The conversation around college football’s future keeps circling back to the same uneasy question: what exactly is a conference worth now?
Wake Forest coach Jake Dickert and Missouri coach Eli Drinkwitz both pushed on that idea this week, wondering aloud why programs should care so much about league affiliation when the sport keeps moving farther away from the old conference model.
“Why are we associated with conferences anymore if we’re not playing for a conference championship? Drinkwitz asked.
Dickert made a similar point, saying, “I don’t like it personally, right now,” Dickert said. “… But you can see why, even this year, it can be an elimination game.
(Independent) Notre Dame doesn’t have to play that game. … But to say we’re not going to have conference champions, why do we have conferences?
It just feels odd.”
The timing of those comments matters. Starting next year, the College Football Playoff will expand from 12 teams to 24, and the sport’s power leagues will stop staging conference championship games. The reason is simple enough: those title games could cost a team a playoff spot.
That change only sharpens the pressure on programs like Minnesota, which is sitting at 5-4 overall and 3-3 in the Big Ten, tied for ninth in the 18-team league heading into Saturday night’s game at Penn State. The Gophers are part of the conference, but right now they are not helping define it.
In fact, the Big Ten is doing more for Minnesota than Minnesota is doing for the Big Ten.
That reality is part of a much bigger fear that has been building in college sports: that the richest programs could eventually split off from everyone else. For Minnesota, that means the possibility of the Big Ten’s top brands - schools such as Ohio State or last year’s national champion Indiana - breaking away from programs like Minnesota and Purdue, either by going independent or by linking up with the best of the SEC and a few schools from the ACC and Big 12 to create a super league.
If that happens, the money follows the power. A new league or a collection of independents would become a TV-rights giant, while the schools left behind would have less revenue to divide up. That money matters more than ever now, with athletic departments trying to cover the rising cost of football and basketball rosters through revenue sharing and still pay for everything else.
“I would argue the Big Ten is a super league,” Gophers athletics director Mark Coyle told the Pioneer Press in October. “I would argue the SEC is a super league. … There’s no doubt that the Big Ten and the SEC have separated themselves a little bit.”
Coyle also pointed to Minnesota’s place in the Big Ten’s history. The Gophers are one of the league’s original members, part of the group that formed the Western Conference in 1896 along with Michigan, Illinois, Northwestern, Wisconsin and Purdue.
But in the current landscape, that history feels more symbolic than protective.
The collapse of the Pac-12 showed how quickly things can change. Oregon State and Washington State, both founding members of that league, were left behind after Oregon, Southern Cal, UCLA and Washington moved to the Big Ten. The remnants of the Pac-12 now include various mid-major programs such as Boise State, Utah State and Fresno State.
Minnesota does have one major safeguard: the Big Ten’s grant-of-rights agreement, which ties football and basketball revenue to the conference and runs through 2036. Coyle said that contract is a meaningful barrier against programs leaving.
There is also pressure from Washington. A provision in the Protect College Sports Act, which has passed the Senate and is now in the House, is aimed at stopping the Big Ten and SEC from “joining forces to create a super league,” according to Texas Sen.
Ted Cruz, who authored the bill and spoke to Yahoo Sports. The proposal would also limit conference membership to 22 schools.
Meanwhile, Miami is openly thinking about its own future. The Hurricanes are 8-1 and ranked fifth in the AP poll, and president Joe Echevarria said the school is weighing what comes next if the economics keep shifting.
“We are proud members of the ACC,” Echevarria told Yahoo. “If the economics were even, we wouldn’t be having any of these conversations.”
He pointed to the gap in revenue as a major issue, noting that Minnesota reported $63 million from the Big Ten in media rights in 2025, which he said is about $25 million more than ACC schools receive on average.
Echevarria laid out three possible paths for Miami: the Big Ten, the SEC or independence. He said the school’s profile fits with both of the power leagues in different ways.
“As an AAU (Association of American Universities) research institution, we line up with the Big Ten’s profile,” he said. “… On the geography idea, we line up better with the SEC. … If we have to go independent, I like our chances because we are a national brand.”
That last option - independence - used to sound like a disadvantage. Now it looks more like leverage. Notre Dame has long shown that a high-profile football brand can survive outside a conference, especially with its own national TV deal.
The new playoff structure only adds to that logic. The ACC, Big Ten, Big 12 and SEC have all agreed to give up their football championship games, and the money attached to them, to make room in the calendar for the 24-team CFP.
So the same question keeps hanging over the sport, louder now than before: if the biggest brands can make more money on their own, why stay in a conference at all?
ESPN contributor Josh Pate framed it that way, pointing to Notre Dame and possible future streaming partners like Amazon and Netflix.
“The Ohio States, the Alabamas, the Miamis of the world, when they start to look around and say there is no benefit to us being in a conference anymore, this is the hammer-home point, Pate said. ” ‘We are probably worth more on our own … than we are with this conference patch on our chest.
“There is no more motivation to be in conference. It is not a question of if that will happen. It’s just a question of when.”
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