The Moat: The real divide in college sports isn't driven by what you think

In 2022, Oregon State went 10-3 and beat Florida 30-3 in the Las Vegas Bowl. The Beavers were a Top 25 team in a Power 5 conference with a stadium renovation underway, a coach named Pac-12 Co-Coach of the Year and a recruiting class ranked 49th nationally. Everything was pointing up.

Three years later, they were 2-10. Their coach had been fired seven games into the season after an 0-7 start. Both starting quarterbacks had left through the transfer portal — one to Florida State, one to Michigan State. The starting running back went to Miami. An All-Pac-12 tight end followed the old coach to the Big Ten. The NIL collective had collapsed after the university partnered with an outside consultancy entitled to up to 75 percent of direct NIL revenue — a deal that imploded within months and ended in a federal lawsuit. The university had cut $11 million from the athletics budget and was still carrying $33 million in debt from COVID.

Same program. Same stadium. Same city. Same fans. The only thing that changed was the conference on the letterhead.

For 40 years, college football has been a race to get to the right side of the moat. Except now, there’s a growing sense that this might actually be the last chance to cross before it’s walled off for good.

This is a story about what proximity to the top is worth — and what happens when it’s taken away.

Most Group of 6 programs were never in a power conference. They know that. They’re not pretending to compete financially with Ohio State or Texas. But they are trying to be as closely associated with those programs as they can, because in college football, association is the product. The closer you are to the top — the higher up the tier structure of conference affiliation, scheduling access and postseason visibility — the more revenue you generate, the better you recruit, the more your program means to the community that supports it. Every degree of separation costs real dollars.

The programs in this story — Oregon State, Washington State, UConn, South Florida, Rice — show what that association is worth in raw financial terms, because they had it and lost it. But the 60-plus programs currently in the G6 are living a version of the same math. They moved up from the FCS or were built from scratch at the FBS level because being in the same division as the power conferences — even at the bottom of it — is fundamentally more valuable than being at the top of anything below it. They spent tens of millions to get here. They accepted every disadvantage that came with it.

Now someone wants to wall them off into a separate G6 playoff — essentially a slightly better version of the FCS many of them just left, where conferences are still trying to figure out how to not lose money on their postseason. Why would any of these programs agree to undo the work they’ve done and the money they’ve spent to end up right back where they started?

They wouldn’t. Unless they had no choice. And that’s the problem.

Washington State’s story is worse in some ways because the Cougars kept winning and it didn’t matter.

WSU went 8-5 in 2024 — the first season after the Pac-12 collapsed — and beat Washington in the Apple Cup. Their coach, Jake Dickert, had built something real in Pullman. Then Dickert left for Wake Forest because Wake Forest was in a power conference and Washington State wasn’t anymore.

His replacement, Jimmy Rogers, went 6-6 in 2025. Then Rogers left for Iowa State. Same reason. Power conference money. Power conference stability. Two straight coaches built winning records at Washington State and both were poached by Power Four programs within months.

The transfer portal was just as ruthless. Cam Ward — WSU’s starting quarterback in 2023 — transferred to Miami, threw for 4,313 yards and 39 touchdowns and was selected No. 1 overall in the 2025 NFL Draft. He said he wanted a bigger stage. The next year, John Mateer — ESPN’s No. 1 transfer portal prospect, 3,139 passing yards and 29 touchdowns at WSU — left for Oklahoma. Baker Mayfield personally recruited him. Thirty-seven players left the program in a single offseason.

The talent was good enough for the No. 1 pick in the draft. It just couldn’t stay in Pullman.

Both programs are sitting on a $255 million war chest.

When the 10 departing Pac-12 schools left for the Big Ten, Big 12 and ACC, the settlement gave Oregon State and Washington State $255 million in exit fees and future conference revenue. That’s not a broke program begging for help. That’s a quarter of a billion dollars. And it wasn’t enough.

It wasn’t enough to keep the coaches. Wasn’t enough to keep the quarterbacks. Wasn’t enough to keep the NIL collective solvent. Wasn’t enough to prevent Oregon State from going 2-10 or Washington State from losing 37 players in one offseason.

Oregon State’s media revenue dropped from $33 million a year to a projected $7 to $12 million under the new Pac-12 deal. Washington State’s athletic department cut its budget by 13 percent, laid off 32 staff members and then asked the university’s Board of Regents to divert $20 million from the general operating fund — money that would have gone to academics — just to keep athletics alive for one more year.

And in 2025, because neither program could fill a schedule after the Mountain West refused to extend its scheduling agreement, Oregon State and Washington State played each other twice in the same regular season.

That’s what happens when you fall on the wrong side of the moat. You can have the money, the facilities, the fans, the coaching staff, the history — and still watch it all erode because someone else’s decision changed your address.

