PE Firm Pitches Taking FCS Football Playoff Private

Private equity may have found another way into college sports: the Division I Football Championship Subdivision (FCS) postseason.

Private-equity firm Sequence Equity presented a plan for a privatized FCS College Football Playoff to a group of FCS commissioners at the Conference Commissioners Association in Chicago on Tuesday, Front Office Sports has learned. The firm told schools they could extract more value from the FCS postseason at a time when schools nationwide are looking for new ways to make money to compete in the revenue-sharing era.

The conversations are still in preliminary stages, though there appeared to be enough interest to have FCS commissioners reach out to NCAA leadership to discuss the concept, the source said. (The NCAA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

Hero Sports first reported the news of a new FCS proposal.

According to the proposal, the new playoff would be run by a new private entity. FCS conferences would own the majority of the new entity, but Sequence Equity would take a minority stake and offer “tens of millions of dollars in investment,” the source said.

Sequence Equity describes itself as “a multi-strategy investment platform based in Los Angeles, investing in sports, media, entertainment, technology, and infrastructure.” The proposal includes all Division I FCS leagues. FOS reached out to multiple FCS leagues, all of which declined to comment or did not respond as of publishing. The commissioner of the Ivy League (which will participate in the FCS playoff for the first time this year) declined to comment, the Patriot League did not respond, and the Big Sky was unavailable for comment.

There are currently 13 leagues in the FCS, which is made up of more than 100 schools in Division I that field football programs that play outside of the Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS). 

The new FCS postseason could take a similar shape to the College Football Playoff—an LLC owned by FBS conferences and Notre Dame that operates outside the NCAA that pays out hundreds of millions each year to FBS schools, and has a six-year media-rights package worth a total of $7.8 billion. FCS media rights won’t compare to their FBS counterpart—but the firm believes schools are currently leaving media-rights dollars on the table.

The FCS postseason is currently owned and operated by the NCAA, which hosts a 24-team bracket culminating in a championship game in January. The bracket is composed of 10 of the top-ranked conference champions, along with 14 at-large bids. This year, the championship game will take place at FirstBank Stadium in Nashville on Jan. 5. The media rights for the event are also owned by the NCAA, which agreed to a deal in 2024 to include them in a bundle with about 40 other championships into a deal on ESPN, which pays about $115 million annually in total for the rights to those championships.

It’s unclear when this entity could get up and running, as the concepts are still in the educational and discussion stages. But sending the proposal to the NCAA for discussion was described by the source as the next step.