The Entitled 4

Boise State hung tough with No. 2 Oregon before losing 34-27. Western Michigan led Michigan 12-7, stopped a Hail Mary, watched the clock hit zero — and then watched officials put a second back on it so Michigan could throw another one and win 13-12. UMass, a program that hadn't won a game since October 2024, went to Rutgers as a 29.5-point underdog and won 37-21.

And yes, Group of 6 teams from North Texas against Indiana to Fresno State against USC to Marshall against Penn State to UTEP against Oklahoma got steamrolled by big-brand powerhouses. Such is life in college football. Such is the existence of being a fan of a Group of 6 team.

But as the rhetoric piles up — the social media blather, the snobbery, the media posturing that always follows the first weekend of the season — I think it's time for some rebranding.

The "Power 4." P4. A media-created label that reads like it was born from an SEC PR office fever dream. How about we retire that one and go with something that feels a bit more accurate these days?

E4. The Entitled 4. Has a nice ring to it.

And the entitlement is the point. Most of the schools inside those four conferences didn't create the enormous television value they collect every year. They were fortunate enough to land inside leagues containing the relatively small number of brands that did. They share that wealth collectively, then turn around and demand that everyone outside the club prove its individual economic and competitive worth. Now they increasingly want to control the schedules, the postseason access and even the definition of who belongs at the highest level of the sport.

That's a hell of a lot of entitlement to package under the word "power."

The look

The Entitled 4 has spent decades telling an unofficial subset of FBS football that it doesn't belong on the field with them. Doesn't add value. Shouldn't share in the revenue or the stage. All while practicing selective socialism of the highest order within its own ranks.

Rutgers doesn't have to prove that Rutgers football individually generates a Big Ten-sized television check. Vanderbilt doesn't have to produce SEC-sized television audiences to receive SEC money. They belong to the club, so they share the club's wealth. Then the conversation reaches Boise State, Memphis, Tulane or whoever happens to be outside the gate and suddenly everybody discovers the virtues of ruthless market capitalism. Prove you generate television value. Prove you can compete. Prove you deserve to be here.

I've written about this extensively — about the war that never stopped, about the moat they built to protect it, about the door that only opens from the inside and about what a real alternative might look like.

After Week 1 of the 2026 college football season, this divide looks more than ever like the defining issue of this evolutionary era of the sport. And given the millions upon millions of dollars at stake, there needs to be considerably more accountability for the way the people on one side talk about the people on the other.

Start in Ann Arbor. Millions of G6 fans already believe the system is rigged against them. Then they watch a second get put back on the clock on national television so Michigan can have one more shot to win a game in which Western Michigan thoroughly kicked its butt on its home field for 59 minutes and 59-point-something seconds.

Maybe everything about that ending can be explained. That's almost beside the point. Imagine watching it through the eyes of a fan who already believes his school has to beat the opponent, the money, the system, the officials, the conference office, the network execs and sometimes the people running the damn clock.

Then there was Rutgers. College football spent the offseason hearing about the "Power 2" and the widening competitive chasm separating the Big Ten and SEC from everybody else. Then the team coming off the worst season in the Group of 6 skull-dragged one of those Power 2 programs on national television in its own stadium. UMass ended a 16-game losing streak at Rutgers as a 29.5-point underdog. Rutgers is a member of the Big Ten.

Then Boise State went to Eugene. National media water carriers have spent months proclaiming that the top Group of 6 programs can't compete with the top programs in the E4. Boise State responded by punching No. 2 Oregon in the mouth before losing 34-27. Boise State still leads the all-time series against Oregon 3-2 after Saturday's defeat. That doesn't sound like a program that doesn't belong on the field. That sounds like a program that keeps showing up and competing at the highest level despite enormous structural disadvantages designed to prevent exactly that.

So we're going to call you the E4.

Punching down

Punching down is never attractive. And every now and then, the bootstrappers punch back hard.

