College football enters this conference championship weekend in an unusual situation, with each Power 5 title game having a major impact on the postseason.
Heading into the weekend, seven of the top eight teams in the College Football Playoff rankings were given the opportunity to win their respective games to stake their claim and possibly seal their fate.
But a year from now, with new money flowing into the sport, things should look very different.
The realignment will consolidate the top conferences into the Power 4, whose championship games will no doubt be affected by the expansion of the CFP to 12 teams. Conferences are changing the way funds are distributed, creating a wide gap between the haves and have-nots. And, of course, it’s all driven by increasingly lucrative media rights deals with college football’s biggest broadcasters.
Now, the question is: Will future changes leave sports in a better or worse position?
broadcast shuffle
Saturday will be the last SEC Championship Game to be broadcast on CBS Sports. Next year, Disney will begin paying more than $700 million a year to be his SEC’s exclusive broadcast partner, and most of its top games will be for his ABC.
But CBS will soon be back in the spotlight, broadcasting the 2024 Big Ten championship game as part of the conference’s new $7 billion deal. The conference title game also rotates annually between Fox and NBC.
The Big 12 is sticking with longtime partners Fox and ESPN, with new contracts worth more than $2 billion starting in 2025, but plans to expand the conference with four new teams next fall. is.
“We’re trying to appeal nationally,” Lee Burke, president and CEO of consulting firm LHB Sports Entertainment & Media, told Front Office Sports. “These conferences are increasingly becoming national conferences.”
This idea also applies to the ACC, which has added California and Stanford at a discount. And that goes for the Big Ten, which also hosts Oregon and Washington State, each of which will receive more than $30 million annually from Fox Sports instead of the standard (and much higher) Big Ten revenue share.
But the transformation of college football is certainly not limited to broadcaster affiliations.
Other “juicy matchups”
Next year’s conference championship weekend will look different thanks to two big changes.
Each Power 4 conference will eliminate the divisional structure, allowing for title game matchups like Michigan vs. Ohio State in the Big Ten and Alabama vs. Auburn in the SEC.
Earlier this fall, CBS Sports executive vice president of programming Dan Weinberg told FOS he was excited about the potential for “really sexy, compelling matchups,” especially in the Big Ten. But will these theoretical star-studded games actually deliver the kind of drama Weinberg suggests?
The new 12-team CFP format could add new and complex developments. By the time teams play in their conference championship games, they may already have clinched a postseason berth. The issue has caught the attention of some conference commissioners, including the ACC’s Jim Phillips and the Big Ten’s Tony Petitti, who acknowledged this week that the title game needs to be reevaluated.
But if conference championship games after 2024 prove to be unappealing, eliminating them won’t be so easy. They are an influential part of most conference media rights agreements.
Sources familiar with university sports media rights agreements told FOS that this is more of a long-term issue and that any theoretical changes would likely be made under a new agreement. The Big Ten and Big 12’s contracts run through 2030, while the SEC and ACC have contracts through 2034 and 2036, respectively.
Neil Pilson, who served as president of CBS Sports in the 1980s and 1990s, said the championship game issue is not a serious problem and that the industry will continue to do so, especially as more CFP broadcast inventory becomes available after 2026. I believe it will be resolved.
“From a television perspective, it’s really a neutral equation, because if you don’t play; [those championship games]Pilson, who now runs a telecommunications company and teaches sports management at Columbia University, told FOS.
No matter what happens, broadcast partners seem to be the big winners.
Is four better than five?
The dissolution of the Pac-12, one of the oldest conferences, may be difficult for some college sports fans to accept, but it is not for media companies, particularly the college football duopoly of ESPN and FOX. isn’t it.
“The reality is that both countries benefit from conference integration,” Burke said. Schools enrolling from the Mountain and Pacific time zones simply offer more “content to tap into.”
An anonymous source who spoke to FOS went a step further and said, “I don’t think anyone was hurt by the demise of the Pac-12.”
There are many obstacles ahead over the next 12 months. But when the 2024 conference championship weekend arrives, college football fans will get their first look at how realignment, network shuffles and CFP expansion will impact the future of the sport.
For now, we have one last ride to enjoy college football as we know it.