🏆 Behind the Plan for a College Football ‘Super League’

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In today’s newsletter:

🗞 The Big Story: Behind the Plan for a College Football ‘Super League’

📉 Biggest Loser: What Happens if an Entire NFL Team Dies?

🏆 Winner’s Circle: The Twins Lost $54M Overnight, Now They’re Cashing In

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🗞 The Big Story

College football might finally start adding promotion and relegation by 2027, but that’s not even the most significant issue that a newly proposed plan helps to solve.

Background: Recently, a group called College Sports Tomorrow proposed a new college football “super league” called the College Student Football League (CSFL).

Many industry experts think this is the most well-thought-out plan for promotion and relegation proposed thus far.

It includes reshaping college football into two leagues:

• A 72-school league that falls largely along Power Four lines

• A second tier of 64 programs concentrated on the current Group of Five

The top 72 schools would be separated into 12 conferences based on geography, while the top eight programs in the lower tier would be eligible to be elevated every year.

How It Could Work: While a restructuring like this would prove extremely difficult, College Sports Tomorrow already has a transition plan that could be carried out between 2027 and 2031 and includes removing football from each of the current conferences.

However, their best chance of making this happen is to convince each conference that they can make more money together than they can separately.

Value Prop: Currently, each conference sells its own media rights individually, which College Sports Tomorrow believes results in schools losing out on billions of dollars.

The group thinks that, conservatively, if all 136 teams sold their media rights collectively as the CSFL, they could make $2 billion in incremental revenue by 2032 - a number that would continue to grow as the league became more developed.

Not to mention that College Sports Tomorrow also proposes a 94% overall revenue split for the top 72 teams, with SEC and Big Ten schools receiving a combined 30% split off the top between 2032 and 2036.

📉 Biggest Loser

There’s a secret NFL rule that’s never been used, but some fans think it could be a better way of tanking…

Background: In the 1950s and 1960s, football teams started traveling across the country in planes, and the likelihood of losing an entire team to a freak accident became a real possibility.

For the same reason that the president and vice president never fly on the same plane, the NFL (and every major sports league) developed its own version of a “disaster plan” in case one of its franchises suffered a significant loss.

Plan 1 - “Near Disaster”: The NFL breaks its disaster plan into two categories; the first is a “near disaster,” which it classifies as fewer than 15 players being killed during a season.

If this happened, the team would be required to play out the remainder of the season but would receive priority over all waiver claims for the rest of the season.

The plan also states that if the team’s quarterback is among the players lost, it can draft up to two quarterbacks from any team with three quarterbacks on its roster.

Each team could protect two of its own quarterbacks, and those drafted would be returned to their original team the following season.

But that’s not even the craziest part.

Plan 2 - “Disaster”: In a “disaster” situation, which the NFL describes as 15 or more players being killed, the commissioner decides whether the team will continue the season.

If he decides they can’t, that team will forfeit the remainder of its games, and a “restocking” draft will occur in the offseason.

Every team could protect 32 of its 52 players, while the “disaster” team would pick from the remainder.

That team would also automatically get the first overall pick in the next NFL Draft.

And while this whole concept might sound crazy, it didn’t stop one Dolphins fan from proposing that his team kill its own players to force a disaster draft in the wake of several injuries.

🏆 Winner’s Circle

The Minnesota Twins just lost over $50 million overnight, but now it could be the reason they’re sold for $2 billion.

Background: The Pohlad family, which has owned the Twins for 40 years, just announced its intention to sell the franchise. This would mark the end of the fourth-longest ownership tenure in baseball:

1. New York Yankees, Steinbrenner Group (1973)

2. Chicago White Sox, Jerry Reinsdorf (1981)

3. Philadelphia Phillies, Buck Family (1981)

4. Minnesota Twins - Pohlad Family (1984)

So why sell?

Well, the obvious answer is that the team is now worth between $1.5 billion and $2.0 billion, a 4,000% increase in value over the $44 million Carl Pohlad bought the team for in 1984.

And given that only five MLB franchises have been sold in the past decade, the family could likely get much more than their estimated valuation.

But that’s not why I think they’re going to sell.

Bally Sports: This announcement conveniently came just a few weeks after it was reported that Bally Sports, the network previously responsible for airing the games of 12 different MLB teams, had ended its contracts with 11 of them, including the Twins.

Now, from a fan’s perspective, this is actually great news.

Without Bally Sports, there will be no more blackouts, and the league has already announced that it will step in, as it did for the San Diego Padres, and offer an unrestricted streaming option for $20 per month or $100 per season.

However, for teams like the Twins, this announcement was a direct hit.

Lost Revenue: For reference, in the league’s first year running the Padres' streaming service, the team only had around 40,000 subscribers.

This means that instead of earning millions per month from Bally, they likely only earned around $800,000 per month or $4.8 million for the season.

And for the Pohlads, whose deal with Bally earned the team $54M per year, this was likely the final straw in their decision to sell the team.

⏱ In Other News

• The Cowboys take another L

• Japan loves MLB more than the US

• The Packers have beef with Green Bay

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