The war never stopped

The Group of 6 is in crisis. That’s the consensus, anyway.

Revenue sharing is here and the G6 can’t keep up. The House settlement carved college athletics into haves and have-mores. The transfer portal has turned into a one-way escalator from the G6 to the Power 4. NIL money flows to the brands. Autonomy means the people with the most get to make the rules about getting more.

If you’re a fan of a G6 program right now, it feels existential. Like the walls are closing in. Like this is the moment everything changes.

This is just the latest chapter.

The class war in college athletics didn’t start with the House settlement. It didn’t start with the College Football Playoff, or the BCS, or conference realignment. It started the moment the first television camera pointed at a football field and someone realized there was real money in this thing — and it has never, not for a single year, stopped.

I know because I’ve been covering it for three decades.

Same war, different uniforms

In July 2003, I wrote a column in the Birmingham Post-Herald about the BCS — the Bowl Championship Series, for anyone too young to remember the acronym that used to make non-power fans’ blood boil. The column was called “Who decides deserving freeloaders?” and it ran as a point-counterpoint with my colleague Cary Estes, who argued that the teams on the outside hadn’t proved worthy of a seat at the table.

My side of the argument was simple: the system was a cartel. Six conferences controlled the money, controlled the access and controlled the criteria for “deserving.” Then they pointed at the teams they’d locked out and said, “See? They haven’t earned it.” You can’t earn what you’re never allowed to compete for.

I imagined Roy Kramer, the former SEC commissioner and the architect of the BCS, channeling Clint Eastwood’s William Munny in Unforgiven — standing over the non-BCS conferences the way Munny stood over Little Bill and saying, “Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.”

That same spring, I wrote another column about Big East commissioner Mike Tranghese, who was begging the ACC not to raid his conference. Miami and Virginia Tech were being poached. Tranghese was near tears at a press conference, pleading with university presidents about “irreparable harm.”

Here was a man who had helped build the BCS — the very system designed to lock out Conference USA, the Mountain West, the MAC and everyone else who wasn’t in the club. He’d sat at the table while the cartel divided the money. He’d watched non-BCS schools get shut out of access, revenue and postseason opportunity, and he’d said nothing.

Now the same logic was being applied to him. And suddenly it was an outrage.

I wrote at the time: “Tranghese helped create this BCS monster. He shouldn’t be surprised when it turns on him. The scavengers will enjoy picking his bones.”

Twenty-two years later, I don’t need to change a word.

Burning the ladders

The details are different now. The BCS is gone. The Big East as a football conference is gone. Conference USA has been raided so many times it’s unrecognizable. The American lost UCF, Cincinnati and Houston to the Big 12 and rebuilt from scratch — again. The Mountain West is about to lose Boise State, Colorado State, Fresno State, San Diego State and Utah State to a reformed Pac-12.

But the dynamic hasn’t changed. Not even a little.

Nobody in this system actually wants to blow it up. They want to make sure they’re on the right side of it. And once they get there, they are perfectly fine burning every ladder back toward bootstrap land.

The ACC did it to the Big East in 2003. The Big 12 did it to the American in 2023. The Power 4 are doing it to the Group of 6 right now. And if tomorrow the Big Ten and SEC decided to form their own super league and leave the ACC and Big 12 behind, those two conferences would suddenly discover the same righteous indignation that Tranghese had in 2003. They’d call it unfair. They’d call it an antitrust violation. They’d file lawsuits. They’d beg for access.

They’d sound exactly like the G6 sounds today.

Because nobody is opposed to the system. They’re opposed to being on the wrong end of it.

The socialism of it all

Tranghese once said he wasn’t a socialist, defending the BCS money structure. That line has always killed me. Because the Power 4 — then and now — operate the most heavily subsidized system in American sports. College or pro.

Here’s how it actually works.

There are maybe 20 to 25 programs in all of college football that drive the machine. They generate the TV ratings. They fill the stadiums — theirs and everyone else’s. They sell the jerseys. They move the needle. Alabama, Ohio State, Georgia, Texas, USC, Michigan, LSU, Clemson, Oregon — you know the names.

Everyone else in the Power 4 derives their value from proximity to those brands. And that proximity breaks down into tiers.

Tier 1: You’re in the club. You share revenue equally with the brands, even though you don’t generate anywhere near the same value. A Vanderbilt or a Wake Forest gets the same SEC or ACC media check as Alabama or Clemson. That’s not capitalism. That’s a subsidy.

Tier 2: You can schedule home-and-homes with the brands. That means national TV dates, recruiting visibility and credibility by association. The mid-tier Power 4 schools live here.

Tier 3: Buy games. You get a check — $1.5 million, $2 million, sometimes more — to fly across the country and get beaten by 30 in front of 100,000 people wearing the other team’s colors. You take the money because you need it. They schedule the game because they need a win in Week 2.

Tier 4: The brands wouldn’t play you at all. You don’t exist to them. You’re not worth the risk and you’re not worth the gate.

The G6 lives in Tiers 3 and 4. Occasionally a program punches into Tier 2 for a cycle. Then the conference it built gets raided and it drops back down.

But here’s the part nobody says out loud: the most subsidized sports programs in America are the Power 4 schools who’ve ridden the coattails of those 20-25 brands to billions of dollars in shared revenue over four decades of unregulated television deals.

Nobody is tuning in for Purdue vs. Rutgers. Nobody is buying a streaming package to watch Boston College play Virginia. Those programs exist — at that revenue level — because they share a conference with programs people actually watch.

The G6 gets called freeloaders for wanting access to the system. But the real freeloaders have been cashing checks in the Power 4 for 40 years. They just have better seats.

End stage or just another turn?

So where does that leave us?

The honest question — the one that matters — is whether we’re watching the end of the road or just another turn on it.

Because every generation of this fight has felt existential at the time. The I-A/I-AA split in 1978 felt existential. The formation of the BCS in 1998 felt existential. The creation of the College Football Playoff felt existential. Every round of conference realignment — from the Big East’s collapse to the SEC and Big Ten’s most recent land grab — felt like the moment the door closed for good.

And every time, the programs on the outside survived. They adapted. They found new conferences, new revenue streams, new ways to compete. They kept playing, kept building, kept filling their stadiums with fans who showed up because they loved their team — not because ESPN told them to.

That’s what the G6 does. That’s what the G6 has always done.

The question now is whether the gap has finally gotten too wide to bridge. Whether revenue sharing, NIL and the sheer volume of money flowing to the top has created a divide that adaptation can’t fix.

Maybe. I’ve been wrong before. But I’ve also been writing about the death of non-power football since 2003, and the patient keeps showing up on Saturday.

The one thing that’s never been for sale

The war never stopped. It just changes uniforms every few years. The people on top change. The people fighting to get there change. The arguments change — BCS access, playoff spots, revenue sharing, NIL, House settlement, autonomous governance.

The dynamic doesn’t change. The hypocrisy doesn’t change. And the fans don’t change, either. They still show up. They still care. They still believe their program matters — even when the entire structure of college athletics is designed to tell them it doesn’t.

Call it delusion if you want. I call it conviction. And it’s the only thing in this sport that has never been for sale.

Tim Stephens is the founder and CEO of Diehard Sports Network and the former sports editor of the Birmingham Post-Herald. He has covered the business and politics of college athletics for more than 25 years.