A Complete Plan to Save College Football: Regional Conferences, 24-Team CFP, & Rose Bowl Title Game

Seth Saunders: Yeah, yeah, fire up the grill, crank the speakers loud. Saturdays feel holy in this college crowd. Sethin' James on the mic, preaching gospel truth, talking rivalries, legends, red, black, old and blue From dead valley lights to the camp, Randall Cold, They're telling stories, they never get old. Ain't no bench, warm hearts on the show tonight. They're walking on proud. The stadium lies. They'll prefer walk-on. No scholarship still putting it on from the church and tailgate hands in the air. Welcome to the preferred walk-on show, the People's College Football Show. I am your host, Seth Saunders. And whether you are with us today because you got recommended by a friend or you've been here for the whole ride, 250 plus episodes, whether you saw us on social, whether you saw a recent interview we did with one of our guests and decided to come back and join today, man. Fired up you're here, right? And before we get started, if this show has earned a few minutes of your time this week, do me a favor, hit subscribe wherever you're listening. Hit the like button if you're with us on YouTube, follow us on social so you never miss what's coming out of the show. It's free, it takes two seconds, and it's the single biggest thing you can do to keep an independent show like us on air, producing content. So so fired up you're here. And ⁓ let's get into it this week. Okay. So we have been doing A series on compensation in college athletics. And as that was going on, the news cycle has been hot with different things, whether it be conversations about the potential expansion of the playoff field, the 24 teams, which we talked about in our compensation episodes about why financially that is a a win and not an if, right? Like that is, in my estimation, going to happen. And how we get there still remains to be seen. But that is that is something that's coming. Because the money is gonna be so, so big from a TV contract perspective. And then this week in the news cycle, we've been hearing a ton about the hearings in Congress on this Protect College Sports Act. Nick Saban testified this week and and folks have had opinions left and right. And all of this is around trying to corral the game of college football. And and I know that's it's under this hat of college athletics, all right? But let's have an honest conversation here. College football is driving the bus, folks. All right. Everything else is Is on the bus, but college football is driving it. And so they are trying to figure out a way. And in some ways, man, this is the ultimate. The toothpaste is out of the tube. And now we're trying to shove some of it back in. But they're trying to figure out a way to put some reasonable parameters around what has happened in the space of college athletics, whether that be compensation, whether that be how we're allocating funds, whether that be You know, conferences getting certain payouts versus other conferences. Obviously, expansion has been rampant. The Big Ten and the SEC have expanded their footprints, all TV driven, right? Trying to add markets, add viewership so they can get a bigger contract. And so we've got this super unbalanced system, and we've got this system that, in my opinion, has gotten completely away from the roots, the history, and the things that we as fans, we as consumers. love about the game of college football. And man, to me, in so many ways, it just feels like we've lost a plot on college football. And there has to be somebody or some group that steps up and says, we got to fix this, man. Like we have made so many poor decisions and we have taken something that was outstanding and in so many ways ruined excellent aspects of it. And I just have hated to see how Benchmarks of the game, foundations of college football have essentially disintegrated. And I think my biggest point of contention for this is how far away we've gotten from the regionality of the sport. All right. So the beauty of the sport used to be that every single region across the nation, all right, coast to coast, had its group of teams that were part of these regionalized conferences where people play each other. There are these natural rivalries, and it made the sport. Great. It made the tapestry so, so rich. And with all of this expansion, we've lost that. And to me, I know the the leader and what has driven conversation a ton has been the comp piece. The last five years we've been super focused on player comp and NIL and how that has shifted things, how that's changed the funding dynamic for the athletic departments across the country. And and all that's real. Like I'm not Not trying to discount that, but what I'm saying is I think where it's all stemmed from and how we've gotten to this point, like everything, okay, the people that have been making decisions do not care. They say they care, but they do not care about the game of college football. Their main concern and the concern that that ends up ruining most things in life, they are worried about growing the purse. They are way less worried about growing the game of college football. And so that's where everything has boiled down to. It's just what what's going to make us the most money? What decisions will allow us to grow the dollar, to grow revenue, to grow margin, all these things. And as a fan, I don't care about any of that. All right. I want to be able to watch Oklahoma and Nebraska play each other. That's what I care about. I want there to be the rivalries that we've grown accustomed to to stay intact. And so, anyways, as I was working through the college comp piece. I didn't necessarily want to talk about the potential for playoffs expansion or essentially looking at different ways to reorganize college football. But as I looked at