While not bound to happen anytime in the near future, an incredibly intriguing release from College Sports Tomorrow on Tuesday has people wondering just what the future of college football might look like.
Over the past decade or so, college football has seemingly outgrown the other collegiate sports in terms of revenue production, and has forced many changes to the current structure of the conferences they are joined in.
However, College Sports Tomorrow (CST) has proposed streamlining college football into a single, national league, which it would call the College Student Football League (CSFL).
“The new league would establish an independent, impartial entity to reorganize college football for the benefit of the 136 Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) schools and student athletes in all sports,” a release reads.
Laine Higgins of the Wall Street Journal called this a “radical pitch for a reimagined top tier of Division I football,” that is “less a series of subtle tweaks than a full-scale factory reset.”
As we see in the the proposal, which NBC’s Nicole Auerbach shared on Twitter, the CSFL would only apply to football, with the other college sports staying in their current conferences or returning to their traditional conferences, thus solving the growing issue of teams having to travel cross-country for competition.
As for football, the CSFL would include all current FBS programs that would be split into two conferences made up of georgraphy-based divisions.
The top 72 programs would compete in the “Power 12 Conference, while the remaining 64 teams would fall into the second conference, dubbed the Group of Eight. Here’s where it gets interesting: the top eight schools in the Group of 8 would have the opportunity to “play up” into the Power 12 Conference the following year, giving the league a chance for promotion without relegation.
As for the trick of scheduling, CST has a solution as well.
“Centralized, results-based league scheduling, including non-division games played between schools with similar records from the prior season, would ensure more competitive matchups and allow more schools to stay in the hunt deeper into the season,” the release reads. “It would also allow the results on the field, not a committee, to determine playoff participation, which in turn would generate more fan engagement in more parts of the country all the way through the regular season and the postseason.”
Sounds incredible, right?
There is actually some momentum for this proposed league, too. Several big names are listed among the members and “supportive ambassadors” of College Sports Tomorrow — even a couple of Big 12 names like Gordon Gee and Kirby Hocutt.
What do you think? Could we see the CSFL become a real thing in the future? Would it fix the issues that college sports are currently facing? Let us know what you think in the member forum.
