I’ve had a pretty good college football offseason this year, I must say. The FCS is playing right now, so it’s not like nothing’s on TV. I discovered Axis Football, a fantastic video game that’s straightforward and intuitive like Madden used to be (not an ad, but download it here).
Then something flitted across my timeline in the Twitterverse, an idea so monumentally bad that it deserves a thorough obliteration.
You see, for about two days this week, some of the biggest European soccer teams got together and decided they were creating a Super League, an alliance to directly compete with the established Champions League.
Then the dread beast known as College Football Sportswriter Twitter had an idea, apparently all at the same time. What if the biggest college football programs banded together and formed a Super League of their own?
My initial reaction was intrigue. If it came to pass, a Super League would produce lots of games every year between heavy hitters that don’t normally play each other, depending on who made the cut.
Then I thought about it for one split second more, and realized just how catastrophically terrible a college football Super League would be. Not just for the small schools left out, mind you. For nearly every conceivable interest group in the sport. Let me explain.
First off, the teams often floated for this Super League (let’s call them the Supers) don’t make sense if you want exciting competition. The idea of “blue bloods” doesn’t hold purchase much more in the sport.
For instance, Nebraska (a formerly top-level program named by several talking heads as a shoo-in for the Super League) doesn’t win games in the Big Ten. Why would anyone expect exciting games from the Huskers? I saw other sportswriters floating Michigan, Tennessee, Texas, and Florida State – so-called top-tier teams without much high-flying success of late.
To top it off, the Supers would stagnate. With no threat from up-and-coming schools, the big boys could rest on their laurels, never innovating, raking in the dough from TV sponsorships. I think that, long-term, this would lead to boring football with last-generation strategy and scheming focused on minimization of risk, a bland product that wouldn’t hold broad fan interest.
And I haven’t even gotten to the programs a Super League would leave out. These schools would lose the best coaches and recruits to the Supers. Quality of competition would fall off dramatically. College football’s already stratified enough. This would make its existing problems worse.
I’ve already detailed in another article how college football could be made better if we restructured the Playoff, or even existing conferences. A Super League wouldn’t provide more opportunities. It would stifle competition and innovation.
And we haven’t even reached the recruits! Incoming players would face a choice: play in a bland league with big names with a chance at glory, or play for a smaller program with less quality competition and no chance at high-level battles. This narrows the field for recruits and makes their ultimate choices matter less.
Most of all, a college football Super League would harm fans, creating a two-tiered system where neither option is particularly alluring to watch and smaller schools have no chance to get program-defining statement wins by knocking off highly-touted schools. I wouldn’t want to watch that sport.
Rather than embracing the fantasy of a Super League, fans and writers alike should advocate for changes to college football that increase opportunities for every program’s success, every athlete’s evolvement, every coach’s progression, every fan’s delight. We should not create another divide between haves and have-nots. A Super League would only redound to our collective disadvantage, leaving us with a barely recognizable version of college football.