Everyone Has a Plan to Fix College Sports—but Will Any of Them Work?

As the SEC and Big Ten’s power brokers descend upon Nashville for a meeting, two radically different blueprints for college sports have emerged as alternatives for the future.

Though there's disagreement over the route to take going forward, those in college athletics agree that it's time for a change. / Kirby Lee-Imagn Images

The wheels are turning. Everywhere. Everyone is in search of a better plan for college football and college sports as a whole. There are projects and blueprints and high-level meetings all coming down at once.

Thursday in Nashville, the athletic directors and commissioners from the Southeastern Conference and Big Ten schools will get together to discuss … stuff. It has generally been portrayed as a benign, issues-based meeting—but everyone else is (and should be) on guard. Could power-play pronouncements about scheduling and the allotment of College Football Playoff bids be coming out of this? Maybe.

At least two ADs who will be involved in the meeting believe the talks will be substantive.

“They better be,” one says. “This is a rare opportunity to get all of us in a room.”

Of course, the phrase “all of us” is misleading and hints at the underlying tension here. These are just two of the four power conferences, two of the 11 FBS conferences and two of the 32 NCAA Division I conferences. But they are swinging an increasingly bigger stick.

With that as a backdrop, two different groups of stakeholders have released plans for an NFL-ish league that would serve as the future framework for college football.

College Sports Tomorrow rolled out a plan last week that had been discussed for months: the College Student Football League. This would be a football-only super league, with the top 72 programs competing in a Power 12 Conference divided into a dozen six-team divisions. The remaining FBS programs would be in the Group of 8 conference, with opportunities for them to be promoted for the playoffs. The plan would “conservatively” bring a $5 billion windfall to college football programs just from 2027 to ‘31, according to Len Perna, one of the principals.

The plan has some big names behind it. Among them: Grant Hill, former star basketball player and current managing director of USA Basketball; Jimmy Haslam, owner of the Cleveland Browns and major Tennessee booster; and Perna of Turnkey/ZRG executive search, whose firm has led countless searches for university presidents, athletic directors and coaches. Several prominent university athletic directors and presidents are listed as “ambassadors” for the league.

Haslam, the owner of the Cleveland Browns and Tennessee booster, is one of the lead voices behind the College Student Football League. / Kirby Lee-Imagn Images

Then this week, a rival super league concept was unveiled. It’s called “Project Rudy,” a 70-team structure that incorporates the Power 4 conference teams—the SEC, Big Ten, Atlantic Coast and Big 12. It’s spearheaded by a group of former Disney executives, with former Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick providing the experienced college administrator gravitas. Yahoo Sports reports that the model “preserves the four power conferences, expands the postseason, overhauls scheduling, tiers revenue distribution and, most importantly, infuses as much as $9 billion of private capital cash into the system.”

Both of the super league plans would utilize one centralized media-rights contract, as opposed to the conference-by-conference deals that proliferate currently.

Confused? Engulfed by off-field issues fatigue? Understandable. But even as one of the most interesting years in the history of the sport reaches the midseason stage, the race is on to make major changes. Urgency is in the air.

At present, there are only two definitive conclusions to draw: 

• Everyone seems to believe college athletics needs a new model.

• There is no unifying power overseeing the search for that new model; there is major disagreement over what it should look like; and there is deep distrust over the motives of most involved parties.

College sports has become a commissioner-driven enterprise, in concert with the TV networks. The leaders of the four power conferences have the most sway. The NCAA is integrally involved in governance issues setting policy, and there is more to do in those areas than ever, but it lost control of high-level football 40 years ago. And thus it lost control of setting the revenue course. And that’s all anyone thinks about—how to make more money at a time when the athletes are finally getting their cut.

Thus we have the various entities attempting to fill the decision-making void. And not necessarily with the noblest of intentions.

This much is clear: The commissioners aren’t overly interested in the super league plans. SEC boss Greg Sankey, the most prominent voice in college athletics, has pushed back at outside stakeholders and private-equity firms trying to re-engineer the industry. He has company on that front.

If the Sankeys of the world are against a super league, doesn’t that doom the premise? Not necessarily, say the College Student Football League principals. There is an end-around on the org chart.

Sankey, one of the strongest voices in college sports, has pushed back on those seeking a more substantive overhaul to the current structure. / Brett Patzke-Imagn Images

“Commissioners work for the college presidents,” Haslam says. “I think now is the time for college presidents to take a really hard look at what’s going on in college athletics, and whether the current system is sustainable or not. The commissioners have been unable—unwilling is probably a better word—to spend some time with us. The commissioners have never sat down with us and said, ‘O.K., tell us how this works.’ It’s frustrating.”

So the idea is to take the pitch directly to university presidents, circumventing the conference commissioners, and meeting the campus CEOs where they are in terms of how they operate.

“The people that run these universities are very different than the people who run pro sports,” Perna says. “It’s a shared governance model. They want a lot of conversation around issues, they want a lot of socializing issues, they like to ask for everybody’s input. So we’re going to follow that model, because we think that’s the right model for this. This is really complicated. So we’re going to have conversations with university presidents. We would love to have conference commissioners involved in that. If they don’t want to be involved in these conversations, we’re still going to have them. We’re going to bring these ideas forward, and we’ll see who likes them.”

Overall, this has the feel of a race to different levels of consolidation. Both Project Rudy and the College Student Football League would put further distance between the power teams and those outside the structure—Project Rudy kicks them to the curb entirely, while the CSFL would at least allow the top teams from that level into their playoff. But there is concern that a potential SEC–Big Ten axis would further thin the herd by marginalizing the programs from the ACC and Big 12. 

“There’s 85,000 student-athletes and about 136 schools,” Perna says. “How do we come up with something that works and not have those numbers go down? There is no real league authority over all of college football that can think about the sport, grow the sport and take care of all the other athletes it supports. It doesn’t have to evolve down to 40 schools that play college football and everyone else is out. It can be healthy and involve more people.”

Adds Haslam: “The idea of putting the SEC and the Big Ten together—I can see why people would be initially enamored by that. There’s a political reality and an economic reality, though. Leaving out that many schools, that’s just not going to fly. To think two conferences can pull off something like that? I think it’s incredibly naive.”

We’ll see if they try. In anxious and distrusting times, all eyes are on Nashville on Thursday.