Everybody has a plan for the Group of 6

The transfer portal remade their rosters. NIL changed the economics. Conference realignment changed the map. Revenue sharing changed the obligations. The calendar got longer, the travel got worse and the pressure to win now — with a roster that turns over every year — never let up.

And then, three days ago, the College Football Playoff expanded to 24 teams. The Group of 6 got one guaranteed spot. Same as before. The field doubled. Their share of it didn't.

Nobody asked the coaches what they thought about that before the deal was done. They're answering anyway.

"All of this is about money," Jacksonville State head coach Charles Kelly said during his weekly press conference. "It's all about money. So it's not about competition. It's about money."

Kelly called it "unfortunate" that football will be the only NCAA sport where conference champions don't have a guaranteed path to the championship tournament. Every other sport — basketball, baseball, softball — gives conference champions an automatic bid. Football decided it didn't need to. Kelly's path for a G6 team hasn't changed: "If you win them all, you take that out of it." But he shouldn't have to frame survival as a strategy.

Troy head coach Gerad Parker put it in terms of what these programs are already paying. "If we're going to be a part of a university and athletic programs that are doing our part to contribute to the House case and the funds that needed to be put in to pay for that, there better be a way in," Parker said. "I do think that there's a path in which Group of 6 football teams should be in the playoff. Probably more than one, but let's call it one."

Parker's programs are writing checks for a House settlement they didn't cause. And the reward is one guaranteed spot out of 24.

UNLV head coach Dan Mullen didn't stop at asking questions. He started drawing up answers.

"At 12, we got one in," Mullen said. "If they're gonna do 24, we should have got a second bid."

His concept: the top four ranked G6 conference champions play two games on Army-Navy weekend. The winners earn automatic bids to the 24-team CFP. Army-Navy stays on the schedule — and if one of those service academy teams is ranked high enough, they could compete for a bid of their own.

CBS, FOX, CW and Amazon are all airing college football. "I bet somebody would buy that game," Mullen said.

It's the most actionable proposal from any G6 coach. Whether anyone in a position to make it happen is listening is a different question.

The coaches don't agree. That's part of the problem.

Boise State's Spencer Danielson doesn't want a separate bracket. He wants in the main one. "Having sub-playoffs ... muddies the water," Danielson said. "Here at Boise State, we've got to win games just like everybody else does. And if we do what we're supposed to do, I want to get a shot."

That's the Boise State position — and it makes sense for Boise State. The Broncos are one of the few G6 brands with enough national profile to compete for an at-large bid. Not every program has that option.

Oregon State's JaMarcus Shephard sees a system designed to protect the programs that already have the most. "I hope the NCAA actually does care about student athletes, all student athletes, not just the ones in the SEC and the Big Ten," Shephard said.

Jake Dickert — who coached Washington State before moving to Wake Forest — had the sharpest structural question. "To not say we're going to have conference champions, why do we have conferences?" Dickert said.

Nobody presented these coaches with a coherent plan to agree on. They got a finished deal and a press release.

The commissioners aren't aligned either.

American Conference commissioner Tim Pernetti called the expansion "important progress for college football." He'd pushed for G6 bids to double alongside the field and has pitched a complementary G6 bracket on weeknight television. Sun Belt commissioner Keith Gill called it "a historic day for college football." The Sun Belt noted six of its conference champions since 2019 would have ranked inside the top 24.

MAC commissioner Jon Steinbrecher wasn't buying it. "A larger playoff does not necessarily mean greater financial benefits for all conferences and institutions," Steinbrecher said. "Every game matters. Rivalries matter. Conference championships matter. As we expand the postseason, we must be careful not to diminish the very qualities that have made college football such a compelling sport."

Three commissioners. Three different positions. No unified G6 front. Which is exactly how you end up with one guaranteed spot out of 24.

And then there's everyone else — the people who don't coach in the G6, don't run a G6 program and don't live with the consequences — lining up to tell the G6 what it should be.

ESPN's Bill Connelly identified the structural problem: "We're going from handing out 15-20 mulligans per year to 45-50." He noted that "the FBS is going to become the only level of football that doesn't invite all its champions to a big playoff."

USA TODAY's Blake Toppmeyer argued the G6 needs its own playoff alongside the CFP. "College football needs another playoff. I'm serious," Toppmeyer wrote.

FanSided compared a potential G6 playoff to the NIT. Clay Travis predicted a permanent split — 50 to 60 programs competing for a title, the rest sorted into their own postseason.

Sympathetic or dismissive, the pattern is the same. Everybody has a plan for the Group of 6 — a separate playoff, a new league, a slow fade into irrelevance. Every one of those plans was drawn up by someone who doesn't live in it.

The G6 needs television money. It needs playoff access. It needs the economic infrastructure of competing at this level. What it does not need is everyone on the outside actively working to diminish that value — defining what these programs should aspire to, prescribing how they should do it, and when that doesn't work, sliding some hush money across the table and telling them to go away quietly.

G6 fans have been watching this for decades. They're not frustrated anymore. They're furious. So are the coaches. So are the athletic directors stretching budgets that wouldn't cover a Power 4 facilities maintenance line. So are the communities that show up every Saturday anyway for programs the rest of college football wants to disappear.

Everybody has a plan for the Group of 6. The G6 didn't ask for any of them.