It’s been a month since we posted a Thursday Thorns column, and in that time, the Texas Tech Red Raiders got eliminated from the College Football Playoff. Amen to that! However … there are still so many problems with the college football landscape, and we want to bring attention to multiple informational pieces of writing, which can help inform the fans still out there about the realities for this totally fractured sport.

First, this piece on LinkedIn from a member of Knight-Newhouse College Athletics, a college-sports think tank. It explains how a school like Indiana can go from not winning a conference title since 1967 and securing just nine victories from 2021-2023 to the most powerful program in the nation seemingly overnight. It takes a Vince Lombardi effort to achieve this, of course, and the Hoosiers scored there, eh?

The legendary Lombardi still needed two seasons to take over a one-win team from 1958 and get them to the NFL Championship Game by 1960, though—without free agency (i.e., NIL) or major infrastructure rebuilding from the Green Bay Packers organization. Indiana’s Curt Cignetti has outdone that, taking a three-win Hoosiers team from 2023 and leading it to two consecutive CFP appearances and a 26-2 record.

We know how Michigan did that, from a two-win season in 2020 to three straight CFP berths from 2021-2023, so forgive us if we’re skeptical here. However, Cignetti doesn’t seem to be an epic douchebag like Jim Harbaugh, and there are no scandals brewing around the Indiana program right now. The LinkedIn piece by Scott Hirko illustrates just how the Hoosiers did this: spending money, hiring Cignetti, and the NIL sh*t.

The irony of Indiana being a “basketball school” is not lost on us, however, despite the fact the Hoosiers hoops program hasn’t made a Final Four since 2002 and has not won March Madness since 1987. If the university wins the CFP finale against the University of Miami, it will cement its evolution from hardwood blueblood to gridiron powerhouse: two words that no one has ever associated with the University of Indiana.

Second, this brings us to the financial realities of what Indiana achieved in such a short time: not every school can do this without a lot of external financial support. This piece by Dwayne Yancey of the Cardinal News (Virginia) explores the financial realities exposed by the Knight-Newhouse report. Among the schools that made data available—basically, only the public universities across the nation—it’s a bleak future here.

Yancey suggests only 24 schools really have the resources to run their athletic departments financially independent from their respective campuses: that’s right … only 24 public colleges could do what Indiana did without charging mandatory (and excessive, in the form of “tuition”) fees to normal students or rely on some kind of “institutional support” in any way whatsoever. This is a suggestion of the Akufo League, really.

Here are the schools with the money to pull this off—Indiana is not among them, of course (nor is Texas Tech … go figure while you try to follow the money):

  • B1G (10): Iowa, Michigan, Michigan State, Nebraska, Ohio State, Oregon, Penn State, Purdue, Washington, and Wisconsin
  • SEC (10): Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, LSU, Mississippi, Mississippi State, Oklahoma, Texas, and Texas A&M
  • Big XII (4): Iowa, Kansas, Kansas State, and Oklahoma State

That’s it, folks … your future Akufo League, perhaps—Public Division. As Yancey notes, private schools don’t disclose their financial data. As private schools, they also have more flexibility on how they spend their money, in general. And three ACC teams are close to making the Top 24 threshold, too, for the record: Clemson, Florida State, and Louisville. No “current” Pac-12 teams make the cut, of course, otherwise … yeah.

Welcome to the soon-to-be-future of the upper echelon in college sports. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.