College football conferences would be over. Relegation would be in... but only for a handful of teams.
A group called College Sports Tomorrow (CST) wants to reform college football as we know it. In reality, it’s just the latest attempt at forming a gridiron super league to sweep away old rivalries and squeeze every last drop of revenue from a cultural mainstay.
CST is a 20-person group that includes executives from universities like West Virginia and Syracuse, the NFL and Philadelphia 76ers owner David Blitzer. They saw a market inefficiency — the waning power of the NCAA, rising costs of litigation related to student athletes and vulnerability of an expanding College Football Playoff — and opted to grab their piece of the pie. Their reported plan to fix college football, laid out by Andrew Marchand and Stewart Mandel in The Athletic, is a massive overhaul that would protect Division I’s power brokers and lock them into one massive media rights contract (which may or may not be legal per current broadcasting deals and looming antitrust concerns).
There’s a lot to unpack here. Let’s go over the biggest steps in the CST plan to reshape Saturdays as we know them.
