Fifteen NCAA teams switched conferences this past year in a groundbreaking year for college athletics that is still months away from being over. And some college sports leaders are already weighing the merits of more structural changes.
Bowl Season executive director Nick Carparelli, whose organization oversees more than 40 bowl games annually, is among them.
Speaking about conference realignment at the Front Office Sports Future of Sports: Sea Change in College Sports event Wednesday, Carparelli embraced the idea of a football-specific “super league,” wherein FBS Division 1 football programs would operate independently under an NFL-like model, while all other collegiate sports could return to a region-based conference system.
“Because football costs the most money and makes the most money, we’ve seen conference realignment being driven by football to the detriment of literally every other sport,” Carparelli said, referencing the frequent cross-country travel and other unfavorable schedule adjustments that many newly aligned non-football teams have had to endure.
Meanwhile, with once-weekly games and ample resources, most FBS football programs can more comfortably play a national schedule. These disparate experiences are why Carparelli described a potential football-specific organizing mechanism as “genius.”
Ivy League executive director Robin Harris agreed: “If there is a way to separate the football out and put all other sports back into a regional model, that would certainly be beneficial.”
However, despite the concept attracting some high-level support, it’s unlikely to materialize anytime soon.
NBC Sports’ lead college football and basketball insider Nicole Auerbach pointed out that with their 2024 offseason additions, the SEC and Big 10 are already “super leagues of sorts.” Both conferences are able to accomplish most of their goals within the current system, meaning their incentives for pursuing additional sweeping changes are limited.
Most leaders also agree that the NCAA needs some time to cool off after several years of unprecedented transformation.
“We went into a lot of these conference and NIL and transfer portal changes without a master plan,” said Carparelli. “And while separately they are all good things, colliding as they did has resulted in some negative outcomes.”
That said, the earliest any consideration of a super league — football-specific or otherwise — may begin in earnest is 2030, when several major collegiate media rights deals are set to expire, including that of the Big 10 and the men’s and women’s March Madness tournaments.
“The idea of taking the most valuable brands in college sports and pulling them away from everyone else has the potential to be a big, big business,” said Auerbach. “We’ll have a much better picture of exactly what that business looks like by the end of the decade.”
