So you’ve probably seen the recent story about the proposed European Super League.
The basics? A group of 12 clubs from across Europe’s biggest leagues announced plans to form a new competition called the Super League. The league, should it be established, would offer permanent spots to some of the world’s biggest clubs and play matches midweek, while allowing the involved clubs to remain in their domestic competitions.
Of course this has led to talk of such a thing in college football. We’re always talking about schools breaking away from the NCAA, their conferences, or both.
Let’s begin and end this discussion with a couple of sentences.
From the mid 1980s to mid 2000s could such a 12-15 college football league have existed without Miami, Nebraska and Tennessee? Would you include them now? That’s it that’s argument.
While Clemson is a shoo in for a current college football league, would Clemson have made it from 1991 through 2010? There’s not a 10 win season in there.
What are we basing this on then? Stadium size? historical number of wins?
I’ll admit that less than 15 schools are capable of winning a national championship in a given year, and that the Power 5 conference could break away from the NCAA, but this?
Nah – there too much recent history to suggest you can identify the top 15 schools to start a league and suggest they will still be the top 15 schools in 10 years. Can we be sure Alabama will still be college football’s top program post-Nick Saban? They were mostly mediocre pre-Saban.
I’m really not seeing a valid argument for this at all. The novelty will quickly wear off as those top 15 schools become the top 3 or 4.
It’s a bad idea for college football, and appears to be a bad idea overall. Six members of the European Super League have backed out of the league.
So much for that, and hopefully that’s the end of the discussion as it relates to college athletics as well.
