The Diehard League

SiriusXM host Danny Kanell opened Week 1 with a familiar take: the Group of 6 should have its own playoff.

"There is such a gap between the Group of 6 and the Power 4," Kanell said on his College Sports Radio show. "I think they would be way better served to have their own championship. That could be so entertaining to have their own playoff. Let all those programs. Then you can actually win a national title and be able to claim that and have rings and celebrate an entire postseason."

Boise State athletic director Jeramiah Dickey — a 2025 national AD of the year at the most prominent program in the G6 — reposted Kanell's segment and offered a two-word answer followed by a condition: "No. Unless ... there is a path to P4 defined or promotion/relegation."

Dickey is right.

A separate G6 playoff walls these programs off from the College Football Playoff permanently. It removes the one automatic bid the G6 currently has. It trades access — limited, frustrating, often insulting access — for a closed system with no pathway up. The FCS already has its own playoff. It cannot even make money on it. Many of these programs spent tens of millions of dollars to leave the FCS. A separate G6 playoff is a slightly better version of exactly what they left.

So here is a different idea. A proposal that keeps a place — or two — for the G6 in the CFP, creates massive new postseason value, restructures the nonsensical conference logistics without blowing up the conferences and creates new intrigue through promotion and relegation.

For fun, let's call it the Diehard League.

Before we lay out how it works, let's acknowledge what everybody already knows: if you were drawing up college football from scratch, virtually none of it would exist as it does today.

You would not build six separate conferences negotiating six separate media deals worth almost nothing individually. You would not have Jacksonville State flying to New Mexico State for a conference game that nobody in either market cares about because the two programs are 1,100 miles apart and have no shared history. You would not have 70 programs splitting into fragments so small that no television network can build a product around any of them.

And you would not build a system where the only meaningful postseason goal is a single automatic bid to a playoff where your team gets outspent 3-to-1 in the first round.

You would build something that looks more like European football. A top division with the best programs, determined by results. Promotion and relegation so that merit — not membership — decides who plays at the highest level. Regional leagues underneath to keep travel costs manageable, rivalries natural and local economies involved. And a postseason that crowns champions through weeks of competition so undeniable that the people selecting the CFP field cannot look away.

Stop negotiating alone

The first step is the most obvious and the most overdue.

Six conferences — the Pac-12, American, Sun Belt, Mountain West, MAC and CUSA — currently negotiate six separate television deals. Each one is worth a fraction of what any single Power 4 conference commands. Even the rebuilt Pac-12, the strongest of the group, is projecting $7 to $12 million per school.

One media package. One negotiation. Structured competition with a National Division, regional pods, a bracket tournament, a Conference Cup and two champions entering the CFP. That is a product a network can build a Saturday around.

The conferences do not dissolve. The Sun Belt still exists. The American still exists. But the television rights, the scheduling framework and the postseason are pooled and negotiated as one entity. The G6 stops competing against itself for scraps and starts operating as an economic bloc.

Dickey has been saying this for years. His 12-point plan for restructuring college football — laid out in a Bronco Studios interview earlier this year — calls for promotion and relegation, united media rights modeled after the NFL and moving bowl games to the beginning of the season as showcase events. "What we're doing is not sustainable, and it is the definition of insanity," Dickey said. He first proposed promotion and relegation three summers ago. The Diehard League does not borrow Dickey's plan. But it builds on much of the same foundation — and it starts where he says the G6 should start: together.

The National Division

Ten teams. The best in the G6, determined by a five-year rolling points system. No committee. No eye test. No brand equity protecting a declining program. A calculator and a schedule.

Every National Division team plays every other National Division team. Nine round-robin games. Three open slots for rivalries, showcases and nonconference games. Thirteen total games.

The top four play a semifinal and championship. The National Division champion enters the College Football Playoff.

The bottom two teams by rolling seeding points are relegated to the regional pods. Two new teams are promoted — one through winning the pod bracket tournament, one through having the highest accumulated points among remaining pod teams. One bad season does not kill you. Sustained decline does.

Based on five-year seeding points from 2021 through 2025, the inaugural National Division:

Seed | Team | Conference

1 | Oregon State | Pac-12

2 | Washington State | Pac-12

3 | Tulane | American

4 | Boise State | Pac-12

5 | Troy | Sun Belt

6 | Memphis | American

7 | Navy | American

8 | James Madison | Sun Belt

9 | Army | American

10 | Liberty | CUSA

Bubble: Fresno State, UNLV, UTSA, North Texas.

The regional pods

Sixty teams. Eight geographic pods. Cross-conference composition. You still rep your conference in the Conference Cup. But you play your pod schedule against the teams near you. The pods of course could change slightly each year depending upon who gets promoted or relegated. Hey, high schools change their regions regularly; I think college football can handle it.