it, I was like, you what? That I'm going to talk about that because that's exactly what I would do if I'm the one that had control and dominion. So that's what this episode's going to be today. If I had the power to quote unquote fix college football, these are the things that I would do to try to put it back in a space where it would be great. where the institutions could get on board because everybody could still, like I talked about, they could still make their money. So you you can navigate all that, but you're also in a place where college fans are getting served. Not certain conference fans are getting served, but college football fans from Maine to Hawaii are getting served. And so this is the plan. Some of you gonna love it, some of you gonna hate it. Some of you gonna say, who cares? None of this is ever going to happen. All that's fair. But this is what I would do. Okay. And, you know, I again, I've talked about why I think it's broken. And the biggest thing for me is we've forgotten and lost what was so unique and singular about college football. And really college athletics in general. And that's the regionality of it. So my first step, if I was, you know, the the individual that had the unilateral power to make things happen and to fix everything. First off, I would bring regionality back to the sport immediately. And the way to do that. Would be to completely blow up the conference structure that we have now. Like, I none of this UCLA is gonna play rutgers in a conference game. Like, get get out of here. We ain't doing that no more. It's ridiculous. Okay. And the fact that we've gotten to this point irritates me to no end. So we're over that. We are we are realigning conferences to bring back regionality. As part of this, just as a preview, my postseason structure, and I've been unapologetic about this. I have been and will always be a proponent of a bigger playoff field. Number one, because I think it's representative of the populace that's playing the sport. And I I'm not going to apologize about that. And some of that is driven by the fact that I went to an FCS school, I went to William and Mary. And so I watched an enlarged playoff system happen every single year. And it's awesome. I watched on campus games and the electricity it brings and all those things. And there's never any gripes about Crown on a champion. You why? Because it there's nothing to gripe about. Nobody gets left out. There's none of this hemming and hon about so-and-so should have got in or so-and-so's resume was better. Mm-mm. Bump all that. Okay. So I'm just gonna be very upfront. My my formalized system, my new system includes a 2014 playoff. But I'm gonna tell you why it includes a 2014 playoff. And it d it directly relates to this reorganization into regionality because part of the way I get there is we're doing 14 conferences. 14 times 10, 10 schools per conference. So 14 conferences, 10 member schools per conference, which means inherently each of those conferences plays a round robin schedule. All right. Everybody's playing nine conference games. So everybody's going to play each other. There's going to be a conference champion, regular season conference champion that is determined via that round robin schedule. All right. Now to get to 140. Some teams have to be added to the pool. There are not a hundred and forty FBS teams currently. In some ways I'm barring from Peter to pay Paul because I'm going to, as part of this reorganization, steal some teams from the FCS. So there's going to be some FCS teams that jump up, but it's part of this regionality piece. There's a there's a a huge portion of the country that is unrepresented really in the FBS structure. So we're going change that. So again, 14 conferences, 10 member schools per conference. Each conference will play nine games round robin schedule. In my model, because of a s from a scheduling perspective, and I'll get to what the calendar would look like. But in my model, there are no more conference championship games. Okay. That is a consequence of having a 2014 playoff, the expanded postseason, while also wanting to keep the calendar tight. Because one of my biggest concerns as I was trying to lay this out and conceptualize this was I keeping the walls around Army Navy as solid as possible. Army Navy gets its own Saturday. So we will allocate that. And in order to do that, we're losing conference championship weekend. And I'll tell you how that will function logistically, but I want to lay out what the structure looks like for these this 140 team, 14 conference, 10 teams of conference structure. So And I told you, my main push on this is to bring back regionality. And by bringing back regionality, I also want to call back history and bring back some conferences. So what we're going to do is we're going to reallocate conferences that are still active. We're also going to bring back some conferences that are no longer active because they were death by expansion, essentially, death by realignment. And then we're also going to have some new conferences. And part of this structure too, which this is a fan base that'll probably be irritated about this, but no day I'm going to be in conference. If they want to be in the postseason, they got to join a conference. So that will be part of this math. And Notre Dame will be part of one of the new conferences. So let's just go through them. All right. I'm just going to roll you through the 14. I know this is probably a little redundant in some ways to go through this, but let's just go through them. Okay. This is what the SEC looks like in my structure. It it's traditional. All right. You're going to get Alabama, Auburn, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, LSU, Mississippi State, Ole Miss, Tennessee, and Vandy. That's the 10 team SEC. Okay. All the schools that have been added, Missouri, out, Texas, out, Arkansas, out, AM, out. They're all out. All right. We're gonna and and I'll show you where they all land, but but this is the 10 team SEC structure. Tennessee and Georgia are gonna play every year. Georgia and Auburn gonna play every year. ⁓ Florida and LSU gonna play every year. None of this, ⁓ we got to wait two years to see something. Mm mm. Nope. Y'all gonna see each other every single year. It's gonna be outstanding. Gonna be on each other's home fields every other year, outside of Georgia and Florida. That's obviously in my model still gonna be neutral side. But but that's that. All right, Big Ten. Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Michigan State, Minnesota, Northwestern, Ohio State, Purdue, and Wisconsin. All the founding members of the Big Ten and some throw-ins in there as well. But this is the group I like. It's a Midwest centric group. This would be the Big Ten moving forward, okay? Penn State out. I'll show you where they land, but Penn State is out. All right. ACC, Clemson, Duke. Florida State, Georgia Tech, Maryland, North Carolina, North Carolina State, South Carolina, Virginia, Wake Forest. This is the ACC I grew up with, essentially, outside of South Carolina. And for everybody going or all the South Carolina fans griping about, man, we're SEC school. Sorry, not anymore. Y'all were a founding member of the ACC. You're back in the ACC. In all honesty, if I was a Game Cox fan, I would be elated about this. You might actually have a chance to win this conference, which ain't gonna happen in the SEC. So And imagine this, okay? Instead of Clemson, South Carolina just being a rivalry game, it is now a rivalry game that could determine the conference title. All right. So we're talking Thanksgiving weekend, Tigers Game Cox for the ACC title. Like, come on, man. If you don't like that, I don't know what to tell you. All right, look, here's one we're bringing back. We are bringing back the big eight: Colorado, Iowa State, Kansas, Kansas State, Memphis, Mizzou, Nebraska. Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, and Tulsa. Bedlam is back every single year. The Border War, Kansas, Mizzou back every single year. We're getting Colorado, Nebraska. We're getting Nebraska, Oklahoma. Come on with it. It's all coming back. Big eight, baby, stand up. All right, another one we're bringing back. The Southwest Conference in all its glory. Arkansas, Baylor, Houston, Rice, SMU, Texas, Texas AM, TCU, Texas Tech. Tulane gonna get in a little Southwest Conference action. New addition to that conference. Man, look, I would sign up for this in a heartbeat. One of the things I've hated about expansion, realignment, all this stuff is you lose this like historical regionality. Southwest Conference was a proud conference with incredible member schools. Gone. Poof. Bamous. It's back now, baby. We're bringing it back. College football, make college football great again. That's what we're trying to do. All right, another one coming back. The Pac 10. Pac 10 gonna have Arizona, Arizona State, Cal, Oregon. Oregon State, Stanford, UCLA, USC, Washington, Washington State, Apple Cup, every year. Gotta happen. Civil War, Oregon, Oregon State. Every single year. They got to happen. Commonwealth Cup. It's all coming, baby. I mean, Pac-10 coming back in all its glory. All right now, new conference. And this one's important because there's some schools on here that you haven't heard yet that we have to include. So this is where we're going with it. It's going to be the Rust Belt Conference. And in the Rust Belt, You got Cincinnati, Kent State, Louisville, Miami of Ohio, Northern Illinois, Notre Dame. This is the Irish's conference. They're in the Rust Belt. Ohio, Penn State. There's the Nittany Lions. They're in the Rust Belt with Notre Dame. Pittsburgh and West Virginia. Pitt and West Virginia playing every year. Backyard Brawl. Could be for the conference title. Let's go. Notre Dame, Penn State playing every single year. Penn State hosting Notre Dame in a whiteout every other year. Come on. Let's see it, baby. Rust Belt, brand new conference, all right? All right, Big East we're bringing back, but it's a reenvisioned Big East. I'm gonna be very straightforward with you. The Big East folks probably not gonna like this one. I'm okay with that. Big East is a basketball conference. I don't think anybody's gonna debate that. This is not built for basketball. This is a Big East for football, and as such, is very geographically driven. We got Army, Boston College, Buffalo, Delaware, the U, Miami, Navy, Rutgers, Syracuse, Temple, Yukon. Look. Is this conference set up well for Miami? Yes. Is there anything we can do about it? Well, in my conference structure realign, the way I wanted to structure the ACC, I couldn't fit Miami in that window. I thought the sunbelt that we'll get to later was not a good fit for Miami. I like the traditional big East tie for Miami, but it is what it is. Okay. Is that an imperfect conference? Maybe a little bit, but I like the regionality of it. I like having Army Navy in the same conference. It is what it is. All right. So that's that one. All right, Mountain West. This is what the reenvisioned Mountain West looks like with a lot of familiar players, really. You still got Air Force, BYU, Colorado State, Fresno State, Hawaii, Nevada, San Diego State, San Jose State, UNLV, and then Utah. Again, nice conference poll for Utah. Sure is. Just is what it is, okay? Utes in the Mountain West. Here is a brand new conference. Could be my favorite one. This might be the conference I would be most excited about. The big snow conference, Boise State. Idaho. This is where we're gonna start pulling some of our teams from the FCS I talked about. Montana, Montana State, North Dakota, newly added FCS team for this year or FBS team for