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When I was in college in the ’90s, I once spent so many hours playing the old EA Sports College Football video game that my roommates looked like Otto the Orange and the Stanford tree to me. That game taught me more about college football than I learned as a real fan: which teams had interesting offenses, what stadiums in states I’d never visited really looked like, what the University of Hawaii’s “Co-Ed” fight song sounded like. When I visited Sanford Stadium in Georgia for the first time, it felt like I’d been there 100 times.
This year, EA released a new version of the game for the first time since 2013. It features every major team and, for the first time, almost every major player, thanks to the new world of NIL (Name, Image and Likeness), which finally allows players to get paid. It’s fortunate that the game – which everyone who was obsessed with it in college, like me, has been playing nonstop for the past month – came out this year, because now it can help people understand the crazy new Rules of college football. The sport has changed a lot in recent memory, but this year it will look a lot different than ever before, in ways that will confound anyone who thought they had it all figured out. (Even the first game is a curiosity: Florida State versus Georgia Tech… in Ireland, of course.) After a month of my kids outplaying me in the video game, I think I have a handle on the new landscape. For the rest of you, here’s a guide to what’s different about college football now, and that’s pretty much it.
The most important issue in college football and college sports right now is the radical realignment of the traditional conferences. It’s looking more and more like we’ll end up with two major consolidated conferences, the Big Ten and the SEC, which would basically turn college football into a version of the NFL. For now, the Big 12 and the ACC are still there, albeit in diminished, grotesquely mutated form. The big news this offseason was the death of the Pac-12, which lost Washington, Oregon, UCLA and USC to the Big Ten while the rest of its teams were left to scramble for a spot, anywhere. So California and Stanford are now in the ACC (with, er, Syracuse and Georgia Tech), Colorado, Arizona, Arizona State and Utah are now in the Big 12 (with, er, Central Florida, West Virginia and SMU), and Washington State and Oregon State are left behind, floating around college football like ghosts, rattling with guilt that the rest of the sport tries to ignore. The ACC and Big 12 shouldn’t breathe a sigh of relief; Florida State and Clemson are actively trying to get out of the ACC, and the Big 12 makes so little that it’s hard to understand how it can ultimately survive. (It has even considered selling the rights to its name and calling itself the “Allstate Conference.” It’s never a good sign for a boxer’s career when he gets a casino’s logo tattooed on his chest.) Oh, and Texas and Oklahoma are now in the SEC, too. There are more changes to come, bigger, more lasting ones, but for now the tables will look surreal and crazy every time you look at them.
It felt like a radical change when the College Football Playoff debuted in 2015 with four teams, but that is nothing compared to the new reality. It will 12 teams in the playoffs this year, a full tournament fit for an office competition team. The top four spots go to the winners of the championship games of the four major conferences and receive a first-round bye. The 5-12 teams are seeded by a committee at the end of the regular season, and one of the spots is reserved for a team from the lower-division “Group of Five,” with teams like Appalachian State, Memphis and the Falwell Family Festival that is Liberty U. considered favorites this year. That’s a lot more games to keep track of than before. The playoffs now last a full month, with the championship game on Jan. 20 at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta. The extended postseason immediately becomes the center of all the discussions of the entire season, with more teams than ever before having a shot at the title. (Last year, Missouri, Mississippi and Liberty all would have made it.) And by the time you get used to it, they’ll be changing it again. In two years the tournament will expand to 14 teams and will probably expand again later. At some point you and I will personally qualify for it.
Nick Saban has been the central figure of college football for nearly two decades. He turned Alabama into an evil empire, responsible for professionalizing the sport like any other school. Saban did his job too well, though: It is widely believed that he did not have the energy to keep up with all the changes in the sport he himself changed so much. He is being replaced by a guy named Kalen DeBoer, a good coach who led Washington to the national championship game last year but is still a coach named “Kalen” at Alabama. (It’s going to be a tough job, is what I’m saying.) In the meantime, other Jim Harbaugh, college football’s coach with an outsized personality, left Michigan to coach the NFL’s Los Angeles Chargers, leaving the team just in time to receive a toothless suspension from the NCAA and leave his former assistant, Sherrone Moore, with a diminished roster and recruiting violations. These are two titans disappearing from the sport, and there are no real overtly polarizing figures (except Colorado coach Deion Sanders, who at this point offers more swagger than results) next in line to take their throne.
As college football becomes more and more controlled by television executives, those executives dictate not only when teams play, but who and where. CBS and Fox are now essentially the Big Ten channels and ESPN is the SEC channel, although there’s also Peacock and the Big Ten Network and the SEC Network and TBS shows playoff games and it’s basically impossible to keep track. Just know that the timing and platform for every game you watch was the result of an endless number of committee meetings in New Jersey and Connecticut, those famous college football hotbeds.
Yes, just like in the NFL. And they are there for exactly the same reason as in professional football: to gain time for more television advertising.
The most famous player in college football over the past two seasons has been USC’s Caleb Williams, who ended up being the Chicago Bears’ first-round pick. There are no obvious successors. The most likely candidates are all quarterbacks: Colorado’s Shedeur Sanders (Deion’s son), Texas’ Quinn Ewers (unless he loses his job to Arch Manning) and Georgia’s Carson Beck (who is excellent but also kind of boring). Otherwise, there are few big national names in the sport. That’s largely due to widespread use of the transfer portal, which is great for players and teams in need of reinforcements but tough on the casual fan who just wants to try and keep track of who’s playing where. Usually, one or two star players emerge over the course of a season, but one of the ironies of the player empowerment era is that they just don’t seem to become as nationally famous as they once did.
Players are making more money today than ever before. They’ve also learned — like anyone in the working world who realizes the best way to get a raise is to take another job — that moving is the quickest way to more money. But people often put too much weight on NIL to explain the tectonic shifts in college football. The real reason conferences are changing and networks are taking over everything is because college football has become a lifeline of television money for a strapped media industry. And there’s no overarching authority figure with the sport’s best long-term interest in mind. Yes, players are getting paid what’s overdue. (So overdue that teams and conferences now have to pay former players back pay.) But the money they’re making is nothing. compared to what leagues and conferences get from television networks. That is what changes the sport.
The transformation that college football is going through is undeniably bad for the sport in the long run. Without a central leadership or governing body, every decision is made with short-term gains in mind. In the long run, as conferences are streamlined, we will see the rise of these two major NFL-like conferences, with more and more schools that don’t get high ratings losing out, as Washington State and Oregon State did. The SEC and Big Ten could end up with 20 first-league teams each, while everyone else is relegated to the bench. College football is explicitly turning into minor league football. The big problem with this is that nobody cares about anything in the minor leagues. The people running the sport today are destroying everything that makes it special: history, tradition, underdogs, tiebreakers, upsets, personalities, regional flavor and panache. They’re replacing all of that with big-brand matchups to appeal to the kind of casual fan who doesn’t really care about college football anyway. College football is well on its way to eating itself.
But this year? Georgia plays against Texas, Penn State against USC, and there is a 12-team playoff. It will be a Explosion. That’s the only good thing about ignoring the long-term goals: it makes the short-term goals as fun as possible. This is all very late-stage capitalism. Get what you can get while you can, and leave future generations to deal with the consequences. It’ll be so much fun this year as long as you don’t think about it too much.
