College football keeps reaching for congressional rescue, but the real fix is sitting right in front of the sport’s power brokers.
The latest push, the Protect College Sports Act, is headed down the same dead-end road as the Save College Sports Act before it. The names sound bold.
The results won’t be. What actually matters, if the ACC, Big Ten, Big 12 and SEC are serious about giving the playoff committee something fair to compare, is much simpler: get on the same page with scheduling.
The clean answer is obvious. Everyone plays 12 regular-season games.
Everyone plays nine conference games. And everyone takes on at least one non-conference opponent from a power conference or Notre Dame.
That would do far more to steady the sport than any bill winding its way through Washington.
Right now, the system is a mess. This season, every team in the SEC, Big Ten and Big 12 will play nine league games.
Some ACC teams will do the same, while others will only play eight. The SEC and ACC will each require at least one non-conference game against a power conference opponent or Notre Dame.
The Big Ten and Big 12 will not.
That gap matters, and the recent national champions make the point as plainly as possible. The last three title winners all came from the Big Ten, and none of them played a regular-season game against another team from a major conference.
It gets even more lopsided when you look at how those seasons began. 2023 Michigan, 2024 Ohio State and 2025 Indiana each opened with three non-conference cupcakes. That’s a massive runway before the real work even starts.
While 2023 Michigan was playing UNLV, Alabama was losing at home to Texas. While 2024 Ohio State was handling Western Michigan, Texas was beating Michigan at the Big House. While 2025 Indiana was sorting things out against Old Dominion and Indiana State, Alabama was losing at Florida State and rolling past Wisconsin.
The calendar only makes the imbalance more obvious. The season now runs from early August into late January, and winning the national title requires at least three playoff victories. A team that gets to ease in for nearly a month has a built-in edge before the stakes really hit.
And this isn’t some tiny sample-size argument. Go back to the start of the BCS in 1998 and run through the 2022 season, and 23 of the 25 national champions played at least one regular-season non-conference game against a power conference opponent or Notre Dame.
The exceptions were Oklahoma in 2000, with current Tennessee coach Josh Heupel at quarterback, and Alabama in 2020, when COVID wiped out non-conference play. Even then, Mac Jones, DeVonta Smith and company were not exactly a team begging for help.
No commissioner and no senator is going to stop the sport’s richest programs from getting richer as college football keeps sliding further toward a professional model. Not Greg Sankey.
Not Tony Petitti. Not Jim Phillips.
Not Brett Yormark. Not Ted Cruz or Maria Cantwell.
What the commissioners can do, though, is agree on one standard that applies to everyone. It wouldn’t need Congress.
It wouldn’t punish the ACC or Big 12 while handing an edge to the SEC and Big Ten. It would at least move the sport closer to something resembling a level playing field, even if the biggest brands will always sit on top.
Without that kind of agreement, the SEC is inviting more of the kind of cheap shots Bret Bielema already handed out this week. Bielema, who won in the Big Ten at Wisconsin and Illinois but struggled in the SEC at Arkansas, said at Big Ten Media Days: “They kind of want to live in 2005 forever.”
That’s not really the point. If Sankey had his way, he’d probably rewind to 2012, when the SEC was rolling toward a seventh straight national title, or 2022, when the league was on the verge of its fourth in a row.
Sankey made his position clear at SEC Media Days, backing the league’s new nine-game conference schedule and the added challenge of a non-conference game against a power-conference opponent or Notre Dame.
“If we believe we are the best conference in college football,” Sankey said, “we should also be willing to embrace the best schedule in college football.”
That sounds good. The problem is what happens if the rest of the power conferences don’t follow. In that case, the SEC may end up with the toughest regular season in the sport while the Big Ten keeps owning January.
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