this year already. South or North Dakota State, South Dakota, South Dakota State, Utah State, and Wyoming. I love this. Okay. First off, you put a big snow conference logo on a t shirt. I'm buying it tomorrow. I mean, within seconds. The other piece of this is incredible. I mean Incredible college football rivalries within this conference. We're gonna get Brawl of the Wild each year in this conference, possibly for conference title. We're gonna get Dakota Marker Game every year in this conference, possibly for a conference title. Just ⁓ incredible. Big snow, I'm here for it. Sign me up every single day. All right, next one, the Red Dirt Conference. Brand new conference, a red dirt conference. Arkansas State, Louisiana Lafayette, Louisiana Tech, New Mexico, New Mexico State, North Texas. Sam Houston State, Texas State, UTEP, and UTSA, Roadrunners, Meet Meet. That is the new red dirt conference. Now, the Colonial. There used to be a Colonial in the FCS. That's what William Mary is part of. They rebranded that. So we're stealing it. Colonial's ours now. It belongs to the FBS. Belongs to the new college football association, which is what this hat will fall under. All right, Colonial is gonna be App State, Charlotte, Coastal Carolina, East Carolina, Georgia Southern, James Madison, Kennesaw State. Liberty, Marshall, and Old Dominion, ODU. So that's the new colonial conference. Sunbelt, Reimagine Sunbelt, FAU, FIU, Jacksonville State, South Alabama, South Florida, Southern Miss, Troy, UCF, UAB, UA Lum, University of Louisiana Monroe. All right, now the Mac. Recognize the MAC. Akron, Ball State, Bowling Green, Central Michigan, Eastern Michigan, Middle Tennessee, Missouri State, Toledo, Western Kentucky, Western Michigan. All right, y'all. That's it. That is the 14 conferences. All right. Ten teams apiece. That's it. Like I said, my my push with this is I want regionality back. I think this is the way that accomplishes that. And now that you know who the teams would be, who the players are, plus I made graphics about this. I'll post the graphics of what each conference looks like, reimagined. But The way this plays out for me from a postseason perspective, because one of the gripes with the expansion of postseason is, ⁓ regular season doesn't matter. We've minimized regular season, blah, blah, blah. Okay, that's fine. It matters now because guess what? Every single conference champion, just like in the FCS model, automatic bid to the playoffs. All right. You win your conference, you're dancing. Okay. 24 teams, 14 bids automatic. 14 conference champs are in the field. Now, they're not automatically going to get home field. I'll get to that. All right. But this is how it sets up. 14 auto bids. Every conference champion in the dance, no exceptions. Win your league, you're in. 10 at large bids. This is where I think you still have some wiggle for a committee, a CFA playoff committee, maybe, maybe the conference, you have conference reps. I don't know how you want to look at that. But I think an independent committee still sits in this and their job is twofold. Number one, they're ranking the field, one through 24. They will be involved with that. So I the conference championship from a rankings perspective, I I don't care about. All right. If you are a conference champion, but you're the last team in the field, sorry, you're 24th. It is what it is. Okay. I I don't care about any of that. What I do care about is the committee seeding this thing as competitively as possible. So if you've been the best team in the country all year, number one seed. All right. So that's how that sits. And How it would play out is one through eight. I think that's how it sits up. Yeah. One through eight bye in the first round. Nine through twenty-four will play each other on campus. So that's weekend one. Weekend two, again on campus. So every single team in the field gets an on campus playoff game. Okay. Well, the home teams do. But what I'm saying is the first two rounds are going to be on campus. So none of this, you know, like the how it was this year. If you were one of the top seeds, what what's the benefit? Like, yeah, you get two weeks off, but then you don't play on your home field, which as we all know in college football is a massive advantage. All right. So we've removed that. Now if you are a higher ranked seed, you will get a home game. So that's how that's structured. ⁓ quarters and the semis, we're going to rotate those each year between historical bowls. So it's going to be the cotton bowl. And I mean the real one. We're playing at the actual Cotton Bowl. We're not playing at Jerry World. Sorry. At the actual Cotton Bowl is where we're playing that game. The Fiesta Bowl, the Sugar Bowl, the Orange Bowl, the Peach Bowl, and the Sun Bowl. Why did the Sun Bowl get included? I love it. All right. There's so much history at the Sun Bowl. It's one of the cooler, I think, bowl sites in all the country. We should champion our history as a sport. The Sun Bowl has rich history. One of the playoff games is getting played at the Sun Bowl. It is what it is. Do do you have other games or bowl games that you prefer to have there? Great. We can do that. We can talk about that. But for me, that's that's what it would be. Now, one name you didn't hear in that list is the Rose Bowl. The reason for that? The national championship game will be played at the Rose Bowl every single year. The the mantra for the entire season will be the road to the Rose Bowl. That's where we're going. All roads point to Pasadena and the Roses as it pertains to hoisting a title. Like it is the just premier spot to me in sport. I think it is an incredible venue. The history is unrivaled. It is where we should play our national championship game as a sport is at the Rose Bowl. And I also think it makes it super special to have your