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One gets the sense that the NCAA meetings in Dallas this week are the equivalent of the Yalta Conference for College Athletics. The Big 5 , clearly the winners in the recent mash up of college athletics, are busy dividing their spoils and theifdoms , while the G5 can only wait and hope to find a way forward to negotiate this new and expensive playing field.
Further complicating matters for the G5 is that the new playoff system in College Football, a playoff system that was created to nullify the often criticized BCS system, seems to offer little relief to G5 schools desperate for exposure and a chance to compete on a level playing field. CBS College sports reporter and insider Jeremy Fowler, in his recent article entitled, "In playoff era , Group of 5 sees big payouts and big expenses", all but rules out the ability of any G5 school making the new playoff system in College Football. Fowler writes, "it's structured in such a way that will make a small-conference team making the playoff doubtful at best".
This "structuring" is designed to reward teams with strong strength of schedule resumes and punish those who don't. Going forward, G5 AD's will need to work the phones hard to convince competitive P5 schools to play them. This will more than likely mean more so called one and done games, where G5 schools travel to play a P5 school at their home stadium with no hope of a return game.
What is becoming clearer and clearer, is that to survive in this new sports landscape, G5 schools will need to have excellent leadership, fans who are willing to empty their pockets for financial support and people who show up for games. Those G5 schools that manage to check all three of these boxes will survive in this new landscape, those that don't, however, will find themselves quickly outmatched and unable to compete.
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