If you are a fan of college football in 2026, then you have to hold two thoughts in your head at the same time: the sport has resolved its original sin by allowing players to get paid and ending the fiction of amateurism and the ridiculous facade of rules and investigations that went into maintaining it and the sport feels like it is transforming into something grim and unrecognizable. In the muck and confusion, among the smoking ruins of conferences and the creation of a new class of grizzled 25-year-old ronin who have played for six different teams, and the curtain being pulled back on the NCAA revealing that the hulking dealer of tattoo and hamburger-based retribution is in fact a timid mall cop who is not allowed to pursue anyone into the parking lot, no one at any level of this mess can resolve basic questions such as who is allowed to play college football. As a result, a sport funded and propped up almost entirely by local car magnates and scions of third-generation hot tub fortunes has reached its apotheosis: everyone is just suing everyone else’s ass all of the time.
It would be easy to blame college football’s spiral into more and more chaos on the crumbling of amateurism. Had the NCAA decided to allow schools to pay players and allowed them to create a union to represent players’ collective interests, they could have figured this out decades ago. Instead, the NCAA fought tooth and nail to protect its sham amateurism structure and had nothing in place when the courts including judges named The Honorable R. Grim Deathstriker who exist only to rule that it is legal and constitutional for corporations to force employees to be grafted into robot exoskeletons that make them better at doing spreadsheets universally ruled against the NCAA and created an insane gray market for college athletes that has entirely outsourced the payment of players to local millionaires who send emails that say “ten yrds a carry i tell you whut we ned to fire the CORDINATORS ASS sent from my Microsoft Surface the official tablet of the NFL.” The schools were happy with this arrangement because it put all of the pressure on boosters and fans to fund their rosters and allows a coach who just lost to a MAC team in a buy game to tell disappointed fans that “we’re not just not getting the support we need” and that if they don’t want to get rolled up by Bowling Green maybe they should stop eating that avocado toast and go out and pay for a tight end who can catch the goddamn ball before driving away in a six ton civilian anti-lollygagging assault vehicle with turrets that shoot footballs.
But it wasn’t the fact that it is now legal to pay players that made schools and conferences start gobbling each other in a cannibalistic frenzy led by the Big Ten and SEC. Player payment was not the catalyst for endless rounds of playoff expansion culminating in a twelve-team system specifically designed to make fans of good but not great teams insane and their boosters to spend billions of dollars hiring and firing the same 25 coaches every three months.
My theory about why college football has been changing so rapidly is that for most of its existence the most amount of energy that the component parts that form the loose conglomeration that governs college football was spent preserving the tenet of amateurism and attempting to police money going to athletes or trying to secretly subvert this to pay players. Once the fig leaf of amateurism fell away and you could just give a wide receiver a couple million dollars instead of having to create a rube goldberg mechanism consisting of uncles and no-show jobs at car dealerships and an influx of ferrari purchasing among the community of football grandmothers, college football officials had nowhere else to put this energy and decided they had to eat the PAC 12.
While the NCAA once liked to present itself as the domain of square-jawed investigators that would pose with burritos a booster paid for on the table like they’re a mound of cocaine seized by the sheriff’s department, the organization and the conferences and the schools are now determining who is allowed to play college sports by waiting for a player to sue them and then having several courts rule on it. College eligibility is now partly determined by a series of injunctions. Everyone is suing each other all of the time to the point where I expect to see a fake play where a punter kicks a subpoena directly at an opposing coach.
This is what I assume it would look like for a college football coach to receive a sideline subpoena and look at the scoreboard informing him he has been served.
The most prominent story of the offseason involved the discovery that top quarterback transfer Brendan Sorsby had repeatedly bet on sports including his own team’s games. Normally, that would be an obvious and instantaneous end to a career, but he transferred to Texas Tech, which is backed by oil billionaire Cody Campbell, a super-booster who has bought himself a position as the school’s de facto athletic director and looks like a guy who menaces Walker Texas Ranger before being unconvincingly spin kicked in slow motion through a plate glass window. Campbell and his army of Texas lawyers who I assume when not in court are kept in a terrarium where they cluck “now see here” at each other while tussling for dry-aged steaks thrown into the enclosure, went on a quixotic journey through the American court system that eventually ruled that no you can’t play college football if you have been caught actively betting on it.
As we speak, the courts are determining whether players who have left college football and spent the summer in NFL training camps can just say the hell with this shit and play college football. This is an echo of earlier cases where basketball players who had played actual NBA games attempted to quit the league and return to college where they will ostensibly make more money.
In this case, the scheme to pluck players from NFL practice squads is being masterminded by LSU head coach and boat-tan hamburglar Lane Kiffin. Kiffin’s team already boasts a team glittering with expensive talent; it is unclear what roles the players he has targeted just weeks before the opening of the season will play on LSU. But Kiffin, who maintains a compulsive desire to be the main character of college football after abandoning his Ole Miss team right before a playoff game to take the LSU job and then acting wounded and persecuted about it, seemed to recruit these players mainly out of a solemn duty to be a little stinker.
