The Ohio State Buckeyes and the Alabama Crimson Tide made a statement on Thursday amid another wave of change.
There are several changes to college football on the horizon that are likely going to hit over the next several weeks and months.
One of those is the opportunity that universities now have to cash in on their own games with their own smaller media rights deals.
Duke basketball set a precedent this week as they came to an agreement with Amazon to sell a three-game package to the school and the program. This is outside of the deal that the ACC has with ESPN to broadcast all of its games.
While this specific deal is a small one, it opens up Pandora's box in college athletics in a massive way.
If schools are able to sell the rights to their games outside of their TV deals, we will begin to see what is already happening in college football. Teams are beginning to back out of their home and home games with schools from opposing conferences in the hopes of seeing off the rights to those games, so they don't have to share revenue with the entire conference; they just share it with one other school.
Ohio State and Texas are a great example of the way that these home-and-home agreements are. In 2025, Texas came to Columbus and kicked off week one of the college football season at noon on FOX's Big Noon Kickoff.
The viewership and revenue of this game all went to Ohio State.
Now, in 2027, the Buckeyes are going to travel down to Austin and play a 7:00 PM game against the Longhorns that will be broadcast on ESPN, the SEC's partner.
It makes sense and each school wins in this scenario.
Now, for each team, the revenue from this game is spread among all members of the conferences, rather than just the two teams that competed, due to the revenue-share rules.
This, along with the change to a 24-team college football playoff, is giving teams cold feet in their competitive home-and-home matchups.
On Thursday, we saw two different games go two different directions. The first was the announcement that Florida State and Georgia cancelled their home-and-home matchup and are looking for a neutral-site home. The intent here would be to get a partner like Amazon to produce this game.
Also on Thursday, Ohio State and Alabama committed to keeping their home-and-home agreement on the calendar for the 2027 and 2028 regular seasons.
An awesome outcome for what is going to become increasingly rare to see in the sport over the next decade-plus. Money, unfortunately, is the root of all of these horrific decisions, and the NCAA continues to chase the almighty dollar while they ruin the sport in the same swoop.
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