The college football season kicks off with several changes

JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:

College football is going to look a whole lot different this fall. There is a shift away from the tradition of amateur regional competition and a move toward something that looks a little more like professional sports. Here to break it all down for us is NPR sports correspondent Becky Sullivan. Hey there.

BECKY SULLIVAN, BYLINE: Hey, Juana.

SUMMERS: All right. Week 1 of college football season is officially kicking off tonight. I’m pretty pumped. And for the first time ever, we are going to be seeing West Coast teams like UCLA and Oregon playing in conferences…

SULLIVAN: Yeah.

SUMMERS: …That now stretch from coast to coast.

SULLIVAN: Yeah.

SUMMERS: Sounds like a pretty big deal.

SULLIVAN: It is. Yeah. I mean, as you know, for more than a century, the – basically the entire system of college sports was organized around schools playing against other schools nearby. So you had, like, the Big Ten, which is a conference that used to be organized just around the Upper Midwest, and then the Atlantic Coast Conference – it’s right there in the name – originally just stretched from South Carolina to Maryland. And so now, those two conferences are totally bicoastal. And so you have Cal and Stanford in the ACC. And then, as you say, UCLA and Oregon, along with USC and Washington, they’re now in the Big Ten.

And it’s not just for football. So when schools change conferences, they do so for multiple sports. And so it’ll also be in basketball. And then sports that don’t bring in revenue, too, will be affected. So you’ll have, like, women’s volleyball teams and women’s soccer teams, field hockey teams – those teams, too, will all be crisscrossing the country now to play.

SUMMERS: I mean, we’ve got to talk about the money here. That’s what this is all…

SULLIVAN: Yes.

SUMMERS: …About, right?

SULLIVAN: Absolutely. Yes. So football is king in college sports. That’s where all the money is. These huge shifts in conference alignment that we’ve been seeing over the past 10 to 15 years, and especially now, that’s all driven by revenue that comes from TV streaming deals. Live sports just remain the biggest moneymaker for those broadcasts. And so to capture that, conferences are growing in number of members in addition to growing in geography. So these big conferences now have 16 schools instead of the eight or the 10 or the 12 of the past.

SUMMERS: I mean, Becky, I am a huge football fan. I mean, football season is the best part of the year. How is this all going to affect what fans like me see as they watch games this season?

SULLIVAN: Well, I think proponents would say that you’ll get to see a lot more competitive games all year long.

SUMMERS: OK.

SULLIVAN: So there will be fun games to watch. But the flip side of that, too, I think, is that it’s going to be harder on a lot of teams. So take the Southeastern Conference, the SEC – to win this conference a couple decades ago, you had to be the best of 12 schools. Now, you have to be the best of 16. And the two newest members joining this season are Oklahoma and Texas, which are two of the best programs of all time – joining now, like, the, you know, Goliaths like Alabama and Georgia. So take a school like Florida, which is no slouch – right now, they look to have the toughest schedule in college football, and there’s a real chance they may struggle to even get to six wins…

SUMMERS: Oof.

SULLIVAN: …Which, of course, is the marker in college football of when your team gets to go to a postseason game.

SUMMERS: And the postseason brings us to another big change, which is the huge expansion of the playoffs. Instead of just four teams, now 12 will play for a chance to win the national title. I mean, that is massive.

SULLIVAN: I’m hoping that it opens the door for some new winners, because college football can, at times, really suffer from a lack of parity. And a big reason for that is that playoffs in this sport are relatively new in its history. And even then, they’ve always been very small, only 2 or 4 teams participating. And so, as you say, this is just a big deal to go to 12 because in the past, teams have been left out of the playoffs, even when they were undefeated. Like, you might remember Boise State from…

SUMMERS: Oh, yeah.

SULLIVAN: …About 15 years ago, Florida State just last year. This should fix that. So I’m hoping we get some fresh faces. This season, that could be a school like Southern Methodist or Memphis, neither of which have played on such a big stage in a long time, or ever. So it’s going to be really fun to watch.

SUMMERS: We’ll be watching. Thanks, Becky.

SULLIVAN: You’re welcome.

SUMMERS: That’s NPR’s Becky Sullivan. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

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