The SEC and Big Ten came down hard on this plan and quickly drafted rules banning NFL players from playing college football. The SEC schools seemed particularly upset about this, I suspect because every single one of them is both upset they did not think of it first and also because Kiffin is extremely annoying. Late this week, a court said those players can play. They are the first players with Schroedinger’s Eligibility.
While the court battles rage on and the government meets every few months to “save college football” by having a bunch of congressmen and administration officials whose policy on labor is to post AI memes about bringing back the good old days of Victorian child mangling equipment, it is unclear what to even think about what college football is and where it’s going. College football has always been a sport that leans hard into tradition while maintaining a roiling simmer of chaos and rapscallionship underneath, which is part of its charm.
College football in 2026 is in a weird place where it is hard to argue with many of the changes and yet these changes seem weird and sour. It is an unalloyed good that the players are getting paid. It is also good for the players that they no longer are bound to bad programs and tyrannical coaches and can offer their skills on an open market– as strange as the robust transfer market is for college football, it seems to have instantly settled into the rhythms of the Sports Transaction News Cycle with lists of the top transfer players available and radio callers hollering about whether the backup guard from Northern Illinois fits the system. Fans of middle teams now understand that their teams’ best players are likely to bolt for better programs in the offseason while also celebrating that they can pick the bones of mid-majors for a grizzled offensive lineman instead of hoping a nineteen-year-old walkon knows how to pass block.
Is it good or bad for college football that players can just move en masse when a new coach is named or that it is now normal for a coach to functionally dismiss his entire team and replace it? Is it good or bad for college football that a coach can bring in a set of loyal players from one school to the next like a sort of elite retinue following a medieval warlord? Is it good when Curt Cignetti uses this strategy to win a national championship for Indiana, an event that seemed so unlikely that if you won a national championship with Indiana in an NCAA video game it would have a post-credits scene where you woke up from a dream to see a low-polygon Nick Saban getting doused in gatorade?
I forgot that coaches were not actually in this game, you would have to figure out if Generic Coach Glasses Three looked the most like Randy Walker
Is it bad for college football if players swept into the dustbin of NFL practice squads can instead earn a lot more money going back to school? For my entire life, the entire premise of college sports has been a strict line drawn between college and pro leagues and the idea of a hardened pro playing in college seemed insane. But does it really make a difference if a marginal NFL player who got fifteen snaps in a preseason game gets to go back and hang out on campus for an extra year? Is there a better way to be in graduate school than make possibly several million dollars and be able to shoulder tackle your peers in a way that would otherwise be frowned upon at conferences where someone has more of a comment than a question
It is hard to determine at what point the queasy feeling watching college football streamline and professionalize comes from watching something you care about change into something else without feeling like an aging fuddy-duddy pining for a sport that was most recognizable as an exploitative ligament destruction factory because that is how it was when you got really into it.
To me, the seismic changes to the conferences and emphasis on the playoff are where the seams in college football start to show. The build up of geographically incoherent superconferences and growth of a playoff that will never be large enough for a team left out to huffily refuse to play in the Pop Tarts Bowl are where the conferences and schools demonstrate a misunderstanding of why people like college football. The people in charge in this multifarious conglomeration of school administrators, conferences, and television executives want to forge a miniature NFL and they will probably make a lot of money doing it as they try to centralize and consolidate. But for me, and I suspect a lot of fans who get up every week and watch their team knowing it will likely never win a championship, the appeal of college football is that it is sprawling, wild, and stupid. Despite all of these changes, it still is. The hope is that college football will remain too ridiculous to contain.
GOVERNMENT ISSUES UPGRADED NORTHWESTERN FOOTBALL THREAT LEVEL
On the one hand, it seems to me that the way college football is moving does not bode well for Northwestern. The remains at the low end of the football payroll, it maintains admissions and transfer hurdles, and it is a small private school with a football program that absolutely no one cares about in a conference that seems to have less and less of a reason to split its gazillion dollars in TV revenue with a team that no one will ever turn on a TV for. Northwestern is not a destination school for recruits or transfers, and other schools will attempt to pry away its best players every year. Every major change seems destined to crush everything Northwestern had been doing to maintain its improbable place as a satisfyingly mediocre team that punches above its weight.
On the other hand, there is no reason why the new college environment can’t help the ‘Cats. Northwestern does not have recognition, prestige, or a promise to play in anything but the lowest tier bowl games that could be used to recruit players but what they do have is a lot of money. Northwestern has relied on one megadonor but this guy has been building things to slap his name on, including the impossibly expensive new stadium scheduled to open in the middle of this season. But fancy athletic facilities and buildings were for the prior version of college football where you couldn't just go out and players. For the first time, it is theoretically possible for Northwestern to overcome the stigma of “being Northwestern” to recruits and transfers by spending money.
