Paul Finebaum Warns College Football Heading Toward Major Crisis

College football is at a crossroads, and Paul Finebaum wants everyone to know the worst may still be ahead.

The longtime ESPN college football analyst appeared on Get Up on Wednesday and offered a candid assessment of the sport's structural problems, citing the ongoing SEC spring meetings as a backdrop for a larger reckoning. With NIL, the transfer portal and congressional inaction all converging at once, Finebaum's tone was far from reassuring.

Furthermore, his point of view was reiterated and grounded in direct conversations with the people who run college athletics.

Finebaum on Congress and the NCAA governance mess

The collapse of the SCORE Act, an NCAA-backed bill designed to provide legal protections for roster management and athlete compensation, has left conference leaders without a federal framework to lean on. According to Finebaum, that is not going to change any time soon.

"We will leave here, and what the university presidents are leaning on is Congress bailing them out, and they are not going to do it," Finebaum said during Get Up. "Congress can't do anything in terms of world peace, they're not going to bail college athletics out."

"I don't think it's realistic right now, but there's so many people here unhappy with where we are."

—@finebaum on the possibility of the SEC branching out on their own 🏈 pic.twitter.com/vDvGtShoP5
— Get Up (@GetUpESPN) May 27, 2026

Finebaum also took direct aim at the money being spent trying to make Washington act. "This place right here, the SEC and the Big Ten, have wasted hundreds of millions of dollars lobbying Congress," he said. "I heard a university president tell me there's another bill coming out this week, it's a bipartisan bill. It won't go anywhere, but that's how desperate this field is."

He also predicted the CFP will remain stuck at 12 teams when all meetings conclude, citing a stalled expansion debate between the SEC and Big Ten as another sign that the sport's power brokers cannot find common ground.

'Anarchy' now, and likely worse by 2026

The most alarming quote of the week did not come from Finebaum directly.

"Jere Morehead, the President of Georgia, told me, 'We are in anarchy right now,'" Finebaum explained. "And by the way, this is a good place compared to where it will be a year from today."

Morehead is one of the university presidents actively pushing for SEC self-governance, proposing that the conference set its own rules in the wake of the SCORE Act petering out in Congress. When someone in that position describes the current state as anarchy, it signals genuine institutional alarm.

University of Georgia president Jere W. Morehead is publicly advocating for the SEC to set its own rules rather than seek a collaborative solution with the rest of the Power Four and the NCAA. | Joshua L. Jones / USA TODAY NETWORK

Kirby Smart echoed that urgency, backing Morehead's proposal. "I've said this for a long time to our president, I've been a huge advocate that if we can't find rules that everybody plays by, then we should play on our own," Smart told reporters.

SEC commissioner Greg Sankey acknowledged a similar frustration, telling reporters Monday night that discussions about conference-led governance reflect exhaustion with the pace of federal progress, not a new idea being floated carelessly.

My read is that college football is watching three prominent voices, Finebaum, Smart and Morehead, say variations of the same thing simultaneously. That kind of alignment and media push does not happen by accident. This likely signals a coming apart at the seams between the SEC, Big Ten, the NCAA and other notable folks around the rest of the Power Four programs.

Add us as a preferred source on Google