College football is being wrecked, and the wrecking is coming from people a lot older than the 19-year-olds everyone wants to scream about.
Start with the complaint you hear loudest. The transfer portal and NIL have turned rosters into revolving doors. More than 4,000 players entered the portal in the window that opened Jan. 2 and closed Jan. 16, about a third of all Division I scholarship players, more than double the entire NFL. That's genuine chaos. It's also a teenager chasing a paycheck and a better spot on the depth chart, the same thing every coach and athletic director in the sport has done for themselves for decades. Players finally getting paid and finally getting to leave is a good thing. Punishing them for learning the lesson the adults taught is just mean.
The real damage comes from above them, and it started long before anyone could profit off a jersey. Conference realignment took the regional map that made this sport different from the NFL and set it on fire. The Pac-12, a power league for more than a century, collapsed from 12 members to two in the 2024 cycle, scattered its schools to the Big Ten, Big 12 and ACC, and has since been rebuilt as a Group of Six league wearing the old name. Nebraska's jump from the Big 12 to the Big Ten in 2011 is widely cited as the opening domino. Memphis's old rivals, Louisville and Cincinnati, long ago moved on to bigger leagues. A television contract made it happen.
Now comes the next swing of the wrecking ball. As of mid-October 2026, the Playoff is reportedly nearing a deal to expand to 24 teams starting with the 2027 season. The reported plan would likely eliminate conference championship games, hand first-round byes to the top eight seeds, play the first two rounds at the home site of the higher seed, and move the quarters, semis and final to neutral sites, with five automatic bids and 19 at-large spots. Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti pushed for 24 teams for more than a year. SEC commissioner Greg Sankey preferred 16 before softening. It still needs final approval and could slip, but the direction is set.
That direction has a cost. Championship Saturday, the December afternoons where a trophy actually got settled on the field, gets traded for a committee ranking. A September loss becomes a shrug. The one thing that separated college football from every other league was a regular season so brutal that a single bad Saturday could end your year. A 24-team bracket deletes that, and you're left with the NFL playoffs and worse branding.
Five top-16 teams lost on one Saturday this October, and that's tremendous fun. The regular season was never truly do-or-die for most programs anyway, since only a handful ever had a shot at the title. Fine. Fun doesn't mean better, and expanding the field to 24 sands down the regular season instead of sharpening it. You can enjoy the carnage and still see what's being taken.
Then there's the ultimate shrug: if you hate it, stop watching, because nothing changes while the ratings keep climbing. Nick Saban put the whole machine in one breath on the Pat McAfee Show. "College football is messed up... The playoffs have created tremendous interest in college football. There's more interest than ever, higher TV ratings and all that. But the underbelly underneath, that is not really good." UCF coach Scott Frost was blunter: "It's broken; college football is broken." The money is the engine, and record viewership is the fuel the sport's owners read as permission.
So blame the commissioners drawing up a bracket that kills the trophies they used to sell you, and the network cutting the checks that make it worth their while. The portal kid signing where the check is biggest had nothing to do with this. They'll tell you they're saving college football. They're stripping it for parts and billing you for the privilege.
