For the past two weeks, college sports stakeholders have been debating the concept of a “Super League,” one group’s vision for a brand new college football enterprise.
While that discourse has focused primarily on the top-line plan—80 teams, a 16-game playoff, new conferences—the proposal from the group, College Sports Tomorrow, includes a more intricate look at how increased TV money and collectively bargained payments might be used to create a college football entity that encompasses all of what is now considered FBS.
Sportico recently obtained a “confidential” pitch deck, which was circulated by the group in mid-February. The document contains a number of previously unreported details, including a specific plan for sharing broadcast revenue with players, a 40-game spring football “festival,” and a preliminary look at how the Super League’s 70 permanent members might be arranged in seven geographically aligned leagues.
College Sports Tomorrow (CST), a collection of U.S. sports team owners, executives and college administrators, has spent months trying to distill the current upheaval in intercollegiate athletics into an entirely new business model. The group includes Devils/Sixers owner David Blitzer, NFL executive Brian Rolapp, Cleveland Browns owner Jimmy Haslam, Syracuse chancellor Kent Syverud and TurnkeyZRG chairman and CEO Len Perna.
An 11-page deck, titled “Competitive Equity Proposals” and dated Feb. 15, was produced for CST by TurnkeyZRG, a search firm that works extensively in college athletics. The document is marked “attorney-client privileged,” although it is unclear why, since TurnkeyZRG is not a law firm. A representative from CST didn’t respond to an email seeking comment on the details.
First reported by The Athletic earlier this month, CST’s initiative assumes that a more concentrated structure for big-time college football would provide greater stability and increased media/sponsorship money than its current, fragmented model. Universities would each own a percentage of the league, according to The Athletic, with revenue sharing that favors the biggest brand names, like Alabama and Notre Dame. The group envisions a prospective players union that will collectively bargain on topics like NIL and transfer restrictions, and is prioritizing competitive equity that is also often absent in the current structure.
The February plan is written for a college sports league that would launch in 2027, a timeline that has since drawn skepticism. Here are some more specifics from the pitch deck:
Eight Divisions
The seven permanent 10-team “Super League” divisions consist of every Power Five school plus Notre Dame, and are organized geographically: west, southwest, plains, midwest, northeast, south and southeast. In large part, the effort appears to preserve or reunite historic rivalries, a number of which have been shattered by conference realignment.
The west division mimics the recently disbanded Pac-12 Conference, but without Colorado and Utah, which would compete in the plains division. The current Big Ten conference would arguably be most impacted, with Wisconsin, Nebraska, Iowa and Minnesota competing in the plains; Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Michigan State, Northwestern, Purdue and Ohio State playing in the midwest; and Penn State, Rutgers and Syracuse being allocated to the northeast. While the bulk of the current SEC conference would compete in the south division, Florida and South Carolina would be assigned to the southeast alongside more proximate geographical rivals like Florida State, Miami and North Carolina.
The eighth division comprises 10 schools from what the deck calls the “Under League,” the rest of the teams in college football’s top tier. That division rotates every year—eight of the 10 are relegated each season and replaced by the eight teams that play in the Under League’s playoff. The rest of the Under League is organized in eight different divisions of seven teams, which are not detailed in the deck.
NIL
The deck proposes a national broadcast NIL (BNIL) construct whereby players receive pro rata shares of a collectively bargained “FB Player Pool,” which would come from the Super League’s TV money. That money would be distributed as follows: 5% to all rostered freshmen, 15% to all rostered sophomores, 30% for all rostered juniors and 50% for all rostered seniors and graduate students.
As another means of maintaining competitive equity, the pitch deck proposes a cap that would constrain how much a program’s athletes could cumulatively earn via NIL. The suggested “NIL Roster Cap” would mandate that individual NIL payments for football players at a single school not exceed those earned via group licensing and broadcast NIL (BNIL) deals.
If a school exceeds the cap for a season, then it would be punished by losing transfer slots, and possibly scholarship slots. If, on the other hand, a school were to fall below 80% of a pre-established “NIL Roster Floor” for two consecutive seasons, it would be relegated to the Under League until it could sustain a full season above the floor.
Calendar
The pitch deck proposes a 14-game regular season played across 15 weeks starting in August. The regular season concludes Thanksgiving weekend and is followed by a 16-team Super League playoff, played out over five weeks. The deck includes a parenthetical that the schedule has room “to grow to 24 [playoff teams] without adding more weeks.”
The deck also references a “college football spring festival,” a series of 40 spring games played by Super League teams each April. Those games could include concerts and other auxiliary events, an apparent push toward further commercializing spring exhibitions that are growing in popularity and prominence.
Transfers
Teams would be allowed 85 roster spots each year, but could only have a maximum of 70 scholarship slots. At least 50 of those would have to go to players who were recruited by the program directly out of high school. Athletes would be allowed to transfer twice within a five-year eligibility window. Each year, there would be two transfer portal windows—an “open” one in February and a “supplemental” one in March—and schools would only be able to sign a maximum of 10 players during each.
Moreover, schools that sign athletes during the February window would have to make a “player transfer payment” to those athletes’ former schools—not unlike how the NFL has compensatory draft picks—reimbursing them for aggregate broadcast NIL payments the transferring athletes had received during their prior enrollment. That total number would fully count against the new schools’ roster cap, which could choose to either take the full hit in a single season, or spread it out 50-50 across two consecutive seasons.
The “system encourages student-athlete persistence (fewer transfer opportunities) to increase odds of graduation and simultaneously creating an even greater incentive for schools to invest in, retain, develop and graduate players,” the pitch deck says.
There are obvious challenges to the Super League happening on this schedule—or at all. For one, it purports to do away with the traditional conference structure at a time when the SEC and Big Ten are consolidating both power and money. Furthermore, the top college conferences all have existing media deals that run through at least the next five years, and all the leagues recently signed off on a six-year, $7.8 billion extension with ESPN to cover an expanded College Football Playoff.
Lev Akabas contributed to this report.