Pods of 8:

Mountain/Plains: Air Force, Colorado State, Wyoming, Utah State, New Mexico, New Mexico State, UTEP, North Dakota State

Texas/South Central: North Texas, Rice, UTSA, Sam Houston, Texas State, Tulsa, Arkansas State, Missouri State

Southeast: Georgia Southern, Georgia State, Kennesaw State, FAU, FIU, South Florida, Middle Tennessee, Western Kentucky

Appalachian/Carolina: App State, Charlotte, East Carolina, Coastal Carolina, Marshall, Old Dominion, Ohio, Kent State

Pods of 7:

Pacific: Fresno State, San Jose State, San Diego State, Sacramento State, Nevada, UNLV, Hawaii

Gulf Coast: Louisiana, Louisiana Tech, ULM, Southern Miss, South Alabama, UAB, Jacksonville State

Great Lakes: Toledo, Bowling Green, Central Michigan, Eastern Michigan, Western Michigan, Ball State, Northern Illinois

Northeast: Temple, Delaware, UConn, UMass, Buffalo, Miami Ohio, Akron

Look at the Gulf Coast pod. Three Alabama programs with existing rivalries. Four Louisiana and Mississippi programs that are already neighbors. Every road game is drivable. Visiting fans show up. Local sponsors can buy into a pod because the audience is in their market.

Now look at what CUSA asks Jacksonville State to do right now — fly to New Mexico State, fly to Liberty in Virginia, fly to FIU in Miami. That is not a conference schedule. That is an itinerary.

The pods feed into a bracket tournament at the end of the regular season. The bracket champion enters the CFP. Two G6 teams in the playoff — one from the National Division, one from the pods. Both earned through weeks of competition, not a committee vote.

The Conference Cup

The Conference Cup is for every team — not just the ones competing for championships.

The Conference Cup runs all season, every game. Points are awarded to your conference based on results: one point for an intraconference win, two points for an interconference win, three points for a win over a Power 4 team. The conference that finishes on top earns bonus shares from pooled television revenue.

A 4-8 team that beats two interconference opponents and upsets a Power 4 team in a buy game just moved the revenue needle for its entire conference. Two last-place teams fighting to avoid relegation are playing with the same intensity as the teams at the top — because every result has consequences for someone. The stakes do not disappear when your team's season does.

Why it beats a separate G6 playoff

CFP relationship. Walled off → Pipeline into it

TV value. Minor league branding → Structured national product

Player retention. Accelerates portal exits → Incentivizes staying

NIL. Nothing changes → Built into the structure

Fan engagement. Same as now, repackaged → Cup standings, pro/rel, stakes in every game

Revenue model. Marginally better → Built from the ground up

Travel costs. No change → Geographic pods cut expenses

A separate playoff accepts the G6's place. The Diehard League rejects it.

Yes, but ...

Antitrust. Some will say pooling media rights across six conferences requires an antitrust exemption. It does not. The old College Football Association pooled television rights for decades without one. The Diehard League does not blow up conferences. It does not exclude anyone. If a Power 4 program wants to come down here and play in the Diehard League, it is more than welcome. If an FCS program wants to come up, the pathway to do so already exists.

The schedule. To complete a National Division playoff and bracket tournament in time for CFP selection, the G6 season would need to start earlier. It could be done. Army and Navy might have some choices to make about their traditional schedule. College football already works around those kinds of things.

Bowl games. They could still exist. But they would be far more valuable repurposed as showcase games on opening weekend — rivalries, promotion-versus-relegation matchups at neutral sites, the kinds of events fans would actually travel for. Not a 5-7 team playing another 5-7 team in front of 12,000 people in a half-empty stadium on a Tuesday in December.

NIL. Showcase games, bracket tournament matchups, a National Division playoff — those are not just more valuable television products. They are real NIL opportunities for players. Presenting sponsorships with player participation built in. The G6 stops trying to match Power 4 NIL dollar-for-dollar and builds a different model — one tied to structured events and real promotional value.

The Power 4 spent 40 years telling the G6 to earn it, only to move the bar every time one of the outsiders did so. Congress tried to legislate a fix and could not get it to the floor. The G6 programs with the most leverage are spending it on exit strategies, not collective solutions.

Nobody is coming to save the G6. Not Congress. Not the NCAA. Not the Power 4 conferences that just spent a decade proving they will absorb anyone worth absorbing and leave the rest behind.

The Diehard League is what is left when you stop waiting. Seventy programs and six conferences stop fighting each other for scraps and start building something worth watching — with stakes in every game and a pathway that rewards the programs willing to earn it.

Dickey said it himself: not without a path up.

Here is the path. Build it.

Tim Stephens is the founder and CEO of Diehard Sports Network and the former president of the Associated Press Sports Editors. He has covered the business and politics of college athletics for more than 25 years.