Super Conference Will Be Reality Sooner Than Later

Posted on: June 5, 2023 at 12:09:33 CT

With so many on this board in other schools, message boards concerned about whether the SEC will play eight or nine game league schedule. Just need to understand that we’re quickly moving towards a 40 team to 50 team superconference.

There’s a former Tennessee College football Coach by the name of Doug Matthews, who has a very popular radio show and podcast who discusses football issues with Tony Barnhart and Charles Davis. Over the years they have discussed that we were moving towards a super conference that will be modeled more like the NFL than college football.

Here’s what was posted on a message board that I frequent.Tennessee 247 . This was taken from yesterday’s show and could be found on the podcast,

“Tony Barnhart, Doug Mathews, and Charles Davis were discussing college football‘s future this week. The discussion is in the second hour when Chuck Davis is on for those who don’t want to listen to the whole podcast. http://www.coachdougmathews.com

As many of us thought at the time the portal started up and NIL became a reality, CFB is moving quickly towards an NFL model. One comment was that about 40 teams will make it in to a super league, which I tend to agree with. Vanderbilt and Stanford were two specifically called out as probably not interested in doing so. They mentioned that both Sankey and Saban amongst others will be in front of the US congress shortly to provide their thoughts on the issues. My thoughts are stated below.

With that will come the NFL structure. I believe players will become employees, coaches making less and less personnel decisions and losing a lot of the control over other decisions, teams trading players annually, a more structured “draft” process, and the teams having a much looser affiliation with the schools. With that will be a continued reduction in the number of university supported sports, and the reduction of competitive sports opportunities for college athletes.

For those who like the NFL model, the coming changes will have minimal affect on their current interest level. For those of us who liked the former structure of amateur athletics, and aren’t interested in the NFL model, high school football and the universities who can’t or won’t support the additional money involved will probably become the alternative.

Things never stay the same, and whether one or the other model captures and keeps a fan’s interest is a personal choice. (For instance, I never thought it was fair that other’s could make money off of college player likenesses and yet the players couldn’t, but could see the ramifications of changing the system) It will be incredibly interesting to see how this shakes out over the next few years. I think the changes to the model will continue to accelerate, and CFB as we know it today, will not be around too much longer.”