College Football Playoff reaches surprise agreement with ESPN for 6-year extension if issues are resolved
According to The Athletic, it looks like the College Football Playoff and ESPN will continue their longstanding partnership for another six years as long as the CFP can get their act together on three key issues. Athletic Senior Writer, Andrew Marchand and a handful of their college football insiders were all over the breaking news […]
According to The Athletic, it looks like the College Football Playoff and ESPN will continue their longstanding partnership for another six years as long as the CFP can get their act together on three key issues.
Athletic Senior Writer, Andrew Marchand and a handful of their college football insiders were all over the breaking news this afternoon.
The way that The Athletic staff phrased it made it sound as though this is a done deal between ESPN and College Football Playoff, but the three key issues that still need to be resolved before the six-year contract extension is finalized are not simple ones.
Key Issues To Resolve
According to The Athletic's report, "future governance, revenue distribution, and access" are the three key remaining issues yet to be resolved before the contract extension is set in motion.
Future governance of the entire sport of college football is a hot button topic right now. Will college football breakaway from the NCAA by itself? Who will lead and make decisions for college football as a whole moving forward? How does any leadership fairly distribute decision-making power across all major athletic conferences? There are so many outstanding questions, all of which are trying to find resolution without clear answers in sight.
Revenue distribution in this case is obviously more related to how money will be spread between all major programs and conferences, but there's another wrinkle that may arise during the six-year span that this new contract encapsulates. If a revenue sharing agreement is made for student athletes to be directly compensated here soon that may impact the College Football Playoff significantly.
And lastly, access to the playoff has been up for debate ever since the Pac-12 was obliterated this offseason via conference realignment. Will there be five conference-winning auto bids into the playoff, or six? Pac-12 (two?) commissioner, George Kliavkoff has been the sole holdout in delaying that particular decision for sometime now.
While it seems this six-year contract extension between ESPN and the College Football Playoff is somewhat of an inevitability, there are still certainly many details to work out first.
