Super-conference could slop college football hogs and save NCAA tournament at same time | Jones

In perusing the Sweet 16 survivors from the 2024 NCAA men’s basketball tournament, I was struck by how many power-conference schools are represented.

It’s everyone but Gonzaga and San Diego State. And both of those have made recent Final Fours with the Zags having reached nine straight Sweet 16s. They are hardly interlopers here.

Something else occurred to me. Schools who don’t play FBS football are again well-represented – Marquette, Gonzaga, Creighton – and each is capable of winning the tournament.

I couldn’t help but extrapolate these results in context of recent rumblings that SEC commissioner Greg Sankey would love to expand the tournament to 76 (or more) teams – which, for well-documented reasons, would ruin it. If Sankey gets his way, such an overgrowth would necessitate a 24-team opening round that would pit the low- and mid-majors against each other while the big-league sides sit out.

Nobody wants that. Except the football schools and television executives who now run college athletics. They will get their way. They want to fully exploit a tournament that’s always been organized and monetized by a now-gutted and teetering NCAA.

Sankey, Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti and their TV allies are taking over. They’ll get their extra revenue, one way or another.

Salvaging the beauty of the tournament and all the little schools that make it great should be the highest priority. So, I’ve been trying to think beyond normal boundaries for ways the suits can get their money without expanding the field and demoting the little-leaguers into some sort of play-in round.

I’ve become Machiavellian in my viewpoints. I’ve given up on trying to defeat the soulless profiteer execs. I’m now just attempting to serve them a greater share of the profits without wrecking the perfection that is a 60-some-team bracket.

As stated previously, I believe a college football super-conference is inevitable. It may or may not extend to college basketball. But it’s coming.

We’re talking about the most valuable programs that attract the highest TV ratings and have the most fervid alumni and fan bases who’ll spend the most on everything from seat licenses to licensed merchandise. But they can’t run a national basketball tournament by themselves; they need the smaller schools for that.

So, who gets cut out of the mix? A lot of schools who’ve been football tag-alongs for decades who’ve been grandfathered into the major conferences but don’t really produce commensurate football revenue or interest. And removing their fat could be the answer to saving the basketball tournament.

I’ve always used the U.S. Department of Education’s Equity in Athletics Data Analysis (EADA) to rank who’re the most valuable football programs. Collating the annual gross revenue figures has been my go-to gauge for judging who’d be most likely to be invited into a super-conference. I have used 32 schools as a template because that’s the NFL size, and I believe TV analysts would love to replicate the pro model.

But then I started following the posts of sports strategy consultant Tony Altimore. He’s a Penn Wharton Business and USC graduate school spawn with fiscal experience throughout multiple facets of college athletics. Altimore has developed a more sophisticated database, what he calls a Realignment Attractiveness Score. It accounts for not just football success, but includes Nielsen TV ratings, market attractiveness, academic prestige and more.

I think this particular data credits academics and what Altimore calls “institutional resources” too heavily for my purposes. I just want to judge which programs present the most lucrative investments for a college football super-league.

But Altimore has all the bases covered. Here’s an Excel spreadsheet he ran, built from Nielsen ratings aggregated by Sports Media Watch, then analyzed by Altimore. This is how he ranks college football programs based on total overall television viewership for the past seven seasons (2016-2023, excluding the COVID year of 2020).

This list does skew high on certain schools in the SEC and B1G (such as Indiana and Mississippi State) simply because their most broadly televised games are played against popular opponents. But in general, I think it’s pretty indicative of which schools an investor, maybe a private-equity entity, would want in a super-conference.

So, what if 32 schools, more or less lopped off this graphic, form a super-conference for football and men’s basketball? And what if, to placate these most valuable programs, it’s agreed that no fewer than three-fourths of them, 24 of the 32, will receive automatic NCAA tournament berths every season? And they receive a flat-rate payout, plus incremental higher awards for each round advanced?

Then, we award the remaining 44 berths among the other conferences. Automatic bids for conferences champions, plus however many at-larges remain?

See what we’re doing? We’re guaranteeing the super-league a bigger slice of the pie while neither baking a larger pie nor diminishing the little schools’ shares.

Who’re the losers? The barnacles who currently enjoy membership in the Big Ten and SEC without hauling their share of freight. The welfare cases like Rutgers, Minnesota, Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri, Vanderbilt, etc.

What would become of them? I think they’d gather in associations similar to the current Big East schools. They’d either de-emphasize football like Connecticut or drop out of FBS altogether and be who they really are anyway – basketball schools like Villanova and Creighton. They’d suddenly reduce the tremendous overhead expended on football and concentrate on everything else.

Would their Olympic sports lose scholarships? Absolutely. In major athletic departments, those programs have been unnaturally subsidized by football TV money all along. The field hockey, baseball, softball, lacrosse, volleyball and soccer teams at those schools would either have to raise their own money to remain varsity sports or descend into the club-sport world.

Would that be too bad? Yes. But those are predominantly country-club sports traditionally played by young athletes whose families have some wherewithal. They’d manage. There was a time not so long ago when university athletic departments did not support 20+ sports. The financial bases of these sports would return from whence they came. Extravagant road trips would cease. But these athletes would also not be coercible by authoritarian coaches. They’d play their sports for the fun of it on club teams.

What happens to the disenfranchised onetime power-league programs who’ve been left by the side of the road? I’d guess many of them would form basketball-only leagues like the Big East, but bound by geography rather than Jesuit roots.

They’ll either deemphasize football, descend to FCS or throw in the towel on the sport altogether. Most of their football programs would hemorrhage tens of millions without conference payouts. They never belonged in big-time football to begin with.

They are almost uniformly “basketball schools”. Their fan bases aren’t either broad or passionate enough about football to play in the big sandbox of the coming era where student athletes are designated as employees and must be paid.

Is that all bad? I don’t think so. I think it’s just the truth finally coming to call. Indiana and Kentucky football were never ever going to reach equality with Ohio State and Alabama because their backers don’t care enough. Why not end the charade?

Anyway, think of the upside. Can you imagine a Big Midwest basketball league made of Indiana, Kentucky, Purdue, Illinois, Northwestern, Louisville, Cincinnati, Memphis and Missouri? Maybe Creighton, Marquette, Xavier and Butler leave the Big East and join them back where they belong in the heartland.

That quartet could be easily replaced by Syracuse, Boston College, Pittsburgh and West Virginia who rejoin their old neighbors in the Big East. The ACC and eastern SEC leftovers could converge. The western SEC and Big 12 leftovers could, as well.

We’d have sensible conferences built around common neighborhoods again!

I’m just spit-balling here. There are serious legal webs to unwind in any super-conference scenario. Like what would happen to the massive research consortiums built around athletic associations? The Big Ten and ACC especially would either have to unravel these or agree to remain research brethren after their athletic brotherhood has fractured. And how can a college athletic world in which big football becomes all but autonomous possibly comply with Title IX?

I just know this much: Those who make the most money on college football are gluttons. Their greed will not be bounded. I think the past few years have proven that. They’ll not be dissuaded through rants and raves, only through proactive pragmatism.

So, it’s time to give the big-football swine what they really want – more money – and save what we can of college sports, what we most value. I think that begins and ends with its most fragile jewel, the NCAA basketball tournament. A super-conference could achieve both.

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