To that end, Northwestern is tapping another family for football money. They are reportedly accepting $35 million from the Uilhein family. Mac Uihlein served as a solid middle linebacker for the ‘Cats before graduating this spring. The Uihlein family writ large, of the U-Line industrial supply fortune, are also reliable funders of any ghoulish right wing political project you can imagine and likely others that are impossible to fathom. I suspect most major donors to college football programs are more likely than not to be closer to the Uihlein side politically, but Northwestern fans have been shielded from having to worry too much about that by its greatest power, absolutely no one giving a shit about Wildcat football.
Northwestern has been trying to become more relevant in the Big Ten by bringing in a nationally known coaching personality in offensive coordinator Chip Kelly. The stark difference between Chip Kelly’s reception from the broader college football internet when he debuted looking like a crumpled flesh raisin crammed into a spirit halloween Mr. Construction costume at the New Ryan Field site and Northwestern fans is stark. The broad consensus I saw is that Kelly is washed up and bad coming off a disastrous partial season as offensive coordinator for the Raiders before getting unceremoniously fired and a guy who has been a joke since flaming out of the NFL and settling into a few years of mediocrity at UCLA. Northwestern fans see him as a potential savior.
Kelly fit into the program's proud tradition of pretending to be construction guys
The reason for this disparity is because even if Chip Kelly is washed up, bad, and at his last stop was unwilling or unable to engage in a job that involved navigating multiple Pete Carroll sons, he is still a guy who has in the past coached functioning offenses. I would guess few of the people laughing at the ‘Cats hiring Kelly have watched any Northwestern football games for the past 15 years of constipated Pat Fitzgerald toilet football. This is a program that could in spirit and execution be described as “aspirational Iowa.” If Chip Kelly is merely able to design an offense that transforms from consistently one of the worst in FBS to one that is on the lower edges of mediocre, it would be the most important offensive evolution of the Wildcat football since Northwestern started doing power runs out of spread formations against fuming opponents who lodged complaints with the league offense about it not being plodding enough.
Kelly has some exciting skill position players to work with. Northwestern’s offense starts with star running back Kaleb Komolafe, who broke out after stalwart Cam Porter’s gruesome early season injury and basically became the entire offense as the ‘Cats stopped even trying to pass the ball. Griffin Wilde, the Wildcats’ best receiver, returns. And Michigan State transfer Aidan Chiles offers a tantalizing run/pass skill set that was enough to drive Spartan fans crazy for the past couple of years. Part of that, I understand, was that Chiles got absolutely annihilated behind a porous offensive line, and part of it were the things Chiles did that made him available to Northwestern. No sure thing at quarterback is transferring here, which is why the gold standard of Northwestern transfer quarterbacking has for the past several seasons has been guys who have been able to move the ball exactly enough for the linebackers to catch their breath and to throw exactly enough disastrous interceptions that still allow the ‘Cats to win.
And yet even if Northwestern as a team is good or even better than last year, it might not matter. Northwestern has drawn a Big Ten Death Schedule this season. The ‘Cats have to play juggernauts Ohio State, Indiana, and Oregon on the road. They are scheduled to open the new stadium against a Penn State team ready to avenge last year’s humiliating homecoming coach-toppler. They also get Big Ten West legacy nemesis Iowa back on the docket along with the annual hat game against Bret Bielema’s irritatingly competent Illinois team. If the ‘Cats want any shot at a bowl game they will have to win every non-conference game and take care of the very few other mid-tier Big Ten teams on the schedule. If Braun can get the team to a bowl game this season against this schedule without one of the superteams suffering a Penn State-style collapse into airplane banner mutiny, it would be a major achievement.
The non-conference doesn’t start out easy. They face South Dakota State. In theory, a Power Four team should have enough talent to stand up to even the best FCS teams. But as a person who watched low-tier and even respectable Big Ten teams get ambushed by Dakota teams in the early weeks of the season, I am worried. The Jackrabbits put up more than 70 on Stetson last week. They’ll be in the sedate atmosphere at the unkillable Temporary Lakeside Stadium on a humid evening. Northwestern under Braun has not looked particularly impressive in season openers, and given the dragons lurking on the Big Ten schedule, this is already a vital game for Northwestern’s bowl hopes. The ‘Cats are favored by the gambling people, but no one has any information yet on how this team actually plays. This is a dangerous game.
I’m excited to see how Chiles looks and what the concept of a Chip Kelly Northwestern attack looks like. If Northwestern looks like a normal Northwestern-style offense, that would be disappointing. And if Northwestern gets rolled by an FCS team in a home opener, that would be pretty bad for the ambitions of the season, but it would offer proof that perhaps college football hasn’t changed as much as it has seemed.
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