THE SPORT WE LOVE, COLLEGE FOOTBALL, IS THROWN A TRUE LIFELINE

A top-heavy future of two megaconferences becomes an inclusive sandbox, with university presidents creating a 12-team, 11-game playoff that rescues dozens of programs detached from the SEC and Big Ten

     Wait, does this mean university presidents actually exist? Have they truly made an urgent decision that saves college football from petty conference commissioners, intrusive broadcast companies, sleazy NIL collectives, the coaching gods, the Supreme Court and the guy (Bill Hancock) who used to distribute media credentials for Olympics swimming events?

     Just as we were preparing for a double-superconference monopoly — the SEC in one corner, the Big Ten in the other, and the 99 programs tethered to neither behemoth reduced to tomato cans — 11 campus leaders reminded us that they still comprise the College Football Playoff’s Board of Managers. They cut through an offseason tsunami of radical change by following the money, natch, and unanimously approving a 12-team, 11-game postseason expansion that will be essentially inclusive, not clannish and discriminatory.

     It means, beginning as soon as 2024, the sport will cash in another $2 billion media-rights ticket and inform the social directors atop the Big Ten and SEC that they’ll have to play in the same championship sandbox with the ACC, Big 12 (8 by then?) and Pac-12 (10 by then?). So much for concerns that the two massive leagues would rig an expanded CFP with an annual overload of their programs. This way — with a proposed field including the six highest-ranked conference champions and six at-large picks, as chosen by a selection committee — the three castaways no longer are lost at sea. Every league still matters, to varying degrees, and there’s even a leftover bracket spot for a Group of 5 outlier, not to mention first-round games in campus stadiums, setting up Miami at Michigan in a Big House blizzard.

     The caste system crashed. Holy Jesus, there IS an America that aspires to make sense. Last weekend was a celebration of what we missed about college football through all the frenetic months, while the adults were busy mucking things up. The lesson: Do not turn the channel until the final play. When the sport is so appealing and consistently thrilling, in a nation of 48 contiguous states and multiple regions, why confine September-to-January relevance to only the SEC and Big Ten? It’s nice to see a Board of Managers — hell, a board of anything — figure out the best way, which opens doors rather than closing them, and triples the number of contestants from the current four.

     “It was time for us to make a decision,” said the board chair, Mississippi State’s Mark E. Keenum. “This is where we think college football needs to be headed to determine our champion. What motivated the presidents, me as well, is that we need an opportunity for more participation for our national championship tournament. Having only four teams, we felt like that’s not fair to our student-athletes.”

     Dizzy? It’s wise to accept confusion as a constant in this sport, but at least some thinkers are trying to apply common logic in a raging storm. Much as folks at Alabama, Georgia, Ohio State and Clemson believe Planet Earth doesn’t extend beyond their stadiums and watering holes, I speak for millions who are tired of those four programs hoarding nine of the last 11 national titles. Guess which four teams already are positioned early this season as CFP semifinalists? Yep, the same quartet is sucking life from the chase before it gets started. Only a handful of regular-season games can alter their inevitable destiny, but with a dozen teams down the road, story lines can live for weeks instead of dying before Labor Day.

     Unforgiving isn’t the word for the current four-team system, which allows scant opportunity for magical peripheral runs that make basketball’s March Madness so tantalizing. Utah looks finished, somewhat unfairly, falling just short in a grueling opening test at The Swamp against new Florida coach Billy Napier and his resurrected quarterback, Anthony Richardson. We’ve dismissed Notre Dame as a playoff contender, too, though an impressive new coach, Marcus Freeman, cooly led his team into the Horseshoe and rattled Ohio State on Saturday night. In the 12-team format, both would have chances to climb from 0-1 holes and reach the tournament. One team that wouldn’t deserve a chance under any circumstance is LSU, which is paying $100 million to a coach, Brian Kelly, who stood frozen on the sideline during an error-filled, special-teams-optional loss to Florida State. Is the man with the phony Cajun accent a fake savior? Remember, Kelly left South Bend because he wanted a better chance to win a championship, which prompted Touchdown Jesus to flip him off.