If it can happen to two programs with Pac-12 infrastructure and a $255 million war chest, what do you think happens to the programs that never had any of it?

Since 1992, 36 programs have moved from the FCS to the FBS — or were founded at the FBS level. They built stadiums. Funded scholarships. Hired staffs. Paid conference transition fees. Invested tens of millions of dollars to join the top tier of college football.

Every single one of them entered a system that was already designed to exclude them.

Nevada moved up in 1992 — the same year the Bowl Coalition was created to lock mid-major conferences out of the major bowls. Boise State, UCF, UAB and Marshall moved up between 1996 and 1997 — during the Bowl Alliance era, when non-power conferences were explicitly excluded from the postseason. Troy, South Florida, UConn, FAU and FIU moved up between 2001 and 2005 — under the BCS, which gave non-automatic qualifying conferences restricted access and a 6-to-1 revenue disadvantage. Appalachian State, Georgia Southern, Old Dominion and Charlotte moved up in 2014 and 2015 — the year the College Football Playoff launched with four teams and no Group of Five automatic bid. Jacksonville State, Sam Houston and Kennesaw State moved up between 2023 and 2024 — into a 12-team playoff that caps the G6 at one bid shared among 60-plus programs.

Half the current G6 didn’t exist at the FBS level — or didn’t exist at all — when the first Bowl Alliance was announced. They paid full price to cross a moat that was being widened before they reached the other side.

So why did they do it?

That’s the question nobody asks because the answer is uncomfortable. These programs spent tens of millions to move up knowing they’d be second-class citizens. Every athletic director who signed off on an FCS-to-FBS transition knew the financial disparity. Knew the scheduling disadvantage. Knew the postseason access was limited. Did it anyway.

Because being in the FBS — even at the very bottom of it — means something that being the best team in the FCS never will.

North Dakota State won 10 FCS national championships. Ten. The most dominant dynasty in the history of that level. And they still moved up to the FBS in 2026. Because an FCS national championship trophy, no matter how many you collect, doesn’t change the recruiting pitch, doesn’t change the TV deal, doesn’t change the conference affiliation, doesn’t change the civic identity of the town you play in.

FBS means your games are on ESPN. FCS means they’re on ESPN+. The difference between existing in the national conversation and not. FBS means a media rights deal — even the smallest one — that pays real money. FBS means recruits take your call. FBS means boosters write checks with a different number of zeros because the ceiling feels higher. FBS means the city you play in is a college football town on Saturdays, not a college town with a football team.

They’d rather be serfs than wildlings. And they’re not wrong. Every metric that matters to a university — enrollment, giving, visibility, community engagement — correlates with FBS status in ways that FCS success never replicates. The value proposition of proximity to the top is so powerful that rational people will pay enormous sums to be at the bottom of the top rather than the top of the bottom.

The people at the top know it.

That’s the leverage. The G6 will never voluntarily leave the FBS because leaving costs more than staying and being exploited. The Power 4 has always known this. It’s why they’ve never had to offer the G6 a fair deal. Where are they going to go?

But the pressure isn’t coming from the top.

Ohio State doesn’t care about the G6. Texas doesn’t care. Georgia doesn’t care. North Texas could play winning football for another 100 years and it still won’t be what the University of Texas is. The brands at the top of college football have nothing to lose from G6 access. They’d beat them most of the time. The games they lost would be entertaining television. The SEC schedules buy games against G6 opponents every September and doesn’t think twice about it.

The class warfare comes from the middle.

It comes from the bottom half of the Power 4 — programs whose entire economic model depends on the line between P4 and G6 remaining hard. Rutgers is 0-40 against ranked opponents in the CFP era. In the Senate Commerce Committee’s viewership analysis, Rutgers appeared in just 2 of the top 100 most-viewed games across two seasons. Ask yourself who they were playing. Wake Forest appeared in zero. Pitt, zero. Syracuse, zero. Boise State fills its market in a city of 700,000. Rutgers sits in a metro of 17 million and can’t. But Rutgers still cashes a Big Ten conference check — north of $60 million a year — because it’s on the right side of the moat.

One anonymous power conference executive told the Commerce Committee what everyone inside the castle already knows: “There are Power Four schools currently that are lucky they got the last boat out... They would have a hard time in 2025 selling themselves to the Power Four. Every conference has one of those.”

The moment that moat gets fuzzy — the moment a Boise State or a Tulane is demonstrably better than a Rutgers or a Purdue year after year after year — someone starts asking why Rutgers gets $60 million and Boise State gets $5 million for the same sport. That question is existential for the bottom of the P4. So they vote to keep the moat deep. Not because they’re better. Because they can’t afford for anyone to notice they’re not.

