A SuperLeague will never be the best path forward for college football

Appearing in a U.S. Senate committee hearing Thursday convened to discuss a proposed bill to address the rapid changes in the sphere of major college athletics, Notre Dame athletic director Pete Bevacqua presented an opening statement of nearly 1,000 words. I assumed in a speech so prolonged he might have said something that was not entirely bunk, but my search for any evidence of veracity ultimately failed.

“We need a realistic cap,” he said, referring obviously to the amount of money paid to college athletes and not to the fact he earned nearly $2.4 million in the 2024-25 academic year without taking a helmet to the ribs.

“If we don’t act now, women’s and Olympic sports are going to be deemphasized or cut,” he said, although he stands in exactly the position where such decisions are made.

OK, so maybe Bevacqua was onto something when he said, “I don’t think a Superleague is good for college football, and I certainly don’t think a Superleague is good for college sports.” It was too much, though, to insist such an outcome was inevitable without a “realistic cap”, and he undermined his own credibility when he later insisted such an arrangement would have the potential to reach NFL-level popularity.

No one smart inside the two most powerful leagues, the SEC and the Big Ten, would contend a Superleague concept is the best path forward in a business or competitive sense.

And few outside those leagues would, upon being excluded, embrace the Superleague product as being worthy of their attention.

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The college Superleague is a futuristic fantasy, and more like the dystopian future you might see in “Blade Runner”.

There currently are 138 teams in the NCAA’s Football Bowl Subdivision. There are 68 playing at the power conference level. There are 34 in the two wealthiest leagues, the SEC and Big Ten. In a Superleague scenario, a vast portion of the first two subsets would be excluded, left either to abandon their programs or to exist in some diminished capacity.

They would be told -- to euphemize this in the most printable way available -- to get bent.

Conservatively, that would be telling roughly 50 million alumni of the excluded schools they don’t matter, they’re worth less, which those among the offended no doubt would construe as “worthless”.

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And no collegiate fan base comprises simply those who attended the schools. There are Arizona fans who did not attend U of A, Kansas fans who never have been inside Allen Fieldhouse on game night, Miami Hurricanes fans who became enthralled with the performance and attitude of “The U” decades ago. No one should understand this better than the AD at a school whose support includes an entire class of people known as “Subway alumni”.

“If you want to truly maximize the media value around the largest sport in terms of eyeballs, which is college football, I do think the best way to do that is a Superleague,” Bevacqua said at the hearing. “I think you would take 24 to 30 teams, create unbelievably competitive scheduling where a team like Notre Dame would play Alabama, Georgia, Penn State, Ohio State, Michigan and start to get a number that more closely resembles an NFL number.”

It’s revealing he would include the Fighting Irish in this scenario – gotta cover that base, just in case – but astounding he would assume one could increase popularity by reducing the customer base. What business ever has succeeded in this fashion?

Luxury fashion brands begin with the air of exclusion; that appeal literally is the business model. Louis Vuitton didn’t start by charging 80 bucks for a suitcase and then jacking it beyond three grand. Its products always were reserved for those who could afford the extreme cost; the highet price compensates for lower sales volume. But taking something that had minimal barrier for entry and making it exclusive is going to offend and infuriate millions.

Aside from gamblers, what incentive would there be for someone who supported Pitt football to watch Penn State contest a Superleague game against LSU? In the current arrangement, there’s the opportunity for Panthers fans to root against their longtime rival, or for whatever might be a perceived advantage in pursuit of their own berth in the College Football Playoff. In a Superleague world, they would have every reason to despise – and ignore – them both. And they would have legions of companions in this.

The money for a Superleague has to come from somewhere – and it would need to supersede not just the lucrative regular-season contracts the Big Ten and SEC are enjoying, but also the postseason – presumably in football, men’s basketball and beyond. Reducing the scope of those events is likely to reduce their value, as well.

Neither would such an approach work for those traditional powers whose fans are accustomed to dominating the competition. How much would they enjoy the standard of success no longer standing at double-digit victories in a 12-game season? The eight best regular-season records in the NFL last season averaged out to a .735 winning percentage, which would be slightly below 9-3 in a college schedule.

The 100,000-plus who attend Ohio State or Alabama games in the autumn are accustomed to going home happy nearly every Saturday. Alabama fans in the post-Saban era are mad at winning 19 games over the past two regular seasons. In a Superleague, the same level of performance might not have gotten them to eight wins in either of those years. Do the crowds begin to dwindle when defeats become more common?

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Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti heard enough “Superleague” discussion in Wednesday's hearing to be compelled to tell Ross Dellenger of Yahoo! Sports his conference has no such aspiration. “Any statement that suggests the Big Ten is pursuing or wants a Superleague is a fabrication,” Petitti said. “At no point in time have we discussed such a concept with the SEC or anyone else.”

If there is no Superleague strawman to impose as a villain, though, Wednesday’s hearing would have been about – what, the imperative to save college tennis? There’s no headline in that. There’s no hearing, to be honest. There’s no bill in Congress to address the allegedly impending calamity of college sports.

A Superleague would be bad business – not just for those on the outside, but those included, as well. It is a handy device to generate fear. It is not inevitable in any scenario. If money is supposedly what matters most in college athletics, then the money has to matter.