“College football” is not only more like a professional game at its higher levels these days, but it is also as much of a business story as a sports one. At the moment, the phenomenon of NIL (name-image-likeness) payments to the athletes is focusing attention on Texas Tech University. For years, Texas Tech has had interesting if uneven teams, rarely competitive in the top ranks. But, being Texans, boosters of the school are sparing no expense trying to bring the Red Raider brand to the pinnacle, a national championship, through recruitment.
Whether money will talk louder than anything else, including tradition, location (Lubbock, TX) and even the instruction leading to a degree, is uncertain. That’s what makes this an interesting business case study as well as a game-day test. The existence now of a “transfer portal” that allows the hired heros essentially to be free agents during their college years, moving from program to program with no interruption in their eligibility, adds to the commercial challenge.
These kinds of situations aren’t limited to the quest to be No. 1. At various ranks, moneyball is making for hectic change. Take the great realignment in conferences, which comes down to grabbing greater TV or streaming payments to the schools for showing their teams in action (so that more people will bet on that action, but that’s another story). Some athletic conferences are worth more than others, so college presidents have been chasing spots up the ladder, sometimes consigning their student-athletes to distant trips as a result. You see this even at the lower rungs of the ladder.
Take the case of Northern Illinois, which for 28 years has belonged to the Mid-American Conference (MAC), a league of long-established but “smaller school” football teams in the upper Midwest. The Huskies, as these Illinoisans are called (“Illini” is another, “bigger” team in the state), haven’t exactly dominated the MAC but they have risen on occasion to national stature. Last season, they were the only team to defeat Notre Dame until the national title game, when the “Irish” were defeated by Ohio State.
Now Northern Illinois is going to leave the MAC, for football only, beginning in 2026. They will join a revamped Mountain West Conference, which because of other realignments is less of a Mountain West grouping but is still way west of DeKalb, IL. This will mean lots of air travel for the Huskies, including sometimes to Hawaii (a conference member). That will increase costs. Northern Illinois hopes that the Mountain West will get a TV contract that will help pay the freight, but perhaps more important, the new conference is a better opening to the College Football Playoff, the lollapalooza that leads to the national championship. Yet a berth in that spectacle is still a longshot, even if the Huskies win nearly all of their games.
Curiously, cable TV money cuts two ways in the case of Northern Illinois. Its current Midwest regional conference features an unusual schedule in the latter half of each fall, with many games played on Tuesday and Wednesday nights. This is in order to get live coverage on the ESPN sports networks, in a feature called “MACtion.” It does give these usually obscure programs more national attention than they’d get on a busy weekend, but doesn’t suit alumni who might drive 65 miles from Chicago to see a home game on Saturday but aren’t likely to do it midweek. (Likewise for the student body–attendance at these games is minimal.) The new arrangement could sit better with this important constituency.
So many factors are at play in the new world of College Football Inc. that the coursework in Sports Management, an ever-more popular major for the matriculants who wear the team uniforms, should get all the richer. Just like lots of those players themselves. –July 9, 2025
Tim W. Ferguson 