The world according to Jim:
• It’s time. It’s past time, in fact.
Time not only to change the process of deciding a college football champion, but time to change the entire face of the sport, after a 2025 regular season lurched to a conclusion and produced a 12-team playoff field that, to be honest, shouldn’t exactly make you feel good about college football’s future.
Unless you consider the griping about who did and who didn’t get in – and which outside entities (specifically ESPN) had a thumb on the scale – to be a feature rather than a bug. …
• First, the sport desperately needs independent leadership, since the NCAA has basically relinquished control and all of the fiefdoms (ESPN, Fox, the SEC, the Big Ten) are fighting for extra shares of the pie. So I’ll volunteer to be college football commissioner. …
• And now that that’s done, I’ll go back to the concept I first introduced in August 2021 – a Division I Super League, made up of the sport’s top 40 teams (compiled over a three-year period) in four divisions and featuring promotion and relegation. Since I came up with that idea, which admittedly was a device to fill column space, others in various corners of the sport have toyed with the idea on a smaller scale.
This would not be small scale. Four 10-school divisions, grouped by win-loss records over the last three years, with teams facing everyone in their division and mandated to play their three non-conference games within that pyramid, including at least one against a traditional rival.
Which means no more of those early-season breathers – or, in the case of the SEC, next-to-last game snoozers. And it also means no reason why USC should ever duck Notre Dame, or vice versa. …
The best part? The College Football Playoff, the subject of so much angst and anger, wouldn’t need a committee to select the field. You earn your way in by winning. …
• Here’s how it would look, with those last three seasons’ records in parentheses:
Tier I, with the top six teams qualifying for a 16-team playoff: Ohio State (37-5), Oregon (36-4), Georgia (36-5), Notre Dame (34-7), Texas (34-8), Ole Miss (32-6), Michigan (32-8), SMU (30-10), Missouri (29-9).
Tier II, four playoff qualifiers: Penn State (29-12), Washington (28-12), BYU (27-11), Miami (27-11), Tennessee (27-11), Texas Tech (27-12), Louisville (27-12), Texas A&M (26-12), Oklahoma (26-12), LSU (26-12).
Tier III, three qualifiers: Clemson (26-13), Iowa State (26-13), Iowa (26-13), Duke (25-14), Kansas State (25-14), USC (24-14), Utah (23-14), Arizona (23-14), Illinois (23-14), Georgia Tech (23-15).
Tier IV, three qualifiers: Maryland (24-21), ASU (22-16), North Carolina State (22-16), Minnesota (21-17), Florida State (20-18), Nebraska (19-18), Rutgers (19-19), Syracuse (19-19), West Virginia (19-19), California (19-19).
• Those who don’t qualify for the Super League will play in the same conferences they do now, which will be less bloated. (And maybe, just maybe, over time some sense will return to conference alignments.) And there will be upward mobility: The five best teams from the rest of college football – yes, including the Group of Six conferences as well as the Power Four – will be promoted to Tier IV, whose bottom five will be relegated. And teams within the four tiers will move up and down accordingly.
It’s supposed to be a meritocracy, right? …
• Meanwhile, word that the LA Bowl will host its last game when Boise State and Washington meet may be a precursor to a seismic shakeup among the off-Broadway bowls. When a Notre Dame listens to its players and declines an invitation to a secondary bowl – and remember, the Irish weren’t the only ones to do so – it continues a trend that started when individual players began opting out.
Those who survive may be the bowls that offer NIL cash bonuses to the participants. …
• Jeff Kent, Baseball Hall of Famer? I did not see that one coming.
Two things worth noting here. First, the special committee that decides Contemporary Era inductees – and gave Kent 14 of the 16 votes while Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens received less than five apiece – sent a message that will resonate when the late Pete Rose appears on a special committee ballot for the first time in December 2027. Character counts, and the gambling issues that got Rose originally banned from baseball will be a factor.
Second: The 27-man regular ballot sent to us members of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America is not exactly laden with star quality. I would not be surprised if the highest-profile member of the Class of ’26 next July in Cooperstown is Joe Buck, who will receive the Ford Frick Award for baseball broadcasting excellence. …
• This week’s quiz: The Chargers, who defeated the Kansas City Chiefs in the opener in Brazil in September, have a chance to not only sweep the 6-7 Chiefs on Sunday in Kansas City but knock them out of playoff contention. When is the last time the Chargers swept a season series from KC? Answer below. …
• You may have heard that the arena being built to host hockey at the Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics in February is not only perilously behind schedule but is being built with a rink that is short of regulation NHL size – and since NHL players will be Olympic participants, this could be a significant issue among the league’s owners from a health and safety standpoint.
So, a suggestion (and TNT’s Paul Bissonnette came up with this concept): Move Olympic hockey elsewhere. And our additional suggestion: Play it in L.A. and Anaheim. If nothing else, it would be a makeup call for sending the 2028 Olympic softball and canoe slalom events to Oklahoma City. …
• And a reminder, which shouldn’t be necessary: If you’re going to promise a venue, do it right and do it on time. …
• Quiz answer: The Chargers’ last sweep over the Chiefs was in 2013, four years before Patrick Mahomes arrived in Kansas City. The then-San Diego Chargers won in KC 41-38 in early November. They then beat the Chiefs at Qualcomm Stadium 27-24 in overtime, on Nick Novak’s 36-yard field goal, to reach the playoffs for the first time in four seasons. Alex Smith was then KC’s starting quarterback.
Since then? Kansas City had won 19 of 22 meetings before Sept. 5 in Sao Paulo, a 27-21 Chargers victory. An L.A. victory Sunday would slap a punctuation on what has been a decade of Kansas City dominance: 10 straight playoff seasons, a 123-41 record, five Super Bowl appearances and three Lombardi Trophies.
jalexander@scng.com
