College football ‘super league’ proposal has merit but significant obstacles remain if restructuring sport

The idea of creating a “super-league” format in college football is doable and brilliant … in 2031. 

That’s right in the timeframe where current media rights contracts for major conferences and the College Football Playoff will be expiring. It’s called “coterminous,” which is derived from the Latin word for “sharing a common boundary.” 

It would be the perfect time to restructure college football to where the sport is owned by the schools and their media rights partners. 

Now is just not even close to the right time to implement those changes. 

That’s one conclusion reached after CBS Sports spoke with sources at the Final Four in Glendale, Arizona, the past several days soliciting opinions of stakeholders regarding discussions of a potential “super league,” which was first reported last week by The Athletic. A group consisting of college leaders developed an idea to transform college football into a single-entity league, similar to what the NFL morphed into in the 1960s.

Back then, former NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle successfully lobbied his teams to share revenue equally under what was called a “single-entity” structure, a model which has survived into today while withstanding even Supreme Court challenges. 

With college sports strapped to a rocket heading toward an uncertain future, the 20 people involved in the venture dubbed “College Sports Tomorrow” are girding for what seems to be a showdown against a future trying to be created by the Big Ten and SEC.

“I do not believe that leaving it just to commissioners and athletic directors [is the way to go], because when you do, you do not get the view of [the university as a whole],” West Virginia president and CST member Gordon Gee told CBS Sports.

“I think the university presidents have been the root of the problem here,” Gee said. “We have ignored. We have not been engaged. We have not paid enough attention. And I am the poster child because … I paid a lot of these coaches millions of dollars. We just thought life was going to go on.

“We should have been thinking more progressively for a long period of time. My view is that is to stimulate the conversation, get enough university presidents together to solve this problem.”

The history of presidential involvement in NCAA reform has been uneven. It goes back to 1984 when the Presidents Commission was established to oversee things after a series of high-profile…