premier event, your title game at the same location every single year. Like you think about some of the most iconic events in all of sport. What is one of the commonalities with that? It's that The venue is the same. The Masters at Augusta, the Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs, Wimbledon, like they're all at the Old England Club. They're all at the same spot. And the venue is as much a part of it as the actual event itself. So for me, there's only one choice when you're talking about a venue like that in college football, and it's the Rose Bowl. So the Rose Bowl will host the national title every year. Now, do we got to get the Rose Bowl folks past playing on New Year's Day every day? Yeah, we're gonna have to work on that. But and maybe that's an impossible barrier to move, but that's gonna be part of this, okay? I want to talk about timeline and calendar for how that would work. All right. Because right now, as we set the calendar with conference championship games, obviously this structure wouldn't work great. So we got to shift that a little bit. And part of how we would do that is is start the season a week earlier, which has been talked about and I think is coming anyways. I think that was part of the agreement starting next year, is that I don't know if they agreed on that or I can't remember. But I know that's been talked about very seriously about moving the season up to week zero. So the week, the weekend before Labor Day weekend, and then ⁓ having it be a 14 week season where everybody has two bye weeks built in. So how I would structure it is same thing. You're gonna start week zero. So week before Labor Day weekend, and then the final week of the season is Thanksgiving weekend, just like it is now. Thanksgiving weekend is the final week of the season. Like I said though, no conference title games. And the reason for no conference title games is twofold. Number one, we got 10 team conferences now. So we're gonna play around Robin. We're gonna crown a champion based on everybody playing each other. No more conference title game. Don't need it. The other reason is, this is the second part of this, is I specifically want there to be protection, a weekend of protection for Army Navy and then Heisman Trophy Ceremony, just like it is now. So the Saturday after Thanksgiving now will be Army Navy game every year. And at night, just like it is now, Heisman Trophy would be presented. Now, the one, I guess, caveat with this or funky thing about this is, and maybe in other systems or maybe even 10 years ago, I mean, it look, it was pretty plausible this year. Army and Navy have been in the conversation the last two seasons for bits. Army had an outstanding year two seasons ago. Navy was in the conversation until the very last hour this year, ⁓ because of the way certain conference title games rolled out in the G six. They were very much in that conversation. And so the only thing I haven't quite figured out that we'd have to work on is which I guess it still works from a selection perspective, is I think actually it does because you don't have the conference title game. ⁓ you just I guess it just ⁓ it it would it would be, I guess you could say, a quote unquote disadvantage for Army or Navy if they were in the playoff, is that you wouldn't get a week off between the end of the regular season and round one of the playoffs. But it's a mechanism of of the structure. I wanna protect that game. The only way to do it is to do it this way. At least based on the calendar that I drew out. So Army Navy theoretically now could be for the Big East Conference title and an automatic bid to the playoffs, which is I mean, that's incredible, right? So that that's how that structures. So then round one the week after that, round two the week after that, quarters semis will be on New Year's Day. New Year's Day will be the semise day. And then every year we're playing a national championship game the the following weekend. I'm going to make this argument because I've felt this way for a long time. I also highly, highly advocate and it'll be difficult on years where New Year's Day falls funky, but gosh, whenever it works out, we gotta play the national title game on a Saturday. Why are we not playing the crown jewel game of our sport on the day we actually play our sport? Why are we playing the com why are we playing the national championship game on a Monday night? I I hate that. I know ⁓ look, I know the reasons, all right. The NFL playoffs start, blah dah blah da blah. I Look, I don't care. We play football on Saturdays from college football. That's when we should play the national title game. So the years that we could fix the dates as it pertains to New Year's Day and try to keep that history, we're playing the national title game on Saturdays. Hard stop. Like any any year that that works, we're doing it. And NFL be damned. I really don't care. So that's that's the playoff structure that I would look at. ⁓ could I be negotiated with on some of those things? Yeah, a hundred percent. I'm I'm open to ideas, but that's the general calendar that I laid out. Now Let's get to the most important part about this conversation, which I think for most everybody, this probably sounds all like pie in the sky. And yeah, maybe it is. Okay. Like there are structures in place and there are enough people making enough money with enough power that something like this probably would never happen. However, if you'll remember, a couple of years ago, there was a group that proposed something not exactly like this. It was kind of cut this in half. It was only seventy teams, but it was very similar. where they wanted to consolidate structure into one essential college football unit. And the most important piece of this is where you have one negotiating win window for a TV deal. So instead of the