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I saw someone link to Meditations on Moloch in the college football subreddit a couple of days ago, to explain why conference realignment is happening and get a lot of upvotes. Was shocked to see Scott referenced in a normie subreddit like that
On a related note, I have a feeling that unless drastic action is taken the entire college football edifice is going to collapse some time in the next decade. NIL deals combined with the transfer portal have turned the entire enterprise into the worst sort of professional sports league. How would the NFL look if there were no salary cap and no contracts, making every player a free agent every year? Since NIL is here to stay, and I don't see the transfer portal going away any time soon, if I were an NIL sponsor I'd make my deal contingent on the player staying at the school all four years, unless I grant him a release. I don't care if it's for the fucking NFL; if I'm committing money to a guy I want to get the max value out of him. I'd also include some kind of liquidated damages clause or prepay the entire 4 (or 5) years so that if he leaves he has to pay the money back. I might not be able to collect all of it depending what the court does, but he'll have to pay something, and he knows he's getting sued either way.
The pipe dream is to come up with some kind of draft system to ensure parity. The NHL from 1995 to 2004 is a prime example of what happens when you can't ensure parity, and even they had more protections in place than college football. No leagues had salary caps before 1993, but no leagues, aside from baseball, had any meaningful free agency before then, either. You'd draft a team and you could trade guys but you could also keep the team together if you wanted to. Some leagues, like the NHL, technically had free agency, but it was restricted enough that building a team through free agency was nearly impossible, as the Scott Stevens fiasco with the Blues demonstrated. As soon as unrestricted free agency was granted, salaries skyrocketed, and even good teams couldn't stay competitive without breaking the bank. The Penguins at the time were going through bankruptcy as a perennial playoff contender with good attendance. 3 teams moved. Ratings plummeted. It took losing a whole season to a lockout to put the league back on the path to stability, and now it's in better shape than ever.
So I propose a draft. I don't know it would work, exactly, but the conferences only stand to make more money if teams like Maryland and Syracuse are competitive every once in a while. If it means Kent State wins a national championship at some point, fine. I never hear any arguments about how the Chiefs don't deserve all of their recent success because they're in a small market with no real national following (yes, they have a national following now, because they're winning, but they aren't like the Steelers or Cowboys who have national followings even when they suck). Because that argument is ridiculous. And will Clemson and Florida State go ahead and lose their fucking lawsuits already?
College Football is absolutely screaming for a Promotion-Relegation system.
A draft would destroy college football immediately. How many teams participate in the draft? It requires permanently cutting off the majority of Division 1 teams, whoever falls below that line, they'll never get a draft pick. It means completely destroying the student-athlete illusion, already very much an illusion, with a talented kid who wants to play in college forced to end up at whatever college picks him, not at his family alma mater or his state school. There would be no sense in which the players are still students.
Pro-Rel, on the other hand, would create a long-term scramble for the top. Colleges have built in fanbases, whether they are good or bad, so they don't face the limitations that pro franchises face. A pyramid system would simply make the existing layers of competitiveness explicit. It would create long term hope for every Div1 program to slowly over decades work its way up, in the same way that March Madness can build a small basketball program over time. A program could work its way up over time, getting better recruits as it works its way up to the top tier. Every team in Div1 would still be able to hold its head up and say it has a chance, one day, to play in the big time, if anything the bottom tier teams would have a theoretical path forward in a way they don't right now.
This is the way.
Relegation would also help to reinvigorate old rivalries that have been demolished because of TV contract led conference realignment.
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