It also comes from below. Programs still in the FCS benefit from the G6 staying suppressed. If the G6 rises, the distance from FCS to relevance grows. If the G6 stays pushed down, the FCS-to-FBS transition still looks viable. The gap stays jumpable. Keeping the G6 close keeps the FCS’s aspirational math alive.

The brands at the top could afford to be generous. A real playoff with real G6 access doesn’t threaten Alabama. It threatens the programs just inside the walls — the ones who need the moat to stay deep because without it, everybody can see they’re standing on the same ground as the programs outside.

They’re not protecting the castle. They’re protecting the moat. Because without the moat, there is no castle — not for them.

The numbers prove it. And the government has them.

In September 2025, the Senate Commerce Committee released an analysis of college sports television revenue based on 20 years of conference IRS tax returns. The headline finding: the revenue gap between power conference schools and everyone else increased 584 percent from 2002 to 2023.

In 2002, the average power conference school received roughly $6 million more per year in conference distributions than the average lower-tier FBS school. By 2023, that gap had grown to $43 million. The average power conference school received $47.3 million. The average Group of 5 school received $4 million. Nearly 12 times less — for the same sport, at the same level, under the same NCAA umbrella.

The G5 distributions didn’t decline. They flatlined. For 20 years, the line on the chart barely moved — stuck below $10 million per school while the power conference line climbed from $12 million to $47 million and kept going. The gap didn’t widen because the G6 fell. It widened because the P4 middle class was lifted by media rights deals that were never designed to carry everyone.

The postseason math is just as lopsided. In 2015, the average power conference CFP guarantee was $64.4 million. The average non-power guarantee was $16.5 million. By 2025, those numbers had grown to $93 million and $23.2 million. The moat widened by $22 million in a decade — on playoff revenue alone.

The report included a viewership table identifying which schools would be “winners and losers” in a distribution model based on television ratings. The table had four columns: SEC, Big Ten, Big 12, ACC. The G6 did not appear. Not a single program. Not a single conference. The government studied who was at risk in college sports and concluded it was Texas Tech (three appearances in the top 100 most-viewed games), Wake Forest (zero) and Washington State (whose conference distribution dropped from $33 million to roughly $7 million when the Pac-12 collapsed).

The programs making $4 million were not part of the analysis. The report that framed the revenue gap as a crisis — and that would later become the intellectual foundation for the Protect College Sports Act — defined "the poor" as schools making $47 million instead of $90 million.

Bob Thompson, the former Fox television executive, was quoted in the report: “The rich are getting richer.” Bob Bowlsby, the former Big 12 commissioner, finished the sentence: “And the poor get poorer.”

They weren’t talking about the actual poor.

Meanwhile, in 2023, 40 percent of players who earned all-conference honors in a Group of 5 league transferred — most of them to power conference programs, per a Wall Street Journal analysis. Jimbo Fisher, the former Texas A&M coach, said what everyone already knew: some of those leagues are “becoming glorified junior colleges.”

The cycle is structural. The G6 develops the talent. The P4 recruits it through the transfer portal. The revenue gap ensures the cycle repeats — and nobody with the power to change it has any incentive to.

The moat isn’t invisible. The government can see it. The government measured it. The government just decided the people on the wrong side of it weren’t the ones who needed help. And when the legislation finally moved, the G6’s own senators fought against it.

And the people at the bottom of the P4 have the votes to keep it that way.

The NCAA’s autonomy structure — granted in 2014 — gives the Power 4 conferences the ability to pass legislation without the rest of Division I weighing in. They don’t need the G6’s permission or its vote. They don’t need the G6 at all.

So the G6’s negotiating position isn’t “let us in.” It’s “please don’t push us out.” That’s a fundamentally different fight. You can rally people around swimming the moat. You can’t rally them around begging the people inside not to make it deeper.

Look at the programs that have already lived through it.

Rice was a founding member of the Southwest Conference. Played in the same league as Texas, Texas A&M, Arkansas and Baylor. The SWC dissolved in 1996 and Rice ended up in the WAC, then Conference USA and now the American. Thirty years later, ask yourself what changed about Rice’s football program. The answer is nothing — except the conference on the letterhead and everything that flows from it. Recruiting. Revenue. National visibility. Civic relevance. All of it, gone — not because Rice failed, but because the conference it helped build was dismantled by schools chasing a bigger deal.

And then there’s UConn — the cleanest case study of what the label does.

UConn moved up to FBS football because they had a guaranteed destination. They were already a Big East member for every other sport — basketball, most importantly. The Big East had BCS automatic qualifying status. When UConn decided to restart football and move up from the FCS, where Skip Holtz had coached the program, the path was obvious: join the Big East for football too. Power conference. BCS access. Automatic qualifier. The label was already on the building. All they had to do was step inside.

