Why we may be reaching a tipping point for the Power Five to break away from the FBS

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"If there's no NCAA Tournament next year," Tatos said. "… I think then there has to be a breakaway from this model."
To put it more plainly, a separation of the Power Five conferences from the NCAA has long been possible. Those 65 schools, including independent Notre Dame, already exist as separate entities -- financially, competitively and even corporately. But with the coronavirus ratcheting up the stakes, a tipping point may be at hand. 

"I'm telling you, if you or I were going to place a bet on a stock … you could double down on the Power Five being a separate entity now within two years," said Vince Thompson, founder and CEO of MELT, an Atlanta-based sports and entertainment marketing firm.

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Basketball would be the tipping point here because it is the financial backbone of the NCAA. College athletics is experiencing what it's like to be without March Madness for one year.

For now, Thompson -- an Auburn graduate who has been a part of 16 Final Fours -- is already forecasting an accelerated timeline for massive changes in college athletics due to the coronavirus.

"With or without a cure, you're looking at forced modernization of the NCAA. It is going to be an accelerated seismic shift in college athletics," he said. "The good Lord has a wicked sense of humor. It is forcing a lot of hands that even three months ago, [if] you and I would have had this conversation, we'd be laughing about it."

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The economy has opened the door

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No one is laughing these days. The economy is tanking, dragging college athletics down with it.  The NCAA's relevancy and might have never been more in question. It is losing in court. It is losing its mission. It long ago lost in the court public opinion. There are few brands with a lower Q rating.

These last months have laid bare how even large athletic departments live paycheck to paycheck. Until two months ago, we would have never considered March Madness being canceled.

The economic impact has caused such upheaval in college sports that schools began trimming budgets, personnel and sports. Some coaches took temporary pay cuts.

A fissure in the college athletic power structure has widened. The NCAA is the middle juggling a pandemic, its finances and an increasingly skeptical membership.

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The NCAA's relevancy is fading

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If the underpinnings of the current structure are further weakened, the Power Five would be able to survive athletically, competitively and corporately. Their brand, influence and economics are better than that of their membership organization.

In other words, they -- not the NCAA -- are the game.

"The NCAA is becoming less and less relevant," said one Power Five president who did not wish to be identified. "I could see the Power Five conferences creating their own version of the NCAA."

Thompson calls it a "grand reckoning" between the NCAA's amateur ideal (the so-called "collegiate model") and athletic departments' for-profit business model.
"That is the greatest inherent friction of all time," Thompson said. "Those two [things] can't serve the same master mutually."

That forced modernization of college athletics may force the NCAA to either remake itself or be left behind.
It already seems to be ceding it power asking for help from Congress to fully implement name, image and likeness legislation.

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What would a Power Five breakaway look like?

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That has landed us at this point where the game's postseason is made up of an LLC named the College Football Playoff, of which 130 FBS schools and ESPN all have a stake in its success.

NCAA sets play and practice rules and handles enforcement, but it has to tread lightly. The NCAA is nothing without that highest level of football, particularly the Power Five, which makes up half of the FBS (65 of 130, including Notre Dame).
The "Power Five" nickname itself sprang organically out of the 2015 NCAA Convention that granted those conferences more autonomy in NCAA matters. That has essentially led us to this point where the Power Five administrators could take their ball, go home and create a separate, more sensible, more profitable equivalent to a Fortune 500 company.

Don't necessarily think of those 65 schools would be completely alone. They'd most likely have to play somebody. Think about a group of, say, the top 90 or 100 schools to enhance scheduling and a television contract.

The American Athletic Conference has long considered itself among the power conferences despite being part of the Group of Five. It even built a marketing plan around the term "Power Six" to indicate as much.

"If you talk about the Power Five breaking away … the American has been adamant that they would have to go with them," a source close to the conference said.

Would the Power Five negotiate with a players union? Sure. That's kind of the point of breaking away from the NCAA. Stage their own basketball tournament? Absolutely.

Because the Power Five don't "own" hoops' postseason, schools play for NCAA-mandated equitable "units" awarded after each win. That number would have been $282,000 in 2020. Each of the Power Five earned $66 million just for being in the CFP.

Eyebrows were raised earlier this month when Emmert said the NCAA wouldn't mandate a return to play from the pandemic. How could it? The NCAA can issue all the medical guidelines it wants, but that's still all they are -- guidelines. Not bylaws that can be enforced by actual penalties. The membership would never allow it. The 452-page NCAA Manual is already too big and too confusing.

As an entity, the NCAA seems to exist these days to avoid lawsuit. Every major decision is rooted in that consideration.

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The ultimate question

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Perhaps it's time to ask, simply: What exactly is the long-term future of the NCAA? Sure, it provides branding and structure and returns a large part of that tournament revenue to the membership, but it also props up an antiquated amateur model, the only one like it in the world.
All while the highest, most powerful level of college sports continues to prove it can run itself.
 
"It would be healthy for the football powers to separate," Staurowsky said. "It's obvious why they've maintained their interlocking relationship with the NCAA. It's to receive the tax benefit of being with an educational entity.

"Given the financial stakes involved, it would be a healthy thing for the football powers to spin off and become an identifiable college football league. Have a players association on the other side of that. There are some people who are talking about moving in that direction. The time has come to really think about that."

To defend its not-a-penny-more philosophy in court, the NCAA has continually maintained further player compensation would turn off the average fan. The paying customers would stop coming.

That's been proven false. Former LSU long snapper Blake Ferguson "made" $12,000 a year while in school in allowable grants, cost of attendance and scholarship checks. Last year, Ninth Circuit judge Claudia Wilken told the NCAA its current athlete benefits add up to "pay for play."

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