Ep. 118: More College Sports Chaos, with Sun Belt Conference Commissioner, Keith Gill

Yeah, that's a great question.

Obviously, there's no shortage of things to talk about in college athletics right now.

From a CFP standpoint, I really do think the answers are much more nuanced than a lot of the things you hear.

So from a Sunbelt standpoint, we are absolutely for more access, right? So if the CFP expands to 24, I really think that's good for our conference and that's really positive.

And in a lot of ways, it's good for college football.

I think what's important to understand, though, is that the issue is just more complex than that because we need to make sure we understand how it impacts the regular season.

We need to make sure we understand how it impacts our conference championship games.

Those games are really important from an exposure standpoint, from a winning a conference championship standpoint.

And that's one of the values of having a conference is it gives every school an opportunity to compete online.

and win a championship amongst kind of peer institutions.

And so all those things matter.

And then the value matters.

So you don't want to drive down value.

You want to make sure that the economics is right and that the math, maths.

And so what I would say is, yes, we are for expansion.

24 is great, but we want to explore it, understand the details before we would totally commit to it because those other things that I just mentioned are really important and certainly should impact

And related to that, how do you see the Sun Belt and other peer conferences and your schools fitting into this evolving environment, particularly with college football, as there's more and more noise about whether it's a full separation or more limited access, that even if the number grows, maybe the access will be more limited? How does the Sun Belt and your member schools continue to compete when The price of competition keeps going up seemingly every day.

Yeah, I think that's a great question because it is not getting cheaper to run these programs.

It's really expensive.

We're fighting and clawing for every dollar to support the programs.

And so I would just honestly say it's a challenge.

But the reality from where I sit is I don't really anticipate, I don't see some huge break in us not having an ability to compete.

I think that we'll still all be together in some ways, particularly from a competition standpoint, from a national competition standpoint.

So I think that will always be exist to us.

And the reality is Alabama has always been Alabama and we've always been us.