Everyone is Loud & Angry

Good morning and welcome to 4th & Forever, Rand & Tate’s College Football Newsletter. A new Death Star looks to be forming in college athletics while the old one might finally be taken out Old Yeller style. We also talk about brazen, confident bettors, a newly open Power 5 head coach position, and Florida State's inability to have a conversation without talking about themselves, so without further ado, let’s get to it!

Don’t Call it an Alliance!

On Friday, the Big Ten and the SEC announced an informal, nameless joint advisory group that will aim to help address and accelerate the solutions to some of college athletics' biggest problems. We certainly wouldn’t blame you if this reminds you of The Alliance, the now-infamous partnership between the ACC, Big Ten, and PAC 12, which failed hilariously as within a year of the agreement, the ACC voted against its partners in the CFP Expansion discussions while the Big Ten quite literally destroyed the PAC 12 as an institution by taking USC & UCLA, and then Oregon & Washington a year later. But this agreement between college athletics’ two largest institutions seems to be much less of a meme and much more of a Death Star that could be massively influential in shaping the future of college sports, as the NCAA’s slow-moving, US-government-hated bureaucratic governance model continues to lose relevance by the week.

It is first crucial to understand where we are at this moment in college sports, particularly in college football, which all decisions are based on as the main revenue driver for Division 1 schools. The Big Ten and the SEC are unquestionably the two power conferences by all definitions. The two leagues’ members have won three times the amount of National Championships as all of the other leagues combined. From a revenue perspective, it isn’t even close either: starting in 2024, schools in the Big Ten and SEC will be earning at minimum $25 million more per year than any school in the ACC and Big 12 from their TV deals alone. We are already seeing signs of a shifting tide at the Group of Five level as well, where we are seeing head coaches like South Alabama’s Kane Wommack this year or Kent State’s Sean Lewis last year, leave those G5 head coaching jobs to become coordinators at Power 5… err, 4… jobs (Wommack as Alabama’s DC, Lewis as Colorado’s OC). It was always silly that we considered South Alabama and Alabama the same thing, but it’s rapidly becoming purely a laughable concept.

There will be many issues that this joint advisory committee will attempt to pave the way on, but none seems more important than the impending changes regarding athlete compensation, where it is approaching “foregone conclusion” territory that athletes will be paid, in some form, directly by the schools within just a handful of years. After former NCAA President and hall of fame dumbass Mark Emmert left college sports with the wild west that is the current world of NIL (more on this below) and basically gestured toward congressional intervention whenever he was asked about it, new NCAA President Charlie Baker is, at the very least, trying to spark conversation about what a future model might look like. Baker released an initial proposal back in December - which we covered in more depth at the time here - that had two major ideas. 

First was a shorter-term fix that would allow NIL deals to be structured and distributed directly by the schools, an idea that would solve so many issues we are seeing right now. As we probably all know, it is currently against NCAA rules to use NIL as any sort of inducement to recruit players to a school. But everyone is doing exactly that because that is the world that the NCAA created. It had no plan in place, no restrictions, and no ability to enforce its rules when the US Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that players should be able to make money off of their own name, image, and likeness, and it is nobody’s fault but the NCAA’s that the whole system is a madhouse right now. Funny enough, the NCAA is currently investigating and handing out punishments to schools, including Tennessee, who have broken NIL rules with regard to recruiting, while simultaneously paving the way to make all of it legal within the next few months. Tennessee has already filed a suit in court against the NCAA and called out the absurdity of all of this in public. We agree with Tennessee here, but would still like to see them get punished because f*ck Tennessee.

Anyway, the second primary idea that Baker proposed is to create a new subdivision that schools can opt-in to, where the requirements would be that schools set aside an annual $30,000 per athlete for at least half of the athletes on campus. It goes without saying that this would be a lot easier to handle for the Big Ten and SEC schools who are making upwards of $80M per year from TV alone. The gap between the haves and the have-nots is widening rapidly, and the split between the two looks more inevitable every day. And while the Big Ten and SEC commissioners said on Friday that this partnership’s intent is not to slowly grab decision-making power away from the NCAA, SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey said Friday, “We have a lot that is linked to the NCAA. We want to see a healthy national organization,” they didn’t seem too firm in that commitment, either. Sankey continued, “But pressures are mounting. We’re going to have conversations about ‘what might a path forward mean for college sports.’” The NCAA’s power is dwindling, and now the two most powerful institutions in college sports are teaming up to “help” figure out what’s next. We think we know where this might be headed.

“It’s Time To Talk About FSU” - FSU

So yeah, what about everybody else? The Big Ten and the SEC are moving forward as the clear powers in the sport, where does that leave the few powerhouse, national championship-winning programs left in the ACC? Not to fret, FSU is here to save them all! 

Back in December, the FSU Board of Trustees announced its approval for the school to take legal action against the ACC in hopes of leaving the league, with a specific focus on the conference’s Grant of Rights agreement, which ties FSU and all other ACC programs to the conference and ESPN through 2036. Essentially, the Grant of Rights states that the ACC owns the television rights to all Florida State athletic events for the next 12 years, regardless of FSU’s conference affiliation - if FSU were to leave the ACC and join say the Big Ten, they would be forfeiting hundreds of millions, possibly over a billion dollars of TV revenue over the next decade-plus. That route is understandably out of the question, so FSU is going full scorched-earth against its own conference to try to get out. FSU President Richard McCullough said back in December, “I feel we are left with only this option as a way to maximize our potential as an athletic department.”

