College Sports Transformed in the Past 25 Years to a Nearly Unrecognizable Product

Welcome to Sports Illustrated’s College Football Quarter-Century Week. We will look back at the past 25 seasons in college football, ranking the top 25 teams, quarterbacks, non-QB players, coaches, games and scandals. You can find those stories here.

As much as things have changed across the sports landscape in the 21st century, nothing has evolved more radically than college athletics. The economy of it. The geography. The ethics. The legality. Almost everything is different, much of it dramatically so. Some for the better, some for the worse.

If there were a 2000 college football version of “Washington’s Dream,” the Nate Bargatze–centered skit on Saturday Night Live in which the father of the country foresees the future, it might go something like this:

Players will be paid as para-professionals, and it will be within NCAA rules. Nobody will even have to lie about it anymore.

Speaking of NCAA rules: The ones that still exist will be outsourced to some new entity. No one knows if they will actually be enforced. The most powerful people will be TV executives and conference commissioners—and some of the commissioners will be former TV execs. The biggest conferences will essentially be TV networks.

Kevin D. Liles/Sports Illustrated (Joe Burrow); Peter Read Miller/Sports Illustrated (Reggie Bush); Darren Carroll/Sports Illustrated (Nick Saban)

Second-year Oklahoma coach Bob Stoops will win the national title this year and get a raise to $1.4 million. Twenty-five years later, that won’t be enough to land a star quarterback out of something called the transfer portal.

Free agency will be a reality, and players will move at such an accelerated rate that even the pro leagues will find it chaotic. Some will play for four teams in four years.

The acronym “NIL” will become part of the vocabulary. The word “amateurism” will be stricken from the record. Many fans will swear off the sport. The TV ratings will suggest they’re fibbing.

The NCAA will lose more lawsuits than Vanderbilt loses games.

The Pac-12 will cease to exist as we know it. The Big 12 will have 16 teams. The Big Ten will have 18. The Atlantic Coast Conference will have teams on the Pacific coast. Why don’t they change their names to reflect the new reality? No one knows.

USC and UCLA will be in the same conference with Rutgers and Maryland. Stanford and California will be in the same conference with Miami and Florida State. Arizona and Arizona State will be in the same conference with West Virginia and Central Florida. These new rivalries will be riveting.

There will finally be a playoff. It will have four teams, which will be good. Then it will have 12 teams, which will be better. But that still won’t be good enough for the greedy. so there will be a push for 16, with Week Zero potentially becoming Week 1 even though it will still probably be called Week Zero, because college football.

In the playoff era, the season will end in late January, not in proximity to New Year’s Day. The Rose Bowl will kick off an hour earlier in 2026, even if that means the sunset—which has somehow been a guiding force in postseason scheduling—will not occur at the end of the third quarter.

Nick Saban, starting his first season at LSU, will become the greatest coach in college football history. Most of his best work will happen at rival Alabama, to the chagrin of LSU fans.

Nick Saban was just starting his college football coaching career as the century turned. Now, he is the GOAT. | Erick W. Rasco/Sports Illustrated

Bill Belichick, who is a losing first-year coach of the New England Patriots, will become the head coach of the North Carolina Tar Heels 25 years from now, after winning six Super Bowls. His future girlfriend at North Carolina is not yet born.

Penn State, considered a pillar of rectitude under Joe Paterno, will be immersed in the worst scandal in college football history. The most unfireable coach in the country will be abruptly terminated in a late-night announcement in November 2011. His legacy will be stained and his campus statue sent into storage.

Deion Sanders, star NFL cornerback, will become a Division I head coach. So will Trent Dilfer, Eddie George and Michael Vick.

San Diego Chargers quarterback Jim Harbaugh will become Los Angeles Chargers head coach Jim Harbaugh. In between those two stints with the Chargers, he will be the best coach in history at San Diego University, arguably the best coach in history at Stanford, one of the best coaches in history for the San Francisco 49ers and the best coach in history at Michigan. He will also become a notable advocate for khakis, steak and whole milk. After broadly hinting that the SEC was full of cheats, years later Harbaugh will serve disciplinary suspensions for NCAA violations, then beat the NCAA posse out of Ann Arbor, Mich.

A Harbaugh staffer at Michigan will disguise himself as a Central Michigan staffer for a game so he could spy on Michigan State. He will also fund tickets for a network of snoops to enter stadiums of upcoming opponents to record their play signals. Michigan fans will argue that it didn’t happen, then argue that nobody in a leadership position knew about it, then argue that the spying really didn’t matter, then argue that the spying wasn’t really a violation, then argue that the Ohio State coach turned in the spy.

After winning three national championships from 1981 to ’99, the SEC will win 14 from 2003 to ’22. Paul Finebaum, currently a sports columnist and local radio host in Birmingham will become an SEC avatar and major ESPN TV presence.

Huddling will largely go away. Then it will come back. Defense will largely go away. Then it will come back. Nebraska will largely go away. It has not come back.

Notre Dame, currently 12 years into a national title drought, will still be in a national title drought 25 years later.

Athletes will progress to the point that a 341-pound nose tackle can run like this.

Jim Tressel, currently the head coach at Youngstown State, will win a national title at Ohio State, get fired by Ohio State, become the president of Youngstown State and then the lieutenant governor of Ohio.

Tommy Tuberville, currently the head coach at Auburn, will become a U.S. Senator. No one knows how.

Kirk Ferentz will still be the coach at Iowa, extolling the virtues of a good punt.

There are more Mannings on the way. Peyton’s little brother, Eli, currently a backup at Mississippi, will become a star. In the 2020s there will be Arch Manning at Texas.

The Georgia head coach will be making $13 million a year by 2024. The Texas A&M coach will be paid more than $76 million to stop being the Texas A&M coach in ’23. There will be a $3 million defensive coordinator, a $2 million offensive coordinator and a $1 million strength and conditioning coach. There will also be general managers. But the athletic directors will say that there isn’t enough money to properly fund their Olympic sports.

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