SMQ: Will new pro football leagues impact lower levels of college football?

The new Alliance of American Football and next year’s reboot of the XFL are changing pro football. How will they impact lower levels of college football?

With the Alliance of American Football coming online this spring, and the XFL looking to it makes sense that talk has swirled around how the launch of new pro football leagues could open up a greater level of individual and collective agency for athletes coming out of high school and in turn have a massive impact on college football as a whole.

Giving real options and a legitimate negotiating position to players is by no means a bad thing. Considering the NCAA is currently reviewing their college football transfer guidelines, a pro football league that offered an opportunity to break free of the intercollegiate model would give young football players that bargaining chip that could break the NCAA’s stranglehold on amateurism.

While that is certainly a real possibility, especially given the fact that the AAF is especially focused on becoming a feeder league of sorts to the NFL, the impact will likely have a disproportionate impact not on the top tier of talent that comes to college but the next group right behind them in the recruiting rankings.

That is not necessarily a bad thing. College football is always evolving, and the sport is unlikely to die off completely. But for certain programs, continuing to sponsor scholarships for the gridiron game might become a game of diminishing returns.

Schools in the Power Five conferences will go back to sponging up a greater proportion of elite players from what could end up a somewhat diminished pool of talent. Athletes who once opted to go for chances in the Group of Five or the FCS, on the other hand, might be more inclined to go for earlier paydays and the chance to develop with pro football coaches in either the AAF or XFL in hopes of forging alternatives to the college-to-NFL pipeline.

If the Alliance of American Football and the XFL adopt more liberal rules regarding signing pro football contracts out of high school than the NFL’s three-year restriction, it will have a downstream impact that bypasses those top tiers of talent. Each major program will have fewer blue-chip players each year, but they will still have the talent to maintain a level of skill and excitement that currently entrances millions of fans across the country. So those are really not programs that have much to worry about in this regard.

No, this week’s Sunday Morning Quarterback is going to dive into the real programs at risk, those Group of Five, FCS, and even Division II schools that are going to see their talent bases dry up. (Division III is likely still going to chug along as it does presently without much impact from pro football proliferation.)

How pro football developments could impact the Group of Five

It is at the Group of Five level where the impact is likely to be most pronounced when it comes to college football and the new pro football leagues that have come online or will in the next year. Should those leagues get to a point where they adopt rules allowing players to sign immediately out of high school or even after just one year of college play, it could seriously decimate the talent at the Group of Five level.

This impact would be twofold. First, players who previously opted to go to Group of Five programs or even less-heralded Power Five programs instead of riding the pine at powerhouses will make their way to places like Tuscaloosa and Norman and Columbus once again. The diffusion of skilled players to lower-tier teams that was made possible by things like scholarship limits would become less pronounced as talent clumps more heavily at the top.

Second, transfer rules that allow players to move freely as graduates and that regularly provide opportunities to play immediately via waiver when transferring as an undergraduate will only skew the field further. Undervalued talent that blossoms in their first year at a Group of Five program could find ways to transfer to Power Five schools with greater regularity, especially if pro football leagues like the AAF and XFL adopt a one-and-done philosophy similar to the NBA.

In both cases, the function will be for a trickle-up movement of talent to ever-higher levels of play. While this is a great thing for players themselves, it will make life more difficult for the majority of Group of Five teams. There will still be powerhouses like UCF and Boise State that manage to draw quality talent and maximize the development of the players they do recruit, but the cumulative effect will be a diminished talent base among the two-deep.

What might pro football growth mean for the FCS?

Just as Group of Five teams are more likely to see talent they normally would be able to recruit opt instead to take over the vacancies opened up by pro football opportunities at Power Five programs, so too is the FCS likely to see their talent pool diminish as those Group of Five teams restock their cupboards from the lower subdivision.

At the same time, the current state of transfer rules could finally facilitate the possibility of an FCS superteam that would decisively break the restrictions once and for all. Players opting to leave Power Five programs but stay in school might see a diminished skill level at the Group of Five level and opt instead for the guaranteed chance to play immediately that is permitted to student-athletes transferring down a subdivision.

In that regard, it could be more of a two-way street for the FCS. The appeal of a real playoff could ultimately further skew talent that doesn’t make the Power Five or pro football cut to opt for an FCS opportunity.

Perhaps, even, we could see more teams take the route that Idaho did this year and transition downward a subdivision. As Group of Five teams see television contracts diminish due to the lower quality of product they can offer, shifting down to the FCS level could become a more attractive prospect with its lower scholarship limits.

Final thoughts

Ultimately, at this point it is all speculative unless and until the new pro football leagues actually do make a move toward liberalizing employment opportunities for football players less than three years removed from their high-school days.

Should that day come, however, it will almost certainly mean further consolidation of the top talent at the Power Five level. The power will remain with those programs, as they become increasingly distanced from the rest of Division I football.

In this case, the Group of Five will likely become a relic of a bygone era. The dreams of fans who love a good Cinderella story will fall by the wayside. Whether that will be something to cry about, especially because it will come at the expense of restrictions on player movement and employment opportunities, is something that each fan will ultimately have to decide for themselves.