Cal GM Ron Rivera Foresees College ‘Mega Conference’ Similar to NFL

Cal’s immediate concern is naming a quarterback for its August 30 opener at Oregon State, but Cal general manager Ron Rivera gave his thoughts on the future structure of college football during an interview on KNBR radio on Tuesday.

Because of the expenses involved in travel and revenue-sharing with the players, Rivera sees college football developing into one huge conference with regionalized groupings of teams, similar to the NFL. Obviously Rivera is familiar with the NFL model since he was an NFL head coach for 13 seasons. The idea of a superconference has been floated before.

“Eventually I think there’s going to be some sort of megaconference," Rivera said. "In other words, it’s going to be very similar to the NFL in my opinion. You’re going to have -- like you have an AFC and an NFC, well, you’re going to have some sort of College West, College East. And just like both of them you’re going to have an eventual playoff system where you’re going to have divisional games, you’re going to have division versus division. You’re going to have eventually what happens is conference championships from those two East and West teams, and they’re going to play for the national championship.”

So how many schools would be part of this megacoinference?

“I know it’s 64 in basketball, right?” said Rivera, who was off by four NCAA basketball tournament teams. “So what’s a good round number, is it 128? Whatever that number is, you can do that, you can whittle it down and get it to one.

"You can do probably just like you do in the NFL. The NFL plays their last game the first week of February. By the time I think we’re done restructuring college football, I think it’s going to be the last or second-last week in January, but I think it will culminate in that.

"The reason I see that is because, again, if you take these West Coast teams or the western half of the United States and have them play in their area, you’re going to cut down those expenses. You’re going to make it affordable for their universities and then for their fan bases to come together, watch more games, put more eyeballs on TV, more butts in the seats.

“I think this is the thing we have to understand, that this is important. If you love college athletics and college sports we got to figure out how we can do that regionally, because if we keep going cross country, eventually people are just going to say That’s too much, we can’t afford to do that anymore, and you’re going to start seeing programs disappear, and you don’t want to see that.”

Rivera, of course, is speaking from the perspective of someone trying to promote Cal football, which is playing games on the East Coast in the ACC and does not generate the football revenue many other schools do. Whether some of the nation’s top football programs are as concerned about the cost of playing elite college football is debatable. However, there is considerable sentiment for the creation of a so-called megaconference

But Rivera might strike a nerve in Cal fans when he says “you’re going to start seeing programs disappear” if the cost because unsustainable.

So what might Rivera’s megaconference look like? He comes up with the number of 128. That seems too large if you are trying to copy the NFL’s 32-team model.

Let’s arbitararily use a 70-team megaconference, which is still quite large but would include all the teams in the Power Four football conferences plus Notre Dame, Washington State and Oregon State. You put 35 teams in an Eastern Conference and 35 in a Western Conference with four divisions of eight or nine teams in each conference. The eight division champions and eight wild card teams would advance to a 16-team national playoff.

Cal’s so-called West Coast division might include Cal, Stanford, USC, UCLA, Washington, Oregon, Washington State and Oregon State, duplicating the old Pac-8, which existed from 1968 to 1977.

It sounds great from a Cal perspective, but, again, we’re not sure schools such as USC or Washington are going to go for it if the TV revenue and exposure would be less than it gets for playing against the likes of Ohio State, Michigan and Penn State in the Big Ten.

Rivera made one more interesting point, although it’s one that others have brought up. Rivera believes the NCAA or some ruling body needs to have the power to control college football. Schools can still offer financial opportunities with NIL (name, image and likeness) deals in which players endorse or represent certain entities for money. That’s a nebulous category beyond the revenue-sharing payments schools make directly to athletes.

Rivera was asked whether college football needs a commissioner.

“Overall, yes,” Rivera said. “It needs a body that has teeth. Right now, to me the NCAA has no teeth. So they are [only] enforcing the rules that they know that can stand. The rules that can’t stand they don’t want to have anything to do with because it goes to court, there’s litigation and because somebody’s going to challenge it.

“Somebody’s going to try to challenge the Clearinghouse,” said Rivera, referring to the body that will determine whether an NIL deal is legitimate and acceptable. “This Clearinghouse was put in place to keep everything fair. I think Deloitte’s the one that's going to control it. It sounds fair, but somebody wants to challenge it. Why? Because you know, ‘Oh we got to have this player. We need one more guy. Hey, I can give a million dollars. Yeah, but what are you going to have him do? Well, we’ll have him sign an autograph, and that’s going to be worth a million dollars.’”

Rivera said again that there should be only one transfer portal period, instead of two as there were this past offseason – one immediately after the 2024 season and another after spring football.

“We ended up going over budget because the second one appeared all of a sudden, because you didn’t budget for it, nobody did,” said Rivera, who said last month that the Cal football program was a allotted $14 million to pay players.

Recent articles:

Cal DB Cam Sidney Says His Sister is the Star of the Family

Cal LB Cade Uluave named to Bednarik Award watch list

Here's how The Athletic ranks two former Cal QBs in the NFL

What did Celtics legend Bob Cousy say about Jaylen Brown?

New Cal RB Brandon High Jr., already knew the Bears' running backs coach