New Era for Football - An Article by Jim Gazzolo

Monday night in Houston two teams from next year’s Big Ten will meet to decide college football’s national championship. 

It will be the first time since 2014 that a team from the powerhouse SEC won’t be in the final game of the season. 

Instead, Michigan and Washington will battle for the final title during the four-playoff team era. Next year the playoffs will expand to 12 teams, meaning the power conferences will have more chances to dominate.

While some consider this the end of the SEC’s terror over the rest of college football it is nothing more than the new order of things to come.

Michigan beat Alabama, a Big Ten blueblood over the SEC’s king. Washington, which is leaving the Pac-12 to join Michigan next year in what is becoming known as just the Big Conference, beat Texas.

The Sugar Bowl defeat was the last time the Longhorns ever played as a member of the Big 12. They move to the SEC next season.

So you can see what is coming.

The SEC is far from done. Instead, it is just finding out there is a new power in town and it is growing just as fast, if not faster.

The snub of Florida State by the playoff committee despite the Seminoles finishing the regular season undefeated showed that the future of the college game is really divided between two leagues. 

Florida State and Clemson are both expected to be looking for new homes now that the Atlantic Coast Conference has taken a back seat. Oklahoma and Texas’ move to the SEC puts a damper on the Big 12’s future as well.

While teams from those leagues will clearly fill out the playoff brackets of the future, you get the feeling it will be hard for them to actually compete for the title. 

If folks thought the system was rigged before, they haven’t seen anything yet.

All the big money, big school programs have been maneuvering their way into one of the two big leagues for some time now. 

This will only grow with the rise in NIL money. Big schools with big wallets will continue to pull away from the rest of the field. 

That will also mean other schools will continue to try and join the big two conferences in hopes of earning great riches for themselves. 

The race is now on to make sure your football program has a chair when the music stops. 

The real game now will be figuring out how many losses teams can have before they are left out of the playoffs. The leagues are going to get much tougher to win with each additional major program that joins.

Texas and Oklahoma will add not only value to the SEC but also the talent pool. That is doubled by Washington, Oregon, USC, and UCLA moving into the Big Ten. 

LSU’s road to a national title just got a lot harder even with the addition of eight teams to the playoff race.

The game of college football has always been changing but now things are never going to be the same. 

So Monday won’t be the end of the SEC or its dominance over the sport, just more of the rich getting much, much richer.

Jim Gazzolo is a freelance writer who covers McNeese athletics. He is the host of Poke Nation on CBS-Lake Charles.