College Football Will Prevail

I made that meme this summer and it's already outdated!

Texas is gonna Texas and Bevo unnecessarily throwing a wrench into everything is a sure sign that college football is almost back again. Of course this time they really outdid themselves, effectively killing their 3rd conference in less than 30 years and raising serious questions about the future structure of college football.

Is the era of Super Conferences and the NFL Jr. upon us?

Well yes. And no. And maybe. And I don't know.

What I do know is that college football will prevail. Call it a gut feeling. These things usually tend to work themselves out. 

The idea of a "Super Conference" isn't even a new one. In fact, a Super Conference already existed in college football.

In the early 1930s, the Southern Conference's membership ballooned to 23 members, effectively a giant combination of future SEC and ACC teams. The structure of the Southern Conference had become too unwieldy and several members broke off to form the SEC. Twenty years later even more members broke off from the Southern Conference to form the ACC.

And frankly, if Super Conferences come to pass again, I see history repeating itself here. Super Conferences are simply too large to be sustainable long-term. The idea of taking all the college football's best teams and making them play each other all the time is an extremely short-term play. If the best are constantly playing schedules against mostly great teams, well then not everybody can stay the best.

In the words of the wise philosopher Syndrome, "when everyone's super, no one will be."

I'm sorry, but someone has to become the new Kansas. Somebody has to finish at the bottom.

It won't take long for many members of a 20-30 member conference to grow discontent with their new arrangement. Many will resent becoming bottom feeders or middle tier. Nostalgia for days of being big fish in a smaller pond will come flooding back. And money. You betcha 20-30 teams thrown together purely for money's sake will squabble about it. And even the networks or streaming services or whatever may eventually find these games between 2-9 Texas and 5-4 LSU aren't quite as profitable as they were at first.

And of course by then you've gutted a huge chunk of your national audience. What reason do fans of Kansas State, Iowa State, TCU, and any other program left out in the cold have to watch the big brands anymore? 

You may say, "Big deal! K-State makes up a tiny portion of the total audience" and you'd be right. But do that to the fan bases of half of all current Power 5 programs? You've now alienated a massive chunk of the college football audience who would normally tune into the Big Brands before and after their team plays. If you think they're going to stick around and watch after you've taken away their team to root for, you're nuts. 

So yes, I do believe Super Conferences are unsustainable. Like with the Southern Conference, I think you'll see teams eventually break away en masse to form new normal-sized conferences. If the Super Conference era arrives, the era after it will be the rebalancing era.

It will be a massive shake-up. These teams probably won't re-form the exact same conferences we had before, but I believe eventually it will look like the college football we fell in love with: Regional rivalries, drivable road games, and the David's of the college football world once again getting their annual shot at the Goliath's.