Forward Progress. Bill Connelly

 

 

Forward Progress.   Bill Connelly.

The Definitive Guide to The Future of College Football. 

There is no question that college football has changed dramatically over the years especially just in this decade alone.    One may wonder how the current state of college football has arrived in its current plight.   If so, author and ESPN writer, Bill Connelly, tries to set the record straight in his latest book, Forward Progress.  Connelly does in fact also provide his attempt at how he would fix or steer the direction of college football in the near and perhaps distant future as well.   

The major and influential topics of this book include a brief history of college football dating back beyond a century of football’s early days.   In addition, Connelly discusses how conferences came about in the formative years, how they have changed and emerged to where they are now but also how the power among the conferences, the few that are considered “power”, has shifted.   The author gives a detailed account of the purpose of post season including the bowl games, when they truly mattered, to a current play-off system that had been opposed by the traditionalists for decades.    Even the advent of television is featured among the topics and how it made an indelible change in the way college football could reach the masses but also make more money for the schools and governing conferences.    

What we found most interesting were the chapters related to socialist models that currently do or have existed in professional sports.    Rather than suggesting that the collegiate game try to mimic the NFL, Connelly, a self-described “professional nerd” takes a different approach.    Readers will gain greater familiarity for the concept of “regulated” and how it works in sports such as in European soccer.      The book goes into detail of how a system of team performance and the standings that come with it dictates which level or in football parlance conference they are allowed to participate.    Now Connelly gives some examples of how colleges could be placed at one conference in a particular year and compete there for a period of time.   However, through success or failure on the field, these football programs (and universities) could see their conference status change to either a more challenging conference/division or to the other end of the spectrum.   

The problem with this model is that college football teams are comprised of college students, some well paid these days, that attend four-year universities.    There is some concern or trepidation as to how the schools would react to being shifted from one conference to another after or upon a given season unlike a professional club that exists solely as an agent of the sport that acts like a business trying to make more money each year to satisfy the owners’ greed and fanatics quench for team success.   In the early days of college football alliances, as Connelly discusses, schools from the same region would co-habitat in the same conference.   At this point the schools would compete against one another in just about all varsity sports.  Furthermore, these schools would form partnerships in endeavors unrelated to sport such as research and curriculum.    Connelly does not seem to address this very real transaction among universities and how that would be impacted in a radical form of conferencing that was impacted only by how the school’s teams perform on the grid iron.

We like how Connelly, the author of three books and the inventor of the SP+ team rating system, attempts to address the myriad issues at hand by nominating himself to serve as college football’s first commissioner.    He reports in his book a list of 9 pillars in his campaign platform.    He claims that seven of nine pillars have already been addressed by college football including an expanded playoff, fairer rules to let student athletes transfer and even eliminating unequal divisions within conferences.   Connelly still hopes that power structure and related relegation will someday be part of the college football landscape.    For this to happen, though, he writes that the conferences with the most cache and clout (SEC and BIG 10) will have to relinquish some of their power to help make the system more equitable for the majority of remaining programs competing at this level.     That concept, he admits, will not come easily if ever at all. 

Forward Progress is a detailed look at where college football has been, how it has evolved to where it is now and where it might be going in the not-so-distant future.   The book content, while mostly positive and interesting, is not necessarily an easy read---many details and information to slowly digest is required. One current college football writer asserts that this is “a must-read for college football fans.”    This may be true on some levels but probably more so for the serious fan that is intrigued with history but also visionary ideas that may not appeal to the casual college sports fan.                

 

·       You might like to read this book if you enjoy reading about college football history.

·       You might like to read this book if you want to learn more about how college football is currently shaped.

·       You might like to read this book if you are interested in exploring ideas and theories for how to improve the sport.

·       You might like to read this book if you want to read about where the sport could be headed in the future.  

 

Read more about the author on X:   https://x.com/ESPN_BillC