A Very Public Tantrum Points to a Very Different Future for College Football
For fans of American college football, this is the almost-empty weekend that sits between the end of the conference championship games and the beginning of the expanded playoff tournament. As I put it in my most recent column on this topic (ten months ago), "I write one or two columns every year at the end of the season, usually offering a guilt-ridden confession that I continue to be fascinated by that brutal and corrupt sport, followed by some observations about the new ways in which the brutality and corruption are playing out."
Although I prefer to wait until the end of the season to go through this ritual, the temptation to write such a column arrived early this year, for reasons that will become clear soon enough.
[Before getting there, however, I should state up front that a major news story emerged from the college football world this week, but that story is in an entirely separate category. The now-former head coach of the University of Michigan's football team has been arrested and charged with a felony and two misdemeanors involving home invasion and stalking of a woman with whom he had a personal relationship. He is also married and has three children. It is all tragic and scary. It happens to involve the team that I most care about, but that has nothing to do with anything. Domestic violence and the other issues raised in that case would be bad anywhere, for anyone. Again, this column is not about that case. I mention it only because it became the big story on the sports pages in the middle of the week, and I thus felt the need to acknowledge it. I am thus literally bracketing this paragraph.]
My writing about college football generally includes two elements: (1) Laughing at the latest idiocy coming out of the mouths of sports talk dudes, coaches, and administrators; and (2) Discussing the incentives and economic implications of the latest developments in the mess that modern college money sports have become. We have both of those elements in front of us today.
On the idiocy front, the story pretty much starts and ends with Notre Dame. Why Notre Dame? Because they had a hissy fit, a meltdown, or maybe it was a diva moment. Whatever one wants to call it, it was something to behold. Beyond that, however, that situation has also become what could be a major turning point in the further degradation of football, which I have been predicting for the last few years. For the most ridiculous of reasons, the Fighting Irish have pointed the way toward the chaotic future that was already inevitable.
The short version of the story is that the 12-team playoff field and seedings are determined by a committee of coaches and administrators. As part of the hyping of the playoff, the committee releases preliminary (nonbinding) rankings each week starting roughly at the midpoint of the season, before issuing the only list that matters on the Sunday after the last conference championship games have been played.
Notre Dame did not make it into the field this year. And guess what? The athletic director, coach, players, and fans thought that they should have been in the playoffs. Why? Because they had a 10-2 record, and their losses were to two very good teams. True, their wins were not against any very good teams (in some years, a win over USC would qualify, but this is not one of those years), but they do have that 10-2 record. The problem is that the team that was in direct competition for the last playoff slot was the University of Miami, and the Hurricanes are one of those very good teams that beat Notre Dame in an actual game.
Motivated reasoning abounds in college football, so it was hardly surprising that ND partisans would make arguments trying to get around the head-to-head result. That is just part of the fun. Indeed, many people thought that the committee might get caught up in the Notre Dame mystique (Rockne, the Gipper, "Rudy") and break one of the most established norms in all of sports by putting the loser of a head-to-head game ahead of the team that won. That the committee did not do so was one of the surprises of the season, but (for everyone but Notre Damers) it was a pleasant one.
In other words, this is normal stuff -- or it should have been. The playoff does not have a system that determines participants mechanically (as the NFL and most sports do), so debate and acrimony are always part of the menu in college football. Notre Dame having the opinion it has of itself, however, caused it to go off the rails. [As an aside, I have no doubt that there are ND fans reading this, so I am especially glad that we turned off comments on this blog years ago. Certainly, the ND social mediasphere is in overdrive.]
The Athletic Director (AD) at Notre Dame decided to go very public with what boiled down to two arguments, if one can call them that. First, the preliminary rankings during the latter part of the season had shown his team ahead of Miami, which made the final result unfair. But that merely means that the committee had it wrong when it published the rankings that did not matter but got it right when they did. That the AD framed the argument as something like "it misled our kids, and that's what's unfair" was cringe-inducing.
Second, the AD was angry that Miami's conference (the ACC or Atlantic Coast Conference, which includes Atlantic coast stalwarts Stanford and Berkeley, but I digress) had aggressively lobbied for Miami to be selected over Notre Dame. Why is that even remarkable? Because ND has always refused to join a conference in football but has affiliated with the ACC in every other sport (except men's hockey, which has ND in the Big Ten). And?