On January 1, 2011, they played Oklahoma in the Fiesta Bowl as Big East champions. Lost 48-20. But that’s not the point. The point is they were there. BCS bowl. Power conference. The label worked.

Then the Big East lost its BCS automatic qualifying status — what today would be called autonomy. Pittsburgh and Syracuse left for the ACC. West Virginia went to the Big 12. Rutgers went to the Big Ten. Louisville went to the ACC. The conference didn’t die. It split. The basketball schools kept the Big East name and its history. The football schools — the ones left behind — became the American Athletic Conference and were reclassified as non-power.

UConn was in the American for all sports initially. But the Huskies eventually chose to leave and rejoin the basketball schools in the Big East — the conference that kept the name, the history and the identity. The problem was the Big East no longer sponsored FBS football. So UConn’s other sports went home. Football went independent. Homeless.

That label — BCS automatic qualifier then, autonomy status now — is the moat. It’s the dividing line between have-mores and have-somes on one side and have-nones on the other. It’s unofficially P4 vs. G6. And the moment UConn landed on the wrong side of it, everything fell apart.

From 2011 to 2021, UConn went 31-90. In AAC play specifically, 11-45. Ten consecutive losing seasons after the Fiesta Bowl. Attendance at Rentschler Field dropped from 38,000 to barely above 10,000 in actual scanned gate counts. The athletic department deficit ballooned from $15 million to $47.2 million. Football alone generated $3.3 million in revenue against $16.6 million in expenses in 2019 — a $13.3 million loss on a single sport. The AAC distributed $1.08 million to UConn in its final year — while Power 5 schools were receiving $20 to $30 million. Twenty-six players entered the transfer portal in a single cycle. Four sports programs were eliminated. The university was subsidizing athletics at $43.9 million a year — highest among public universities nationally.

UConn paid $17 million to leave the American. Sent its other sports back to the Big East. Left football wandering as an independent — where it still is today. The Big 12 explored adding UConn but paused expansion talks. The program that moved up to FBS because it had a guaranteed power conference home has spent 15 years and tens of millions of dollars trying to get back what it lost. It still hasn’t.

South Florida lived the same thing on the other side of the state. USF made it to No. 2 in the AP poll in 2007 as a Big East member. Once the Big East lost its power status, USF went 9-27 over three seasons. Even when they rebounded to 21-4 across 2016 and 2017, they never made a New Year’s Six bowl because the label was gone. Under Jeff Scott from 2020 to 2022, the program went 4-26. Actual scanned attendance in a 65,000-seat NFL stadium averaged 22,577 in 2024. USF didn’t fail. USF lost the label. Everything else followed.

What happened to the Big East is exactly what happened to the Pac-12 — but on the East Coast and a decade earlier. The same mechanism. The same result. The label moves, the money moves, the coaches move, the players move and the programs left behind spend a decade trying to claw back something that was taken from them in a conference room.

Houston and TCU spent decades in that wilderness after the SWC dissolved. TCU cycled through the WAC, Conference USA and the Mountain West. Houston went through Conference USA and the American. Both eventually clawed their way back into the Big 12. But the lost decades cost them in recruiting classes they didn’t land, facilities they couldn’t build, revenue they didn’t earn and momentum they couldn’t sustain. Getting back to where they started took TCU 16 years. Houston, 27. And they’re the success stories.

The G6 isn’t trying to overthrow the system. It never was. These programs aren’t pretending to compete financially with Ohio State, and nobody is staging a revolution.

They just don’t want to be forced into something they didn’t choose.

They chose FBS. They paid for FBS. They accepted the terms of FBS — every disadvantage, every disparity, every 45-3 loss in a buy game in front of 100,000 hostile fans. They took the deal with open eyes. What they didn’t agree to was having the terms rewritten after the fact by people who have the votes to do whatever they want and don’t need anyone’s permission to do it.

That’s the trap. Can’t go back — they’ve spent too much. Can’t go forward — the votes aren’t there. Can’t stand still — because the ground underneath them keeps moving. Every time the G6 adapts, the rules change. Every time a program breaks through, the moat gets wider. And the definition of “earning it” shifts to make sure nobody earns it twice.

Oregon State earned it. Went 10-3. Beat Florida in a bowl game. Packed a renovated stadium. And three years later they were 2-10, their coach was gone, their quarterback was gone, their NIL collective was in litigation and they were playing Washington State twice in one season just to fill a schedule.

If a $255 million war chest and Pac-12 infrastructure couldn’t protect them from the moat, nothing can.

Unless someone builds a bridge.

Tim Stephens is the founder and CEO of Diehard Sports Network and the former sports editor of the Birmingham Post-Herald. He has covered the business and politics of college athletics for more than 25 years.