Alright, so the ACC/Big Ten/Pac-12 alliance announcement yesterday was, to quote a friend, a whole lot of nothin’. But it did bring to mind an impending possibility for college sports: the death, or minimization, of the NCAA.
With the SEC growing in stature and various figures making comments about the NCAA’s growing illegitimacy, we may well be moving toward a freer-market approach to college football, something the NCAA already struggles to envelope in its bureaucratic hands (the College Football Playoff is not an NCAA event). One could imagine a structure not all that unlike the current one, in which the SEC is its own entity, the other power conferences have some interconference workings effectively making them the SEC’s counterpart, and the best respective teams from each meet in the sport’s national championship every year while others play bowl games and the non-power leagues do their own thing. The Rose Bowl or the Orange Bowl could be the non-SEC championships, or a playoff for The Alliance. The Sugar Bowl and Peach Bowl could be the same for the SEC.
This system, applied to the playoff era and using the playoff rankings as a guide, would have yielded us championship games like the following:
2014-15: Alabama vs. Oregon
2015-16: Clemson vs. Alabama
2016-17: Alabama vs. Clemson
2017-18: Clemson vs. Georgia
2018-19: Alabama vs. Clemson
2019-20: LSU vs. Ohio State
2020-21: Alabama vs. Clemson
Using real game results, we would have gotten Ohio State and Clemson flipped over these last two years, but basically, we’d be getting the same things we’ve gotten, minus 2014-15 Ohio State and minus 2017-18 Alabama. It would come from a more decentralized approach, but it wouldn’t be a shock to the system, which is a good reason this is one of the better bets for the direction college sports are going. If forced to guess with specificity, I’d guess The Alliance really will become its own thing in the next ten to twenty years, with a shorter schedule (getting rid of many buy games) than the SEC while the SEC maintains its current format (potentially getting rid of buy games itself) or something similar, with both having a championship or a playoff of their own and the champions meeting in an agreed-upon unifier of a championship, not unlike how the World Series used to work in its early days when the American League and National League were more separated entities. There would likely need to be a governing body of some sort, and perhaps it would be the NCAA or a ghostly descendent, but barring significant differences between on-field rules, the structure would work for college football.
It would not work for other college sports.
Which is why the NCAA, or a ghostly descendent, will continue to exist.
The fact football is such a different beast makes this easy. The fact the NCAA Tournament is such a beloved institution makes this easy. The fact streaming is incentivizing ESPN to invest more heavily in the college sports that traditionally aren’t moneymakers, through the SEC Network and the ACC Network and ESPN+, makes this easy. The Big Ten and Pac-12’s loyalty to the Rose Bowl makes this easy. The health of the men’s College World Series, the men’s Frozen Four, and the women’s volleyball NCAA Tournament all make this easy. The NCAA will be forced to take its hands off a bit, limiting its scope more to on-field/on-court/on-rink rules and postseason organization, but that too will be a victory for conferences and therefore the institutions themselves, with bloated NCAA salaries no longer leeching to such a degree from the NCAA Tournament’s revenue generation. (Yes, something similar to the NCAA Tournament could exist under a different name and be just as popular, provided it was organized wisely, which is where you start to get into some game theory about what schools and conferences might want out of basketball. The bottom line, though, is that college basketball is the NCAA Tournament. The consumer wants that, and however payment for top talent works out, it would be shocking if the consumer did not get that.)
This might sound utopian, and perhaps I’m being a little rosy-eyed about it all. To be sure, there would be losers, with Iowa State, to whom I have some personal affinity, potentially high on the list (really hoping the Big Ten gobbles up the Cyclones). But a world in which college football operates fundamentally differently from the rest of college sports already exists. It’s this world. There’s a thing called subdivisions in football. There’s no NCAA championship in football. So as the NCAA potentially approaches fundamental change, we could be heading to a cessation in attempts to pretend the obvious isn’t true. We could be heading to NCAA-less college football without losing anything for the rest of college sports. That’d be pretty fun.