Big Ten negotiating TV deals, the SEC negotiating TV deals, the ACC negotiating TV deals, everybody grants the TV rights up to the entity that's essentially running the league. So in my scenario, it's the College Football Association. The College Football Association would negotiate the TV rights for this deal. And this is where it gets sticky because I think people are like, how functionally would this work? Why would the Big Ten give up this their power? Why would the SEC give up their power? Look, these are all great questions. And and the reality is they likely would not. However, I do think there's a legitimate path forward where this works structurally and everyone still also makes a hell of a lot of money. And so I'm gonna try to lay that out. And and look, I've been pretty open on our show about this. I I read a book called The Club. A couple of years ago. And it is about the genesis of the Premier League. So the most popular sports league in the world. And its similarities to college football are striking to me. Number one, English soccer, English football was extremely regional, still extremely regional. You're talking clubs that are followed by supporters that are distinctly regional to their squad. And have loved that squad for generations. And the rivalries are so important and so rampant. And the history in those rivalries is so important and so rampant. And obviously it's a little bit different, right? Like England's tiny compared to the scope of the United States. But I think conceptually it's a very shared concept with college football. And then what happened with the Premier League is when they consolidated, started the Premier League, and then started making TV negotiations and started negotiating worldwide TV deals, that's when the money Exploded, right? And as that league has continued to evolve and become more popular and have more money than Davy Crockett, as you can imagine, there are certain teams within that league who have bigger fan bases, who are more popular as a brand globally and have started coming to the table and saying, hey, wait a minute. We shouldn't be treated the same way as team 20 in the table, the team that's not producing the revenue we produce, the team that's not. Getting the same type of ratings, bumps that we get when we're broadcast. And all that's fair, and those are all the same arguments that you would get in a rational conversation about a structure like this in college football. Because if you're the Big Ten or you're the SEC, you're gonna go, hold on, why on earth would I give up our TV rights and lump in with this new big snow conference? Like, I'm not doing that. Look, okay, that's fair. All right, but I'm gonna tell you how I think it could work. And again, structurally, This would be very similar from a TV rights deal to what the NFL does. You consolidate all of your branding, all of your power, and then you negotiate one deal with the various TV networks. Like the Cowboys aren't negotiating their TV deal. The Raiders aren't negotiating their TV deal. The NFL's doing all that. All right. And they've all given them that license. And then each of those member teams, those member franchises, gets paid out accordingly. Well, this would function extremely similarly, except the package of games. would be massive. Now, the first hurdle you have to overcome in this, the only reason that the professional leagues can negotiate all of their TV rights together is because of legitimately an act of Congress. The Sports Aud B Broadcasting Act of 1961 gives Professional Sports League a limited antitrust exemption because generally this is where it falls apart. You would say, ⁓ no, this is you you can't do this. You're working collectively and you can't do this. So you're you're in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act if you band together and you sell all these national broadcasting rights. Well, the Sports Broadcasting Act said, except if you're a sports league, professional sports league, you can do this. And that's why the NBA, the NHL, DNFL, Major League Baseball, if they want to, can just negotiate all their deals, you know, independent. So that's that's why that sits there. So in order and here's the hook with that though, does not apply to college sports. So They would have to get either an extension of the Sports Broadcasting Act to include college football or college sports, or they'd have to have a new act of Congress that essentially laid that, laid out that antitrust exemption for the College Football Association. So, and just as a kind of a brief overview of what the Sports Broadcasting Act does, it exempts leagues from the Sherman Antitrust Act or violating that. By banding together to sell national broadcasting rights. And it also allows the league to act as one and enable the distribution of television revenue across all teams, which if you're a small market team, like say you're like a buffalo, that's what's giving you financial viability, is that piece of it. They also, and this is why you don't see the NFL on Saturdays, which is why college football has been protected in that window for so long. There was a Friday night law in that sports broadcasting act. Which prohibited, okay, professional football telecasts from being on TV Friday nights and Saturday nights between a Friday, the first Friday in September and the second Saturday in December, you cannot broadcast an NFL game within 75 miles of high school or college games during those time windows. And that's gotten, you know, wonky'd a little bit. Like theoretically, too, the Sports Broadcasting Act was only supposed to apply to Public no pay television. So like it's on CBS, I can watch it, it's free, right? And obviously we're not doing that now because ESPN is showing games, Amazon Prime is showing games, all these pay pay networks are showing