Creating College Football's Version of the Super League

So obviously soccer has been turned upside-down in the last 24 hours with the announcement of the the Super League, an idea which I have literally not seen one person think is a good idea. Jack Mac did a great job (above) explaining it for those who may not follow soccer very closely or understand why everybody is so upset about it.

But when I was trying to talk about it with one of my friends who doesn't know anything about soccer, the only American equivalent I could come up with — and there isn't a good one — was if the top college football programs decided to break away from the NCAA and form their own league to rake in all the TV money. So that got me thinking what a college football Super League would look like. Everybody already hates the College Football Playoff for myriad reasons, so let's just go all in and create a Super League so everybody can quit bitching about Cincinnati not making the Playoff.

I sat down and tried to come up with the 16 teams — 12 is a weird number for my American brain, I need it to be a number of teams that can be put into a bracket — that would be included, both on historical and recent merit and also sort of following some of the logic the European Super League used in some of its inclusions. So here is my list.

The No-Brainers:

- Alabama
- Clemson
- Ohio State
- Notre Dame

In all honesty, most of this list could have qualified as "no-brainers" since college football operates as an oligopoly already, but these are the four that are in any league no matter what. Obviously none of them needs any explanation for being here, but while Notre Dame doesn't quite belong alongside the football merits of the other three, we all know they'd be included in this thing from the jump. When college football needs TV revenue, it turns its lonely eyes to South Bend.

The SEC:

- Georgia
- Florida
- Auburn
- LSU

Just as the Premier League got six teams into the European Super League, the SEC gets six into the College Football Super League — we'll get to the final one in a second. After Alabama, these are pretty clearly the four programs you'd select for any league, for both on-field prestige as well as money and fan support. I'd say each of these teams has won a national title since 2008, but, you know ... Georgia. Maybe the Bulldogs will really start to figure it out in the Super League.

The Old Money:

- Tennessee
- Nebraska

I said we'd get to the other SEC team in just a second. So these two teams are the Tottenham and Arsenal of the CFB Super League: a ton of historical prestige and still a fuckload of money despite the fact that both have been going nowhere at warp speed for a decade.

Nebraska is still raking in cash and if Arsenal can be a Super League club without having played in the Champions League in the last four years, Tennessee is a Super League team too.

The Other Supers:

- Texas
- Michigan
- USC
- Oklahoma
- Florida State
- Penn State

These six were pretty easy to round out the list. You could make a legitimate argument for Texas A&M — especially depending upon how much we're considering money into the equation — or Miami or a couple other schools, but there isn't really a program on this list you could put one of those schools over. You gotta have these guys.

So now we have our College Football Super League. Ironically enough, it was only a few weeks ago that a College Football Champions League was proposed, but now we're blowing that up and making it super. Only the elite of the elite — plus Tennessee and Nebraska — are invited.

Sorry to the Syracuse water polo program. We're keeping all the money in the Super League.