Earlier this year 100,000 people jammed into Happy Valley to watch Oregon’s football team play Penn State’s football team and well over a million others tuned in to watch on television. Also earlier this year about a hundred people filled into a section of bleachers and maybe another couple hundred followed along on a Youtube stream to watch Ithaca Football take on Hobart. And what connects these two events you may ask? The fact that they are both under the same governing body, the NCAA.  

What’s Wrong?

The NCAA was designed to govern amateur athletics, the kind of small scale events that most college sports are. And it operates at its best when it does just that. The NCAA is instrumental and very necessary for providing structure for hundreds of college sports teams throughout the country that lack the resources to operate independently. However college football teams are now international brands that can secure multi-billion dollar tv deals and pack stadiums all over the country. They have simply outgrew the need for the structure and organization that the NCAA provides. What high level college football needs is a professional sport like structure, that ensures protection and clairty for its players and the best possible product for fans. 

One problem that the NCAA has failed to address is eligibility. With the rise of NIL and the opportunity to make life changing money frat bros aren’t the only ones who never want college to end. There have been countless petitions from players this year for extra years of eligibility in order to capitlaize on lucrative NIL deals. And the result has been a seemingly random luck of the draw for who gets an extra year of ellegibility and who doesn’t. 

Imagine you are incoming USC transfer DJ Wingfield. You know you’re not going to get drafted into the NFL but you have worked your way up from junior college, had a nice year at Purdue and now have just accepted an offer for $210,000 to go play football for the Trojans. You think that you are all set because another player Diego Pavia had the same journey as you and was just granted a 5th year of eligibility by securing a waiver from the NCAA. However, one thing leads to another and now you are without eligibility and that $210,000 you were expecting is gone with the wind. When the stakes are so high it is unfair to have a system that offers such inconsistent outcomes. 

How to Fix it

Situations like the one mentioned above could be avoided by a newer more well equipped league that is not dragged down by regulations that were written in the days when football was played with a leather helmet. More clear eligibility rules are just one example of what an independent college football league could offer, here are some more.

1. Spending Clarity

The rise of NIL and the ability for schools to pay players through boosters or just directly has thrown a wrench in the NCAA structure. And that makes sense because the league was created for amateur sports where player compensation was not an issue. The result has been a rollercoaster that has seen some schools with willing and wealthy boosters able to capitalize while other schools simply cannot match the spending ability. A new league could offer a simple solution in the form of a comprehensive salary cap. Professional sports leagues around the world implement salary caps all with unique caveats. The one that would fit best for college football would be a similar structure as the NFL hard cap. A hard cap sets the limit that a team may spend and does not allow any exceptions for going over it. Now stay with me as I walk you through how a new league will accomplish this. 

The NFL sets its salary cap based off of gross revenue for the league as a whole that gets evenly distributed to each team. This is mainly earned from the money based off of the leagues broadcasting deal. As it stands each power conference has their own media rights deal. The BIG 10’s current deal is worth over $7 billion, the SEC’s current deal is worth $3 billion over its current duration, the BIG 12’s incoming deal is worth $2.28, and the ACC’s current deal worth around $3.6 billion. These deals also incorporate the schools other sports but basketball is the only one that really makes any contribution other than football. A new league would offer college football the opportunity to have all of its best teams covered under one broadcast deal. This deal would easily push into the tens of billions of dollars and would possibly eclipse that of the NFL’s broadcast rights deal. This would provide more than enough money that the league could then evenly distribute to its teams to fund the salary cap. The result would be a level playing field in terms of spending ability that would eliminate the uncertainty and dependency on outside investment that NIL has created.

2. Peak Structure 

Besides creating more consistency for players and teams, a new league would also offer a better product for fans. A new league would offer college football a chance to unshackle itself from the scheduling limitations that the current conference structure presents. Schools have already been taking steps to do this by jumping conferences to the point now where most of college football’s power lies in the SEC or the BIG 10. By selecting all of these teams and other powers scattered through the remaining conferences a schedule could be created where every single game is must watch action for fans.

 A common criticism I hear about the abandonment of the current conference format is that fans wouldn’t be excited to watch because the storied history of long standing conference matchups may be lost in some cases. However the facts do not support that belief. The opening week matchup between Ohio State, a BIG 10 team, and Texas, a SEC team, drew 16.6 million viewers despite the fact that these teams come from different conferences and have no long storied rivalry. The most watched conference matchup this year was an SEC game between long standing rivals Georgia and Tennessee. The game drew 4 million less viewers than Ohio State vs Texas. At the end of the day what matters most to college football fans is watching the best competition play each other on a weekly basis. 

3. Less Subjectivity 

With the NCAA shifting to a 12 team playoff model there are less debates about what teams are deserving of a playoff spot than the days of the four team playoff, still every year many fans are left wondering why one team made it in over the other. A new league would offer a level of competitiveness that would allow teams to be judged strictly by their record, not by subjective measures like quality losses and wins and trying to factor in how injuries played a role in those games.. This would ensure that the 12 most deserving teams get into the playoffs every year and would not leave fans screaming at a wall wondering why their team was left out. 

I am not arguing for the NCAA to be disbanded as it is still a vital institution necessary for so many schools and sports to continue to have college athletics. The reality is that it is not equipped to handle the multibillion dollar entity that high level college football has become. College football needs a league that propels it into the future, not anchors it the past.