The college football season is nearly here, and you’ve likely read about seismic stuff afoot—Texas and Oklahoma slinking off from the Big 12 to the Southeastern Conference, an expanded playoff, the Big Ten/Pac-12/ACC alliance, the potential for more conference reshuffling, and, most excitingly, offensive linemen being paid in barbecue gift cards. 

It’s a lot. You may wonder if this noisy sport of Saturdays is still recognizable. 

So let’s take a moment to gaze at our AP Top Four for 2021…

Alabama, Oklahoma, Clemson, Ohio State. 

Yup! Still extremely recognizable!

But change roils underneath the surface. College football is remodeling itself once more, as the biggest teams and conferences consolidate their power. 

And yet it doesn’t feel like a revolution. It just feels like college football is finally being honest with itself.

Some of the most hyped changes are a ways off, or remain theoretical. Texas and Oklahoma aren’t scheduled to join the SEC until 2025, though nobody will collapse in shock if their divorce from the Big 12 happens earlier. The college playoff expansion from four to 12 isn’t anywhere close to official; this year’s playoff event remains a quartet. There’s no breakaway “super league” of marquee teams, though there’s low-grade speculation one could happen down the road.  

(Free BBQ, however—that’s real! As the Journal’s Laine Higgins chronicled recently, thanks to the new loosening of “name, image likeness” rules in college sports, wise BBQ titans are signing up assemblies of offensive linemen as new spokesmen.) 

The Texas and Oklahoma move is the mammoth one. It’s everything you need to know about college football today—that a pair of high-leverage name-brand programs have no compunction about leaving for college’s sturdiest conference.  

The prevailing reason, of course, is money. Why stick around with a lower-watt conference—and less dough—if more cash is around the corner? The SEC is already college football’s shiniest conference—and if you don’t believe that, ask an SEC fan. 

So here come the Longhorns and Sooners, into the land of the Tide, Tigers, Bulldogs and Gators. 

Meanwhile, the Big Ten, Pac-12 and ACC are forming an alliance to…well, it isn’t completely clear. It seems rooted in some hope to counterbalance SEC dominance and create some intriguing scheduling possibilities. (It also appears to leave the under-siege Big 12 on an island.) 

The ground is shifting under our feet. There was a time, not so long ago, when moves like Texas’s and Oklahoma’s would have been met with wide condemnation. Now everyone’s eyes are open to the bigger financial picture—the mammoth, multibillion-dollar business in which most of the cash flows to the teams and conferences with the firmest grip on eyeballs. There’s some irritation—the Big 12 is not happy, to say the least—but there’s also plenty of shrugged-shoulders realism. Why wouldn’t Oklahoma and Texas make a move?

Same goes for “name, image, likeness” reform, which is in its infancy. The early wave of endorsement deals for college athletes is an acknowledgment of the obvious—players have real economic clout.

I don’t think there’s a sports topic where public opinion has migrated more in the past decade. The money is too obvious—the megadeals for regular seasons and playoffs; the multimillion-dollar annual contracts (and buyouts!) for head coaches. 

Last year, the sport dove headlong into a pandemic and played inside empty stadiums because its TV deals were too valuable to pass up. It’s hard to observe that and cling onto the nostalgic idea of college football being driven by regional and school pride—and how accurate was that notion anyway? Big-time college football has always been an economic beast.

Which is why the expanded playoff is surely going to happen down the road. Why not? College football’s current postseason—a four-team playoff, plus a whole raft of zombie bowls that star players are increasingly (and rightfully) uninterested in playing in—is far from perfect. A playoff expansion would add urgency and variety (read: teams from “Group of Five” conferences) to a product that is starting to feel a bit predictable, even if it’s likely we’re going to look around in early January and still see the usual suspects.

But here, too, the biggest driver is money. An expanded playoff would be a behemoth product, replacing a week or two of destination TV with a month or more of it. 

That’s why it happens. There are still wrinkles that need to be sorted out—the early proposal was too married to the zombie bowls and surrounding junket culture. These playoff games should be played on campus, as much as possible. But it feels inevitable.

Alabama and head coach Nick Saban have lost a lot of talent to the NFL, but they’re still Alabama.

Photo: Vasha Hunt/Associated Press

As for other inevitabilities, yes: the preseason polls are not predicting much disruption to the traditional power balance. Alabama lost a lot of talent to the NFL, but they’re still Alabama. Clemson’s Clemson. OSU and OU remain OSU and OU. My Wisconsin Badgers are ranked No. 12 in the AP but have a heckalicious opening month in which they’ll play Penn State, Notre Dame and, yes, Jim Harbaugh’s Ann Arbor Academy of Interesting Football Decisions. 

Health concerns linger, especially amid the Delta surge, but there’s hope that vaccines safely return fans to the stands and prevent the cancellations and disruptions of last year. Conferences are talking tough; forfeits are on the table for teams that can’t field a roster. It might get weird. Of course, it’s college football. There’s always something. 

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What do you think about the proposed and coming changes in college football?

Write to Jason Gay at Jason.Gay@wsj.com