of an invitational between the Big Ten and SEC.

As noted Wednesday, by Yahoo’s Ross Dellenger (with commentary below from Action Network’s Brett McMurphy):

Washington State prez Kirk Schulz told @RossDellenger in new 12-team playoff 4 automatic qualifiers from 1 conference was proposed. If so, it wouldn’t be just 1 so both SEC & B1G would each get 4 auto bids leaving only 4 bids for remaining 7 conferences/Notre Dame. At that point,…

— Brett McMurphy (@Brett_McMurphy) February 21, 2024

In short, at least one of the SEC and Big Ten (if not both) believe they deserve as many as four automatic bids each to a 12-team playoff, making any event basically their best teams against a handful of representatives from the other leagues. The money awarded would be commensurate with this arrangement as well.

Though such a lopsided approach is not necessarily new in terms of how titles have been awarded in past years — or even the typical look of the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament come the later rounds — these things have at least been preceded by the appearance of an even playing field to start. Now, as McMurphy nods to, if these leagues are so dead-set on showcasing their superiority, they may as well just hold their own separate event to do so.

Other conferences wouldn’t want to endorse giving the SEC and Big Ten more. But if the sport’s two giants press the issue, what choice do the others have but to play along?

Staging a playoff without those two leagues would mean excluding many of the most popular (and well-watched programs) programs, while putting on an event that would lack legitimacy to crown a “true” champion. You could make the case a Big Ten/SEC-only playoff would as well, but they also feature about 75% of the national champs from the last 40 years.

Ultimately, it will come down to what’s going to drive TV revenues, and well, it’s primarily those teams. The other conferences would potentially struggle to find a lucrative home for an alternative playoff’s rights anyway. One could guess that current College Football Playoff rights holder/SEC exclusive partner ESPN would be out of the running, and Big Ten media partners CBS, Fox and NBC would all have a minimal interest in supporting that endeavor as well, for risk of diluting their sizeable Big Ten investment.

Either way, the rest of college football get the short end of the stick, and that probably means more TV-fueled realignment that winds up swelling the Big Ten and SEC well beyond their current 18 and 16 members, respectively.

We’ve talked about the perils of college football’s TV-based consolidation in this space in the past, but it’s never been more apparent that we’re locked into that future now.

Whether it’s this year or next, the sport’s financial disadvantages — created in large part by TV revenues — will drive more realignment and consolidation, out of pure necessity for the programs currently sitting on the outside looking in. The networks likely need it too at this point, as top-tier college football rights were the No. 2 program by TV ad impressions last year, according to iSpot data. But that comes from an amalgamation of rights across a variety of networks and conferences.

Moving toward a nationalized college football product could mean networks consolidate costs, have more direct control over schedules, and then crucially, also get a better handle on how to build out live game inventory on streaming.

While Fox and ESPN have been built up as opposing sides in the ongoing conference realignment whirlwind, they’re also partners in the future sports streamer (that also features Warner Bros. Discovery). Being able to easily ship most elite college football rights over there, while also cutting into how much they’re paying for those games, sounds like a dream scenario as the networks try desperately to strike the right balance between linear and streaming platforms.

In the meantime, though, college football is about to be eaten alive by TV. What’s left will be lucrative, but it won’t resemble what made the sport so successful to begin with. Given the fact that these programs need to be in the business of growing new fans every season, we’ll see if that winds up being the best idea long-term.