Hail Mary: A Plan to save College Football from the NCAA, NIL and the Transfer Portal

New book details plan to create 64-team Super League with four 16-team conferences, a 16-team playoff and players being paid a salary

New proposal for College Football Super League features 16-team playoff, relegation and paying players

Who’s in and who’s out?

A new book details a plan to rescue college football from the chaos caused by the NCAA’s inability to manage what has become a multi-billion dollar sport. “Hail Mary: A plan to save college football from the NCAA, NIL and the transfer portal” calls for a 64-team Super League with four 16-team conferences, a 16-team playoff with all spots determined by results on the field and players being paid a salary comparable to what their peers in other minor league sports make.

“The College Football Playoff Committee’s egregious decision to snub undefeated Florida State in 2023 in favor of an Alabama team that needed a miracle to beat Auburn may have been the straw that broke the camel’s back,” said author Todd McGee. “FSU is already looking for a way to get out of the ACC, and if the Seminoles are successful, Clemson won’t be far behind.”

Another round of conference realignment will cause further confusion. Longstanding rivalries are being tossed aside as schools pursue riches in either the SEC or the Big Ten. Their television rights deals dwarf those of the ACC and Big 12, and the two conferences are already attempting to throw their weight around as administrators dicker over who will be in the expanded playoffs.

“University presidents and athletics administrators are incapable of managing what has become a billion dollar per year industry,” McGee said. “It’s time for the upper echelon of college football teams to stop being the tail that wags the dog, divorce themselves from the NCAA, form their own league and let results on the field determine the college football champion.”

After the national outcry over the Seminoles’ snub last year, the College Football Playoff organization accelerated its plans for a 12-team playoff. But even that will be fraught with peril, as only five of the twelve spots will be won on the field—the SEC, Big Ten, Big 12 and ACC champs will be guaranteed a spot, as will the highest-ranked conference champ from any other conference. The other seven spots will be determined by the CFP committee.

“If you thought the outcry was bad last year, wait until you see what happens when the committee tries to seed 12 teams for a playoff,” McGee said. “Debates will no longer be limited to who which teams should be in the playoff. Now we’ll argue about which teams deserved the first-round bye or which teams deserved to host a first-round home game. Treating college football like a beauty pageant is an insult to the players and coaches who battle it out every week.”

HAIL MARY is available on Amazon as an e-book and paperback.

Heading into the 2024 season, 67 teams are in one of the four designated Super Conferences (Big Ten, Big Twelve, ACC and SEC). This doesn’t include Notre Dame or the two schools kicked to the curb by the Pac-12—Oregon State and Washington State. A handful of non-Power Conference schools (Boise State, East Carolina, Fresno State, Marshall, Memphis and San Diego State) can also make a legitimate claim to being one of the best 64 programs in the nation.

The author chooses which teams are most deserving of inclusion, based on their recent success, and assigns them into conferences based on geography, an effort to restore some sanity to college football.

“Conference realignment has stretched common sense to its breaking point,” McGee said. “West Virginia is in the same conference as BYU—2,000 miles and two time zones away. That’s a mere day trip compared to the 3,120-mile sojourn Boston College fans will make to Palo Alto for the matchup with Stanford whenever those two ACC rivals meet for the first time.”

Traditions are also falling by the wayside. Oklahoma and Oklahoma State’s long-running Bedlam Series survived two World Wars and a global pandemic but couldn’t survive conference realignment. The Sooners bolted to the much greener pastures of the SEC after the 2023 season, ending the second-longest continuously running series between FBS teams, a streak that began in 1910.