     “Can’t wait to get to ND where we have the resources to win,” mock-tweeted four-star linebacker recruit Drayk Bowen, who added the hashtag, “#FreemanEra.”

     “No fake accents on this team,” Florida State lineman Dillan Gibbons tweeted from the winning locker room.

     Oh, let’s still be real about the title favorites. Alabama, Georgia and Ohio State will remain future kingpins based on brand pedigree alone, threatened only by programs with over-the-top NIL payouts funded by waves of wealthy donors. Hello, USC, which showcased a transfer-portal duo of quarterback Caleb Williams and wideout Jordan Addison, who connected for two scoring passes in a 66-14 rout of Rice. And Miami, which posted 70 points for new coach Mario Cristobal amid NIL fever. But the reality is that only a precious few elites strike it rich — Alabama’s Bryce Young, Ohio State’s C.J. Stroud and Texas’ Bijan Robinson among them — in a system where the average NIL transaction for a college football player is in the $3,400 range, per the Associated Press. The norm is at Brigham Young, where Jake Brandon is pragmatic about his NIL collective for athletes.

     “For sure, you have the haves and the have-nots,” he said. “We’ve given out thousands and thousands of dollars to the athletes, but we haven’t given out millions and millions of dollars to the athletes.”

     What’s fascinating is that the 12-team playoff stands to reward some of the have-nots, at the expense of the haves. When USC starts play in the Big Ten, the Trojans could be aced out regularly by Ohio State; same goes for Oklahoma and Texas, which are off to the SEC but won’t gain instant CFP entry as a conference champion as long as Nick Saban is at Alabama and Kirby Smart at Georgia. Those are impenetrable colossuses, not programs, and both coaches send enough players to the NFL — and have enough NIL potential — to keep their recruiting/developmental factories purring.

     “We embrace expectations. We hunt,” Smart said after a 49-3 stomping of then-11th-ranked Oregon. Under the current format, the blowout has us instinctively fast-forwarding to early December, where Alabama awaits in the SEC title game again, with both teams expected to gain CFP bids.

     And Saban? He’s in mid-season form, scolding media for showering his players with too much praise, including a near-consensus agreement that Alabama will leapfrog Georgia for its seventh national title since 2009. “I think the rat poison this year … it’s worse than ever,” said Saban, ever feisty at 70, having signed an extension that pays him an $11.7 million average per season, tops in the college game.

     I can hear the arguments years in advance. The CFP selection committee will be pummeled with rabid lobbying from SEC and Big Ten countries, both convinced their conferences are dominant enough to split the at-large bids, three apiece. Some years, their complaints might be valid, and in the middle of it all will be Hancock, a respected lifer in college sports administration, who sometimes acts more as a pacifier than the CFP executive director. But by favoring champions in four other leagues over non-champions that excel in the two superconferences, the university presidents are greasing skids in the future for, say, Baylor in the Big 12 or Utah in the Pac-12 — and Houston from the American Athletic Conference, as the Cougars resemble this year’s Cincinnati. Or, did someone say Coastal Carolina? The Chanticleers?

     “It provides good access for a broader array of teams and conferences, which I think it most important right now,” AAC commissioner Mike Aresco said, per the New York Post. “You want to make sure that the consolidation of teams (in the SEC and Big Ten) doesn’t mean there isn’t opportunity for everyone else.”

     Because nothing is easy about college football, the new system won’t happen without bumps. SEC commissioner Greg Sankey, who thought he was the sport’s most important figure before the presidents voted, went on record to say expansion implementation by 2024 or 2025 is a pipedream. Sankey and nine other FBS commissioners, along with Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick, will meet Thursday outside of Dallas to discuss.

     “If history's a lesson to help us understand the future, it won't be easy," Sankey said. “But minds change, motivations change. ... There's a bunch of moving parts. We'll have to accelerate our consideration to make it happen."

     In case Sankey doesn’t understand, he and the commissioners have been ORDERED to make the new way happen. Let’s hope they don’t sabotage it with more of the same political madness. The sport we love — and the kids who play it — deserve so much better from the grownups.

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     Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.