College Football Playoff Pushes Sport Closer To TV-Based Consolidation

When the 13-0 Florida State Seminoles football team were left out of the College Football Playoff’s top four on Sunday, it demarcated the end of the sport as a property that existed independent of its TV network interests.

Maybe that time already came and went these past two years as the Pac-12 was picked apart for the sake of TV rights and content inventory. But by leaving out an unbeaten FSU team in favor of a one-loss Alabama squad, the ESPN-controlled Playoff virtually secured a future where the SEC and Big Ten are the only major conferences in college football.

As it was, Florida State had spent the offseason and fall making it clear that the school’s highly successful football program was not being compensated accordingly by its current league, the ACC. Exiting the ACC — assuming it can fight the conference’s reported $120 million exit fee plus potentially hundreds of millions in forfeited TV rights — was among the options floated. And that was BEFORE the team went unbeaten (and admittedly injured at the quarterback position) but was left out in favor of SEC champion Alabama.

ESPN has exclusive relationships with both the SEC and ACC, but those agreements are not created equally.

For the SEC, it’s just starting a 10-year, $3 billion deal that’s likely higher now with Texas and Oklahoma joining in 2024. The SEC is arguably the biggest game in town for college football, and having the league in the fold allows ESPN to be at the center of that universe, even as Fox has helped push Big Ten expansion coast-to-coast and the Big 12’s own push to 16 teams.

On the ACC side, it takes home $240 million per year from ESPN, but that’s well short of the SEC and Big Ten totals and the ACC splits its pot between 14 full-time members and non-football member Notre Dame. In 2024, the conference will also be bringing in Stanford and California at reduced rates, plus SMU with no media payouts. Once those limited-time reduced rates end, it’s more mouths to feed, with schools still locked into the ESPN deal ‘til 2034.

Being locked into the current rate is where Florida State (and others like Clemson, North Carolina and others) are most aggravated, because as the SEC and Big Ten take in increasingly larger payouts from ESPN and Fox, respectively, the ACC falls further behind in college sports’ growing arms race. Lacking funds relative to “peers” over time spells less on-field success, and it doubles down on the perception that the ACC is little brother to ESPN’s preferred SEC.

So you can see how Sunday’s flight toward FSU is also a slight toward the ACC. And it may also pull the ACC apart, even if not immediately.

To-date, FSU and others in the league had not been able to point to a specific moment where it lost out on football rewards as a result of conference membership. Yet Saturday was exactly that, robbing an unbeaten team of the chance to win a national title, and the ACC of extra revenues in the process. A look at the final College Football Playoff rankings also hammers home the point further; Florida State was the only school in the top 12 that was not a current or future member of the SEC or Big Ten.

There is still the matter of the exit fee and grant of rights, but it does seem like this was the straw that breaks the camel’s back for Florida State, and as a result, the ACC. However the school finds a way to exit the conference (and it almost certainly will), others will follow and the league will be relegated to a lesser status among the power leagues — if not figuratively thrown out of that club altogether.

All FSU needs now is a better offer. Would the SEC want the Seminoles when it already has (rival) Florida? Would the Big Ten be willing to expand to 20 or more and move take its footprint into the Southeast as well?

If either league were to move on Florida State, you’d probably see consolidation quicken from there. The SEC and Big Ten could basically hold a fantasy draft of the programs it wanted out of the ACC and Big 12, both would likely swell beyond 20 teams apiece, and you’d wind up with two mini NFLs as a result.

This is all in spite of the fact that the College Football Playoff will expand to 12 teams next season, rendering leaving FSU out moot. Yet the damage is done at this point, and the wheels will start to roll toward consolidation in the coming years.

Perhaps it would’ve happened anyway. But as a long-time fan and observer of the sport myself, I guess I’d convinced myself we had more time before we had to meet that reality. Now the implosion feels assured, and will loom over every season until it just happens. “Go ESPN Conference,” I suppose.