Denver Broncos Legendary Receiver Talks About the Current State of College Football

Dylan Grausz | Sep 6, 2024

Aug 31, 1997; Denver, CO, USA; FILE PHOTO; Denver Broncos receiver Ed McCaffrey (87) on the sidelines against the Kansas City Chiefs at Mile High Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Peter Brouillet-USA TODAY NETWORK / Peter Brouillet-Imagn Images

The storied history of Stanford football is rich, with modern greats like Andrew Luck, Richard Sherman and Christian McCaffrey donning the red and white before going on to have historic NFL careers. But if we look a little further back, Stanford was once home to the great Ed McCaffrey, father of Christian, who excelled for five years in Palo Alto from 1986-1990 before going on to have an accolade-filled NFL career that included three Super Bowl championships, before retiring after 13 years.

Since ending his playing career, McCaffrey has stayed around the game of football, from coaching to broadcasting, and recently sat down with Betway Insider Group to give an exclusive interview about many topics, including the current state of college football.

Playing at Stanford when the conference was still a member of the Pac-10, McCaffrey looks at the realignment and does believe that while it is good that Stanford got put in one of the big conferences, the current way that travel is and how it affects all aspects of life as a student-athlete could lead to possibly more changes in the future.

“It’s a little weird, right?,” McCaffrey said in the Betway Insider interview. “For a team that’s on the West Coast to be in the Atlantic Coast Conference. I think after the shakeout from last year, you’ve got to be pretty happy you’re in a conference at all. I think there’s still going to continue to be consolidation over the next five, 10, 15 years. There will probably be more conference realignment. There’s a real good chance, in my opinion, that football breaks away from some of the other sports, because I think of the girls’ volleyball team, the men’s baseball team – teams that have to travel from one side of the country to the other and play multiple games. During your season, you’re barely going to be going to class. It’s way more expensive to travel out of your region, but also it’s got to affect the kids’ education. It’s a short-term fix and I’ll be shocked if that’s the way things are structured 10 years from now.”

Stanford is also in a very unique situation because of the reputation that it has as an academic institution, and while McCaffrey believes that the current staff is doing a good job of trying to build a competitive program, the challenge becomes having to navigate being able to get players on the football team while dealing with them being accepted into the very hard school while also dealing with NIL opportunities that are offered to players in order to get them to play.

“There’s a lot of optimism at Stanford,” McCaffrey said to Betway. “I know coach Taylor is really trying to turn the program around, they’re battling all the things that the other schools are battling, and maybe it’s a little more difficult for Stanford because they have really high academic requirements. The transfer portal rules changed and basically opened up the floodgates, and it’s not easy to get into Stanford so they weren’t able to bring in as many transfers as other teams. Essentially you’re missing a whole year of your education if you try to get into Stanford.

“The other problem is if you don’t get into Stanford grad school and you have another year of eligibility – and some players had two more years of eligibility because of the new freshman rule and then COVID giving them an extra season – you can lose your seniors to other schools,” McCaffrey said. “As a matter of fact, two of their best players started for Michigan’s national championship team. So they’re losing players that graduate that still have eligibility, and they were losing players that couldn’t get accepted to the school. They’d lose players to the portal, but they couldn’t bring in players to replace them. You have to bring in freshmen who are just not as prepared. Then NIL opened up, and now it’s pay for play. I know the school’s not doing it directly, but alumni are paying for players to play for certain teams. Now if you have a really talented player, if your NIL doesn’t step up and help compensate players, then you can lose players that way as well. So Stanford has faced some huge headwinds, a lot of challenges, and they’re facing it just like everyone else. But I would say some of the elite academic institutions have a tougher time keeping up because of their academic standards.”

Nowadays, college football is business now more than ever before and with the amount of money involved with the sport and the amount of movement occurring this year in order to maximize on revenue opportunities like TV deals, McCaffrey believes that it may take some time before college football is finally in the place that it needs to be in.

“If I have to look in the crystal ball, I think for the 30 or 50 big-time FBS football teams, there’s going to have to be consolidation there,” McCaffrey said in the Betway Insider interview. “It may be 10 or 15 years away, but they’re going to have to break away from the pack at some point because the TV revenues in college football financially support all of the other programs at a lot of schools. They’re really dependent on college football to subsidize the losses that they experience. Football is one game a week, so to have teams that have to play a series of three or four games at a time on the road is way more expensive and is affecting student athletes’ education. College football is also the only sport where you have to play three years before you can go pro. I was originally part of a group headed by Don Yee, Tom Brady’s agent, and we were going to create a professional football league for players right out of high school. We didn’t quite get the financial support we needed to get it done, but it was a great vision and we had it lined up.”

College football is something that will always be around, but McCaffrey talked about the possibility of one day getting rid of the three year rule that requires former high school football players to be on a college team for three years before being eligible for the pros, even bringing up doing something like a minor league system like they do for pro baseball.

“I’m not ruling out the NFL one day having their own farm system like Major League Baseball,” McCaffrey said in the Betway Insider interview. “They’re not going to want to take that risk, someone else is going to have to do it first, and then if it works the NFL certainly could take it over.”