College Football 2024: ACC, Big Ten, SEC, Big 12 get new teams
College football will look a lot different in 2024. We take a look at the new Big 10, SEC, ACC, Big 12 and Pac-12…or is it Pac-2?
To paraphrase Frank Zappa, college football is not dead, it just looks kind of funny.
College football as a national sport looked doomed as the NCAA lost case after case in its defense of amateurism. The U.S. Supreme Court fulminated in its summary of NCAA v. Alston, and Justice Brett Kavanaugh condemned the entire system.
“The NCAA’s business model would simply be illegal in almost any other industry in America,” Kavanaugh wrote in June 2021.
The result ends the hypocrisy of amateurism in a billion-dollar game, and the NCAA reluctantly lowered all the gates it had used to maintain some level of equality and balance. The result is an anarchic landscape that seems destined to reduce participation in Division 1 because competition drives up the cost of doing business.
If only the strong survive, we may be left with only the arsenal of teams that the SEC and Big Ten can acquire.
As NCAA member institutions move into the post-amateur era, the question arises: Can college football survive with the dominance of two conferences?
Football is as much about continuity and development as it is about recruiting talent. However, due to the NCAA’s lax transfer rules, roster turnover has become the new normal for all teams.
Better-funded NIL collectives mean the rich get richer, allowing elite programs to secure the best players that other programs have invested time and energy in developing. This has turned teams from conferences below the SEC and Big Ten into de facto farm teams.
Defenders of the new system argue that college football has never been equal. That’s largely true, but the gap between the top and middle has never been wider. If weaker programs can’t keep the players they develop, the path to competing against the giants seems insurmountable.
The SEC, in particular, enjoys playing this zero-sum game. Since the BCS was founded in 1998, seven different SEC teams have won national championships, a total of 15 in 26 years, proving time and again that money and commitment to the sport produce champions. With the addition of Texas and Oklahoma, the conference has added two more winners to its portfolio during that time period. Their fan bases are eager to maintain that dominance, and NIL gives them the muscle to do so.
Read more: NIL, revenue sharing: How did university sports come about?
Arizona State fans have experienced this firsthand, as they have seen players use Tempe as a springboard on their way to great success at LSU, Florida and Georgia.
The expanded 12-team playoffs were supposed to give the midfield hope, but the SEC and Big Ten bought up six other big-name programs to grab those spots, eliminating the Pac-12.
Even the programs new to the major conferences seem to know what’s at stake.
Newly minted Big Ten member Oregon has “unlimited” NIL from its promoter Phil Knight, according to former Washington and UCLA head coach Rick Neuheisel. It’s a claim that’s hard to verify, but the Ducks have one of the top five recruiting classes for 2025 so far. It’s hard to imagine a class of that caliber being inducted in this era without a truckload of financial promises, even at a glamorous school like Oregon.
However, everyone spends something.
According to NIL athlete platform Opendorse, student-athletes are expected to spend $1.175 billion on names, images and likenesses in 2023-24, with over 70% of that going toward football. The company projects that number will rise to $2.55 billion by 2025-26.
The original NIL concept envisioned athletes accessing the same corporate capital as NFL players, but the Opendorse report claims that over 80% of all NIL is provided by university collectives.
If this seems strange to you, you are not alone.
“Let’s face it, we’re all involved in money laundering,” an unnamed SEC sports director told Sports Illustrated last year.
It has been 37 years since the NCAA canceled all 11 Southern Methodist University football games in 1987 and four more in 1988 because of $61,000 in payments to 13 football players from a slush fund for sponsors.
As it turns out, they weren’t outlaws after all. They were pioneers who were simply four decades ahead of their time.
The NCAA and its member conferences are aware of this extracurricular activity and, as part of a settlement negotiation for several antitrust lawsuits, submitted a comprehensive term sheet in late July that also included language to combat these lawsuits.
In agreeing to the sharing of sports revenue, they want NIL contracts to be reviewed for “valid commercial sponsorship or support,” along with language that creates some form of market control. The proposal provides for arbitration for disputes – their hope is to end the flood of lawsuits that continue to pour in.
The proposal has obvious critics and could delay a final agreement until 2025. Some, like Russell White of the pro-NIL group The Collective, also see it as a circumvention of the core of the Supreme Court’s decision in favor of athletes.
“The more I look into the proposed settlement, the more I feel like the folks at the @ncaa just took every idea anyone in the building had and threw it in. Some kind of weird stew…” White posted on X.
As the battle continues, the distinct smell of uncertainty remains for a game that is becoming increasingly difficult to detect, but is not yet dead.