Well, the AD's feelings are hurt. I mean, really hurt. He said that the ACC had done "permanent damage" to its relationship with ND before dialing that back to "strained the relationship." He also said that "[t]he ACC does wonderful things for Notre Dame, but we bring tremendous football value to the ACC, and we didn’t understand why you would go out of your way to try to damage us in this process." The ACC had a member school that was in competition with a non-member school in football, so the ACC did what conferences do. And what the ACC did "damaged" ND in exactly the same sense that it would have damaged Miami if the committee had gone the other way. Appropriately, but surprisingly, the commissioner of the Big 12, another power conference, said this about the ND AD: "I think his behavior has been egregious. He is totally out of bounds in his approach."
As a fan of a not-Notre Dame school, I of course am eating this up simply because it is a popcorn moment. Notre Dame holds itself out as the pillar of the sport (which is part of why it refuses to lower itself to join a conference). About twenty years ago, I recall hearing a previous ND AD said that "college football is better off when Notre Dame is good." Yeesh. One of the major sports websites just published a piece with this headline: "Whining from Notre Dame’s AD might have screwed Irish football for a decade: Be careful what you wish for." I should also be clear that ND is being absolutely raked over the coals on ESPN and by most of the sports commentariat. This, it seems, crossed a line.
At the very least, however, this is going to be something for sports fans to yell at each other about for years, and as far as it goes, that is fine -- again, with the extra heaping helping of fun watching the self-proclaimed class act of the sports universe lose its marbles.
All of which is the first half of my usual two-step: making fun of what should generally be seen as a silly argument (because it is silly). The second step explores what happens when one of these silly things exposes perverse incentives (economic or otherwise) that could further damage the sport or the players involved. And Notre Dame's substantive reaction to being deemed not good enough to make the playoff was to quit and go home. That is: "As a team, we've decided to withdraw our name from consideration for a bowl game following the 2025 season."
But why is that not merely more silliness, adding pre-adolescent pouting and quitting on top of the rhetorical excess from the AD? The simple answer is that this further exposes the fact that college football is now about nothing but the playoff. All of the traditions are gone or hanging by a thread.
Two years ago, the injured group of egotists du jour was Florida State, which was left out of the then-four-team playoff by the committee. They freaked out, and because FSU is a public university in an insane state, the Florida political establishment freaked out with them. As I described in detail at the time, FSU's exclusion was based on a pre-existing standard that the committee correctly applied, but even to this day, there are paid sports reporters who still claim that FSU was excluded on a "whim" by the committee. Sure thing. (By the way, the people who said that expanding the playoff from 4 to 12 teams would make such arguments go away were either fools or liars.)
But the point here is that FSU responded to the "snub" by tanking their bowl game. They were assigned to play in the next-most-prestigious bowl game against Georgia, a team that had an arguable case themselves for having been snubbed. And what did FSU do? Most of the best remaining players opted out of the game, while Georgia played football the way it is supposed to be played. Final score: Georgia 63, FSU 3. I guess one could make an argument that Notre Dame's huffy withdrawal was more honorable for being stated up front, so I will give them that.
No matter how one assesses these things on a tantrum-versus-tantrum basis, however, that the team widely viewed as the premier program in the sport has decided that no other games are even worth playing is a very big development. I am not saying that bowl games are good or bad, but they were probably already going to go away, and between FSU's insulting even one of the best bowls available and ND telling all bowls to suck eggs, where is this headed? As it is, many teams play bowls with unrecognizable rosters, because the starters are not willing to risk injury in meaningless exhibition games. This is chaos.
Even the games that supposedly matter no longer matter. Earlier, I mentioned the conference championship games, which used to be a big deal. Now, however, the playoff selection committee is saying that it will not "punish" teams for playing in such games. (That is not true, because teams do drop in the seedings and so on, but we can play along here.) Ohio State just lost the Big Ten championship to Indiana, but it is easy to imagine that neither team was truly all in, given that everyone knew that the committee was going to keep both teams in its top two, no matter the result. As many commentators have noted, it no longer makes sense to have these games at all -- even given the money that they have generated, because fans are catching on as well, which will soon make these games unprofitable.
