Len Perna has spent much of the past year devising and pitching his idea for a college football super league — officially dubbed the “College Student Football League” — to university presidents and athletic directors across the country. There is no indication it is close to becoming reality.
But he hopes the frustration in the past few weeks about the College Football Playoff’s subjective and secretive selection process will lead folks to consider his proposal for an alternative.
That proposal? A 24-team playoff where nobody does any rankings or evaluations. Just like in the NFL, the teams that win their divisions and the wild-card teams with the next-best records get in. No arbitrary criteria. Just math.
“We know fans want this,” said Perna, chairman and CEO of Turnkey Search and one of the founders of the new group College Sports Tomorrow. “More access and fair access, without the politics, without all the squabbling.”
But it’s not realistic in the traditional structure of college football, with its uneven conferences and imbalanced schedules.
The CSFL, which The Athletic first reported about before it had a name, would divide FBS into two tiers, the 72-school Power 12 (roughly the Power 5) and the 64-school Group of 8 (the current Group of 5). The Power 12 would be divided into a dozen six-team divisions grouped geographically — Iowa and Iowa State in the Midwest, BYU and Oregon in the West, etc. There would be no conference championship games.
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Those 12 division champions, along with 10 wild-card teams and two “play up” teams from the Group of 8 (this year, Army and Boise State) feed into a playoff with eight byes and eight first-round games. Using this season’s records and a “strength of victory” tiebreaker, Oregon (12-0) and Notre Dame (11-1) would be the top two seeds, while Clemson (9-3) and Syracuse (9-3) would be the last wild-card teams in.
The CSFL sets the schools’ schedules, which are based in part on how the teams finished the prior season.
“Like versus like scheduling is really important to this, because it creates more competitive balance,” Perna said. “It’s important that if you’re Michigan last year and you win the national championship, you’re going to have a really hard schedule. And if you’re Baylor and you only won three games last year, this year you’re going to have an easier schedule.”
If that sounds exactly like the NFL’s model, that’s intentional. One of the primary architects of the CSFL alongside Perna is Cleveland Browns owner and Tennessee booster Jimmy Haslam.
“We believe the NFL playoff system is much more objective and less subjective,” Haslam said in an email. “This should result in truly the best teams ‘making the playoffs.’”
“It’s a really bad look to have commissioners arguing with commissioners and athletic directors arguing with athletic directors, all in the media,” Perna said. “What do you think fans think of all of our college football leadership arguing with each other out in the open, day after day after day after day? It reduces the confidence in the system.”
The postseason component is just one part of the group’s larger vision for a restructuring of major college football. It’s a radical proposal that has struggled thus far to gain traction with universities. Last week in Dallas, Perna’s group, as well as representatives for a similar, private equity-backed venture, Project Rudy, gave presentations to a group of presidents and chancellors from the Big 12 and ACC at a meeting organized by Baylor president Linda Livingstone.
Their pitch in a nutshell: “You guys are going to need a lot more money to afford House settlement revenue sharing with athletes (expected to be around $20.5 million beginning next school year) and benefits if the athletes eventually get classified as employees.”
Their solution: “Pooling the conferences’ TV rights into one centralized property, like the NFL does, to drive up bidding, along with more inventory from the bigger Playoff.”
Mind you, every Power 4 conference’s current or pending media contracts run into the 2030s, and the CFP’s new six-year ESPN deal does not even begin until 2026.
“The timeline that we’re looking at is that you would be able to ultimately move to a system like this around the year 2032,” said Perna.
To do it, he’ll have to win over two conferences, the Big Ten and SEC, that have thus far viewed any super league proposals as a non-starter. SEC commissioner Greg Sankey in particular has been outspoken in his disdain.
“I’ve studied it a little bit and I come back to, I don’t want to dumb down the Southeastern Conference to be a part of some super league notion with 70 teams that some people speculate would happen,” he said in October. “They want to be us, and that’s on them to figure it out, not on me to bring myself back to Earth.”
“I have yet to see a single thing in any plan that I’ve learned details about that contains things that we couldn’t do ourselves and do with other colleagues,” his Big Ten counterpart Tony Pettiti said.
Perna’s group believes an NFL model would help stabilize an enterprise that has been rocked by upheaval in recent years. The future of college athletics is currently being shaped by legal challenges and attempts to get Congress to help standardize rules around NIL. They do not view the House settlement, which is up for final approval in April, as a long-term solution.
“It is tough to see something as important as college football is to the very fabric of our nation in such peril due to the rapidly changing landscape of NIL, the transfer portal, etc.,” Haslam said. “We believe the College Sports Tomorrow solution not only preserves the game but enhances it.”
In the meantime, it may seem frustrating for those seeking a more objective Playoff system that any such change is at least eight years away.
“Your customer has to be ready to buy, and they’re not ready to listen yet,” Perna said. “So we’re really persistent. We understand the timing is probably not right for this idea right now. But I’m telling you, right now, what we’ve outlined in our proposal is the manifest destiny of where college football will wind up.”
(Top photo: Jevone Moore / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images; images of deck courtesy of the CFSL)