Chip Kelly Laid Out The Most Comprehensive Plan To Fix The Future Of College Football In Under 2 Minutes
Where was this suggestion when the Pac-12 was collapsing and dying? College Football as we knew and loved it is dead. Kelly's framework laid out in the clip above does a lot to save some programs, regional rivalries, and ends the lunacy of having Washington softball have to travel to play a conference game against Rutgers. There is no law for this. There really isn't even a governing body with teeth anymore. College Athletics can do whatever they want. Notre Dame already does what they want. They're in the Big10 for hockey and the ACC for everything. They've been separating football from their other sports for my entire life. It should've always been the Notre Dame model.
This is effectively one BIG NFL. Chip Kelly says it many times. One league. One entity. One TV contract to be shared equally among all the participants. Now, I am not sure if Alabama, Georgia, and Ohio State-type programs would sign up for a system that has them sharing revenue equally with Boston College, Virginia, and Texas Tech. That is a problem. I also don't think that the BigTen and the SEC in particular would like to see their organizations just die because this new plan benefits them the most in the short term. Let's put that aside for now though because it is more fun to dream of a better solution than to complain about realistic roadblocks.
Kelly says that there are 64 teams. Imagine if we had 8 divisions of 8 teams with a 16 team playoff at the end. You win your division it is an automatic bid. The remaining 8 spots determined by the committee. Divisional schedule with enough room for crossover. They could even put the group of 5 teams in a lower tier that has the ability for promotion and prize money kind of like the premier league.
This doesn't fix the problem of the transfer portal and the NIL situation, but we are moving in the right direction. I love college football. I feel like we've had too much change all at once and we've ruined it. So big that it has to fail. We need leadership and new ideas like this from Chip Kelly to make something that fits the 21st century without losing the 20th.