Consider the following possibility. Alabama and Auburn have one of the most storied rivalries in college football. They play each in the final game of every season. Now imagine that they go into that game ranked #1 and #2. No matter who wins, they will play again the following weekend in their conference championship game. And then what? Even if one of them has won both times, the other one has lost to the best team in the country but beaten every other team on its schedule. (And because this is the strongest conference in the country, we are not talking about a weak schedule a la Notre Dame 2025.) If, say, Oregon is the Big Ten champion that year, are they placed ahead of the 2-loss second-best team? And even if they are, would that 2-loss team lose out on a first-round bye entirely? According to the committee's rules and norms, you do not "punish" that team.
Even eliminating the conference championship games does not change that dynamic. In my scenario, Bama and Auburn will play on the last Saturday in November, but who cares? They will be ranked 1 and 2 in the playoff and quite possibly play each other again in the championship in January. A whole lot of games that mattered (in the sense that anything could truly matter in a world this small) stop mattering.
What does matter, however, is the players themselves. There are already schemes being discussed to expand the playoffs to 16 or even 24 teams, which means that even more players will be injured even more severely while playing even more games. In the column from earlier this year that I republished yesterday, I wrote that "[i]f college football is becoming in every other way a pro sport, then it should at the bare minimum have what every other professional sport has: a union that negotiates a collective bargaining agreement."
Professional leagues have such agreements, and the players' unions do what they can to protect current, former, and future members. The NFL's owners, for example, try to add games to the schedule -- which the fans evidently want: "60% [of fans polled] support expanding the season, including many who say the move for players -- which would include a salary increase -- is worth the increased risk of injury." -- but the college game has no such protection for its players.
In that column, I summarily dismissed the possibility that anything resembling player unionization could happen, given politics in the US (and in the states in which college football is most popular). Interestingly, however, ESPN ran a column just yesterday with this headline: "College ADs consider collective bargaining amid setbacks." The hell you say! The column makes clear that there is still a lot of resistance, but the reporting shows that athletic directors (at least when they are not busy complaining about their not-really-conference's social media accounts) are starting to figure out an important fact of economic life: legal frameworks matter, and some are better than others. More to the point, even seeming to have no legal framework is an illusion, because of course there are existing laws governing transactions large and small. That is what civilization is.
Among those background laws is the US's antitrust regime, and apparently some AD's have been trying but failing to convince Congress to give them immunity from antitrust liability. "Athletic directors see only two paths to a future in which the college sports industry can enforce rules and defend them in court: Either Congress grants them an exemption from antitrust laws, or they collectively bargain with athletes." Notably, "Syracuse chancellor and president Kent Syverud said Monday that he has long felt the best way forward for college sports is a negotiation where athletes have "a real collective voice in setting the rules." And even the AD in a very red state is actively leading this charge:
[Danny] White, the Tennessee athletic director, has also spent years working with lawyers to craft a collective bargaining option. In his plan, the top brands in college football would form a single private company, which could then employ players. He says that would provide a solution in states where employees of public institutions are not legally allowed to unionize.
"I don't understand why everyone's so afraid of employment status," White said. "We have kids all over our campus that have jobs. ... We have kids in our athletic department that are also students here that work in our equipment room, and they have employee status. How that became a dirty word, I don't get it."
Why this interest in a solution from labor law?
Players and coaches are frustrated with the current system, wanting to negotiate salaries and build rosters with a clear idea of what rules will actually be enforced. [One AD] says fans are frustrated as they invest energy and money into their favorite teams without understanding what the future holds. And athletic directors, who want to plan a yearly budget and help direct their employees, are frustrated too.
In other words, games need rules. One might think that it would be unnecessary to say those words to people involved in organized sports. But players and coaches are suddenly jumping around from team to team, and there is not much to stop that from happening without a legally enforceable set of rules that can in some way at least partially rationalize all of this.
To be clear, the interest from those AD's is not directly motivated by concern for the good of the players. Indeed, they might not care at all about their labor force. But if there is collective bargaining, with players treated as workers with rights, there is a better chance to limit their physical exploitation and to compensate them with genuine liability insurance when they are injured, even for injuries that take years to manifest.
In any event, the various panic attacks caused by this year's college football playoff were truly entertaining. But the way that this one played out suggests that the internal contradictions in the sport are going to become unsustainable much sooner than we might have imagined. People have rightly likened the current situation to the Wild West, where law was haphazard and unpredictable. That needs to change. I am not a hopeful person these days, but it would be good if something that was truly good for the players could emerge from this mess.
- Neil H. Buchanan