games. So theoretically, we're not exactly following the sports broadcasting acting professional sports, but that's what was supposed to it's what it was supposed to look like. Okay. Now, how would you get around that? with college. Well, you'd have to you'd have to broaden that scope. Okay. Like you'd have to get it to the point where college football was part of that because there was a case back in nineteen eighty four NCAA versus Board of Regents that said the NCAA was trying to do this. They were trying to negotiate football contracts amongst broad based swath of member institutions. And the court said, Nope, can't do that. That that's in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. So like I said, there'd have to be some type of either inclusion for college football under the Sports Broadcasting Act or conversely legislation, active legislation to change that. Now, that is part of this conversation with the whole saving college sports initiative and the ⁓ Protect College Sports Act that they're trying to, you know, talk about with Congress right now. But that's the first step in this is you'd have to eliminate that. So you could you could make the argument that ⁓ we can have one set of TV rights. Now, let's get back to how that could actually functionally work. All right. I think in order for it to work, you can't be blind to the fact that in order to get the Big Ten or the SEC or hell, even the ACC and the Big 12 to play in that game, you have to create a tiered revenue distribution structure. And I think some of that you would steal from how it currently is, which we talked about in previous episodes, of everybody's going to get a base distribution. So you negotiate the TV deal every single institution in the hundred and forty team membership is going to get a base distribution annually off the TV deals. I think you start there. Then just like it is now, you get additional revenue if you play in the playoff. So if you win, you get more money. So each conference title winner will get a little bit of a bump. And then also too, if you're one of the at-larges then the more powerful conferences have the ability for their member schools to get a little bit more of a bump. Here's the big piece of this. I think also You have to have some type of tiered distribution as a third pool based off of eyeballs. All right. So in order to have this be at a starter with the bigger conferences, the ACC and the Big Ten or the SEC and the Big Ten, you have to be able to offer them a bigger piece of the pie because inherently their ratings numbers are going to be bigger. Now look, that might change with the regionality and all these things, but There has to be some type of then third pool that's tier distribution based off ratings and structure. So essentially like a merit-based or a value-based ⁓ payout. So that's how I would do it in order to A, include everyone, but B, also provide some distinctness to how how things are paid out and also protect some of the bigger brands. So that's how I would start with it. And the conferences aren't going to go away. They would still stay in place. It's just getting that buy-in. Now, I want to talk about why that could actually work. Because think about this now. If the numbers have gotten as big as they've gotten with these bigger conferences, with the SEC and with the Big Ten, the Big Ten negotiated what, like a seven billion dollar deal or something like that for their their revenue. I think it's a billion dollars a year. The SEC negotiated a monster deal. For their TV deal. I've talked about on the other episode. If we went to a 2014 playoff, even in the structure we're in now, you're talking about you could probably negotiate somewhere between three and a half to four billion just for the playoff structure. Okay. So let's say then we've shifted now and we've got 140 teams with 140 teams games pool of inventory to go sell to the networks. All right. The total annual revenue now. For regular season conference payout is a if and this is a ballpark, somewhere between three to four billion. That's if you combined all the conference TV deals together. If you do some projections and some what this could look like in three years and five years, you're talking maybe in five to six years, a unified a hundred and forty team CFA could garner somewhere between twelve to fourteen billion a year in TV revenue. And that's that's packaging the playoff, but still. That's a massive jump in revenue. Okay. And I think how the payouts could potentially look is if, and again, this goes into the three tier structure. I think the SEC and the Big Ten are looking at, you know, each school maybe getting somewhere between 120 to 130 million annually. I think right now the schools are sitting around seventy-five to eighty. So look, each school's getting paid more. If I'm the commissioner of that conference, I can go sell that. ACC and the Big Twelve, those schools are sitting at like 35 to 40 million a year. In this payout structure, that looks more like 60 to 80 million per school. Now, this is where I think it gets fascinating. You go to group of six, you're talking they're getting maybe 10 million, maybe a little more. That would jump up to like 25 to 30 million annually under this 140 team structure with the consolidated TV negotiating. And so the entire sport, and not just college football, but you gotta think about this from an athletic department perspective. Each athletic department, the boats. rise higher. Okay. Rising tide raises all boats. And in this scenario, man, it is the biggest incoming, I mean, wealth transfer you would see. It would just be incredible from every single school would get so much more money. Okay. And it would just allow I I just think it would allow for the sustenance of college athletics as a whole because schools throughout the