The E4 narrative would tell you Indiana's run to the national championship is the Cinderella story college football deserves. I agree that Indiana is one of the greatest college football stories in history. But let's not call it a bootstrap story. And let's not call it Cinderella.

Indiana has received billions — with a B — in television money from the Big Ten while producing the single worst portfolio of any program at college football's highest level for more than a century by almost every measurable standard. Indiana is the frat bro who spent a hundred years wasting daddy's money. Cinderella didn't have a trust fund.

What Indiana did was make one incredible move. It hired Curt Cignetti, one of the great coaches of this era and, in delicious irony, an actual bootstrapper. Cignetti spent decades climbing through assistant jobs at Davidson, Rice, Temple, Pittsburgh, NC State and finally Alabama, where he coached under Nick Saban from 2007 to 2010. His first head coaching job took him from the pinnacle of college football back down to Division II — at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, of all places. From IUP he climbed through Elon and James Madison before finally reaching the Big Ten at the real Indiana.

Then he built a national championship team fueled in significant part by players who came through programs outside the traditional power structure. The team didn't play with entitlement. It played with hunger. And then it went 16-0 and punched every big brand in the face.

The E4's apologists called it Cinderella. These folks would have cheered the stepsisters in the Disney movie.

Indiana had access. That's the part of the story that matters. Indiana could spend more than a century as one of the worst programs in major college football and still wake up every August knowing exactly what it had to do.

Win the Big Ten and you're in.

Nobody could freeze Indiana out. Nobody could committee it out. Nobody could decide its television ratings weren't sufficient. Nobody could create a scheduling standard Indiana wasn't allowed to satisfy. Cignetti built the team. Access gave that team somewhere to go.

That is all the Group of 6 has ever asked for. A path.

And yet the Entitled 4 continues to punch down — rhetorically, structurally and relentlessly.

11 on 11

There's another audience I want to talk to here, and this one is on the G6 side of the divide.

I hear from G6 fans who have given up. They've heard for so long that their programs can't compete, can't afford to compete and eventually won't be allowed to compete that some have started believing it themselves. Fine, they say. Let the Power 4 go. Give us our own playoff. Give us our own championship. At least we'd have something we could win.

I understand the exhaustion. I reject the surrender.

Spencer Danielson has the right answer. Before Boise State played No. 2 Oregon on Saturday — a program whose roster likely costs more than three times the amount Boise State spends in revenue share across its entire athletics department — Danielson told Fox Sports' Ben Portnoy something that should be painted on the wall of every Group of 6 locker room in America:

"Do we have what everybody else has? No, but I do know we have more than enough. We play Oregon. We play Washington. We play Penn State, Notre Dame. On paper, do they have more resources? Probably. But, in those games, there's still 11 dudes on the field. We've got 11. They've got 11 — and there's not going to be any excuses made from us."

The financial gap is real, the structural disadvantages are real and the forces trying to make the path harder are real. None of that requires G6 fans to accept the conclusion that their programs belong on a different playground.

When you encounter a bully, you don't beat him with your mouth. You don't run off to a different playground. You punch him in the mouth. Boise State has been doing that to E4 programs for two decades, and Danielson just told you exactly why.

What we do about it

Here at Diehard Sports Network, we cover the Group of 6 because this side of college football deserves serious coverage from people who actually understand it. We have a point of view: the Group of 6 deserves meaningful access to the highest level of the sport, and its fans deserve coverage that doesn't treat their programs as punch lines, feeder systems or September inventory for somebody else's playoff resume.

Having a point of view doesn't give us permission to bend facts. It gives us a reason to ask questions the national conversation routinely ignores. We don't finger-wag. We don't talk down. We ask the questions G6 fans have because those are the questions that matter to them. And we're going to call out hypocrisy when we see it.

The Group of 6 doesn't need a consolation prize or its own little playground. It doesn't need to accept somebody else's declaration that it has become second-class college football. It needs access. Then put 11 on the field. We'll see what happens.

We cover your team. For you.