This is an incredibly unprecedented situation in college athletics - nobody has ever legally challenged a Grant of Rights agreement before. FSU is arguing that the ACC has breached its contractual agreements with its member institutions, citing several different examples of how - including that the league’s additions of SMU, Stanford, and California further dilute FSU’s media rights payouts, with stipulations around conference expansion not being clearly defined in the GOR document. To be clear, FSU is facing a major uphill battle here - all ACC schools had to sign off on the GOR in order for it to be put into place. But the unprecedented nature of a Grant of Rights challenge in court and the unknown of how a conference adding members after the fact impacts the binding nature of the document, nothing is a sure thing here.

What Florida State is really worried about is falling behind financially, and therefore competitively. In their initial arguments and public statements, FSU is directly citing the television contracts of the SEC and Big Ten which, as we discussed above, are blowing every other conference’s contracts out of the water. FSU is set to receive around ~$42M next year, while every SEC and Big Ten will be making $80M. Stretch that over the next decade, and you’ve got a problem. FSU views itself as being on the same level as the Georgias, Ohio States, and Alabamas of the world, and is terrified about what getting doubled-up financially by those schools would mean for its future as one of the sport’s premiere programs - especially when you consider what we discussed above, where we seem closer every day to a world where schools are paying their athletes directly, from their own pools of money. And FSU certainly can’t stomach the thought of making half the money that Rutgers, Vanderbilt, Maryland, and Mississippi State are making. 

The ramifications for this are massive for the future structure of college athletics. Again, it is an uphill battle, but if FSU can successfully argue that the ACC’s GOR agreement is no longer binding, it won’t stop with the Seminoles. Miami, Clemson, and North Carolina share the same thoughts and concerns as FSU, and would immediately be out the door themselves should Florida State provide them with the path. All of those programs, along with possibly Virginia, Virginia Tech, and Georgia Tech, would be attractive additions for the SEC and Big Ten should they become available. If we hit that point, it seems like it would be the nail in the coffin for college sports as we know it. The two behemoth conferences would own all of the valuable assets, and a split from the rest of the schools and leagues would be an inevitability. They could create their own playoff, their own athlete payment structures that no other conference could compete with, and do quite literally whatever else they wanted to do. The version of the sport we grew up loving would be dead.

The ACC immediately filed a countersuit of its own and has publicly stated it plans on fighting this thing tooth and nail, as the existence of the league itself is on the line here. As we mentioned, it’s certainly an uphill battle for FSU and the schools that would follow them. But it is such an unprecedented situation, and the massive changes in college athletics that have happened over the past few years could sway a judicial decision enough for at least some leeway for FSU to get out of the ACC before 2036. Florida State isn’t spending all of this time, energy, and money on a legal pursuit it believes it doesn’t have a shot in. Florida State is being loud and angry in public and in court, and the future of college football could be on the line. We’re sure this will all go very smoothly.

Quick Hitters

While this is a CFB and sometimes CBB newsletter, we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention the hilarity around former Alabama baseball coach Brad Bohannon’s legal troubles. Last year, he was fired after being connected to a bettor at the Cincinnati Reds Great America Ballpark sportsbook tried to place a $100,000 bet on an LSU-Bama baseball game. The bettor was only permitted to wager $15k on the game because the staff deemed the activity suspicious. This bettor showed the sportsbook staff texts from Bohannon and said the bets were “for sure going to win” and “if only you guys knew what I knew”. We admire the confidence in this guy and if he wants to do some guest writing for this newsletter, our door is always open. The NCAA just hit Bohannon with a 15-year show-cause penalty and if a school hires him during that time, he'd be suspended for the subsequent 5 years. Never change Alabama, never change.

Boston College is looking for a new head coach after Jeff Hafley accepted the Green Bay Packers DC role. A former NFL assistant, Hafley joined the Eagles back in 2020 after spending time as Ohio State’s DC. Boston College is an extremely hard place to win but that doesn’t mean it can’t be done. Hafley was a good fit but the hype didn’t translate to the field as his best season was 7-6 last year. Look for Boston College to target former Alabama and Patriots OC Bill O’Brien or Toledo’s Jason Candle during this search.

Lastly, there are rumors coming out of Seattle that Bama OC Ryan Grubb might leave Tuscaloosa after an entire 3 weeks on the job for the open Seahawks OC position. Remember, last year Saban tried to hire Grubb away from Washington but was rebuked, then once Saban retired and was replaced with Washington’s Kalen DeBoer, Washington tried to keep Grubb and promote him to head coach which was met with a ‘nah’ from Grubb as he followed DeBoer to Bama. Who knows what Grubb wants or if he will leave for the Seahawks, but if he does his three-week tenure in Tuscaloosa will be a fun bar trivia question in a few years.

Hope you have a great day and we will talk to you again soon.

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Rand Fisher & Tate Smillie met a few years ago through their good buddy Dave Peljovich who went to college with Rand and high school with Tate. Tate went to Georgia and has spent the last two years collecting championship rings while traveling to watch the Dawgs. Rand went to known CFB powerhouse Wake Forest and currently pays rent in Atlanta but is rarely found there with all the work & CFB travel he does.