country would have a bite of the of the pie instead of Right now, where everything is shifting so dramatically to the Big Ten and the SEC. And so again, the that those are the roadblocks is the SEC and the Big Ten. You have to get them to buy in. And I think the way you sell it is if we do this, your member schools could theoretically get paid almost twice as much as they're making per year now. And they are already getting paid at the richest level. And so that's where I would start with that. You have so much more power from a playoff inventory perspective. You have so much more power from a regular season inventory perspective. And also you're taking out the middleman because you're not having to negotiate against other conferences. You're not having to negotiate against other networks. You have one gigantic inventory pool, one big pot that you get to go take, one big product you get to go take to the whole market and say, hey, look, you can all have a piece of this pie. What do you want to pay us? And so you just enlarge. what you can make. And I think the way it would be structured, God, it just feels like a no-brainer to me. So you're talking the way that I am conceptualizing this, you bring back regionality, you have a playoff structure, a postseason structure that is an inclusive of the entire sport while also still allowing greater inclusivity for teams and conferences that are playing at a better level. You also everyone's making more money, which at the end of the day, Is the whole conversation around any of this. So we're we're still enlarging the purse. We're keeping fan bases happy because we are preserving regionality and we are involving more fan bases for a longer time. Because now, if I have grown up living and dying with North Dakota State as my team, or I've grown up living and dying as a Grizz fan with Montana, I can go to the I can go to the big dance now. I can go to the actual FBS. Traditional FBS playoffs and my brand's gonna be all over national TV. I just, man, I love it. All right. Like this is how I think you celebrate the full scope of the sport. The regular season still matters because every conference championship could be up for grabs till the last week of the season. And that conference championship means you're dancing for something real, not going to the Gasparilla bowl like we're gonna go get to play in the playoffs. I just we and also too. And I know people have talked about, ⁓ well, this is what makes college football unique. We do an expanded playoffs at every single level of football in America. Every single level. NFL, larger playoff field, more inclusive playoff field. FCS, more inclusive playoff field. Division two, more inclusive playoff field. Division three, more inclusive playoff field. High school football, more inclusive playoff field. Why are we not doing this at the highest level of college football? I just that's never worked for me. Intellectually, like I can't I can't put that together why that works and why we're so stuck on that. But yeah, so that's my plan. 140 teams, 14 conferences, 10 teams a conference, round robin regular season, 2014 playoff, conference champion auto bids for all 14 conferences, 10 at larges, two rounds of on campus games, historical bowl tie ins for the quarters and semis, road to the Rose Bowl. We are playing the national title every year. With the sun setting over the San Gabriels in Pasadena in the historic Rose Bowl, iconic. Okay. This is the way. Like we have so broken the game that we love. This is an opportunity to put some reins back on it, to corral what has gotten out of control, to take into account the fans' interest and bring back the things that we love about this game. So again, one man's plan, do with it what you like. I'm sure there will be people with a absolutely hate this plan. Tell me that. Tell me that you hate it. Tell me what you hate about it. And if you love it, tell me what you love about it. If you're neither here nor there about it or just of the opinion this will never happen, tell me that too. I wanna I want to hear all the feedback. Okay. Look, so fired up you're here. Might talk about this again on another episode. Might do an actual like construct of what this would have looked like for the 2025 season to the best of my ability. Obviously some of these conferences didn't exist so we'd have to kind of cherry pick and go, well, based off what this team did, they would have won this conference. But we can look at what that field would have looked like, where the games would have been played, and how things theoretically could have played themselves out. But God, man, like if you could set this structure up, if you could do a build a build a league in NCAA football, I I probably would be facing getting divorce paper served on me. I think my mo my wife would leave me because I'd be spending my time doing all this. But that's ⁓ that's my plan, guys. So again, tell me what you think about it. Thank you for being here today. Always glad to have you, always glad to spend time with you. ⁓ man, we're getting closer and closer. We're under a hundred days till when college football comes back and kicks off. And y'all can stop listening to me ramble about my ideas for the sport and just listen to me talk about the actual games in the field. So it's coming. ⁓ we will be back next week with some more content. Like I said, I might do a 2014 a field based on this structure that I've laid out. And then I'm gonna have a great guest next week, gonna have Mitt Winter on the show. He is an attorney who specializes in NF NIL work, in college compensation, in the changing landscape of college athletics, and most importantly, proud William Mary grad. So go tribe, fire to talk to Mitt next week, and we will get that out to you. Until then, earn that scholarship, baby, and kiss your nooch.