Bold predictions for college football on and off the field in 2023 and beyond

After both Tony Elliott and Brent Venables left the program last offseason, Swinney rose from within with poor results. The the defense underperformed last season under first-year coordinator Wes Goodwin. The offense was a mess that led to the surprising firing of Brandon Streeter on Thursday. The quarterback play was up and down, but DJ Uiagalelei wasn’t the reason Clemson missed the playoffs for the second year in a row. The Tigers lack the elite superstar receivers that propelled them to championships. Tajh Boyd, Trevor Lawrence and Deshaun Watson. A new offensive coordinator — who is sure to be an outside hire — may be the program’s only hope to avoid the fall.

OKLAHOMA, TEXAS JUMP EARLY SEC

Oklahoma and Texas plan to leave the Big 12 at the start of the 2024 school year, a year earlier than originally planned. The Big 12, the SEC and its media partners will have to work out a deal to allow for an early exit, but it sounds like it will happen and an announcement will come sometime in the fall.

Big 12 management is ready and willing to allow the two schools to leave early, and some sort of buyout — or a television purchase to make up for the conference’s loss of a year’s worth of media inventory — is expected to be negotiated. if presented. The key here is FOX and whether the network tries to slow down the pace toward an early move to ESPN support in the SEC. Most of those details can be finalized this spring and summer, which I call college athletics’ “business season.”

CONGRESS REALLY BEGINS SERIOUS WORK ON LEGISLATION

College athletics and politics are joining hands again, and that might be a good thing for the future of the NCAA. I expect clear and appropriate NIL legislation to be completed by the end of the calendar year.

Incoming NCAA President Charlie Baker, the outgoing governor of Massachusetts, will start his new gig in Indianapolis in March. Why does this matter? The NCAA’s backside has been kicked for its inability to enforce the rules and its inability to guide the organization — and its member institutions — through massive changes to the collegiate model since the pandemic began in 2020. The Supreme Court embarrassed the NCAA. and President Mark Emmert in 2021 with a 9-0 decision against the NCAA in Alston’s case last summer. Meanwhile, Congress has been unhelpful in developing appropriate NIL legislation to bring some sense of legal uniformity to what has turned into an adjacent pay-for-play model with little or no oversight and regulation at the state level.

Baker, the Republican governor of the Democratic-controlled state, is seen by many as a unifier and benefactor in political circles, and will be responsible for aligning the NCAA’s interests with a range of approaches — all political in nature, of course. used in Washington DC by the NCAA and all of its schools want guidance from the board and Baker figures to give them the best chance to successfully navigate these waters.

MANUFACTURERS ARE TRYING TO EXPLODE THE RECRUITING CALENDAR

The introduction of two windows in the transfer portal’s recruiting calendar has complicated the logistics of coaches across the country in December during the early signing period.

Executive Director of AFCA Todd Berry said in January that the recruiting calendar has become “chaotic,” but that’s largely due to the coaches themselves. After all, they proposed new transfer portal windows (December 5-January 19 and May 1-15).

“We’re concerned about the first one being this long, but we think this is going to be really good for the student-athletes,” Berry said.

The coaches want to move the early signing day to the first Wednesday in December or possibly the week after Thanksgiving. However, it’s not entirely clear if that would alleviate the stress of recruiting a 20-man class from the high school ranks while focusing on the end of the regular season, the 12-team College Football Playoff, the ever-wild coaching carousel. and the opening of the transfer portal in mid-December.

Commissioner of the SEC Greg Sankey believes the early signing period should be eliminated, making the first Wednesday of February the only signing day. It makes sense and will certainly relieve some stress. “There was an idea that we needed these long windows to relieve the pressure. I think we put pressure on the young guys,” he recently told The Athletic.

Maybe we should do away with signing altogether and allow high school players to sign anytime during the rest of the year?

Here, it seems that the entire recruitment calendar needs to be scrapped and a new one introduced before the academic year 2024-25. The question is whether there are already too many cooks in the kitchen to see through the smoke. The best way to put out a fire is to let it burn itself out and rebuild.

“We’re trying to find more time periods for dead periods,” Berry said. “I mean we want to be with our own players instead of recruiting.”

How burnt out are the coaches? Many canceled their plans to attend the AFCA convention in January because they had to stay on campus to receive transfer portal recruits. Only 38 head coaches attended the FBS meetings on the final day of the convention, with few upper-level personnel lining the corridors of the Charlotte Convention Center. This was not the case a few years ago.

PAC-12 GOES TO LIVE

Pac-12 approves giant media rights deal worth more than $2.2 billion ESPN and FOX will pay Big 12.

The Pac-12 and Big 12 have battled publicly and privately over which conference is more valuable in the media market, but the truth is that the Big 12 is in a much stronger position despite losing Texas and OU to the SEC. However, the Pac-12 is more willing to sell most of its media rights to a streamer like Amazon, allowing the conference to cash in on short-term gains that bypass the Big 12’s payday over the air. broadcasters.

That could and should help the Pac-12 as it tries to expand to 12 or 14 teams, but don’t expect that to happen until the conference approves a new media deal.