After another week of frustrating setbacks, at the end of a frustrating year trying to bring stability to their industry, a growing number of college athletic directors say they are interested in exploring a once-unthinkable option: collective bargaining with their players.

Dozens of athletic directors will gather in Las Vegas over the next few days for an annual conference. They had hoped to be raising toasts to the U.S. House of Representatives. But for the second time in three months, House members balked last week at voting on a bill that would give the NCAA protection from antitrust lawsuits and employment threats. So instead, they will be greeted by one of the Strip’s specialties: the cold-slap realization of needing a better plan.

“I’m not sure I can sit back today and say I’m really proud of what we’ve become,” Boise State athletic director Jeramiah Dickey told ESPN late last week. “There is a solution. We just have to work together to find it, and maybe collective bargaining is it.”

Athletic directors see only two paths to a future in which the college sports industry can enforce rules and defend them in court: Either Congress grants them an exemption from antitrust laws, or they collectively bargain with athletes. As Dickey said, and others have echoed quietly in the past several days, it has become irresponsible to continue to hope for an antitrust bailout without at least fully kicking the tires on the other option.

“If Congress ends up solving it for us, and it ends up being a healthy solution I’ll be the first one to do cartwheels down the street,” said Tennessee athletic director Danny White when speaking to ESPN about his interest in collective bargaining months ago. “But what are the chances they get it right when the NCAA couldn’t even get it right? We should be solving it ourselves.”

Some athletic directors thought they had solved their era of relative lawlessness back in July. The NCAA and its schools agreed to pay $2.8 billion in the House settlement to purchase a very expensive set of guardrails meant to put a cap on how much teams could spend to acquire players. The schools also agreed to fund the College Sports Commission, a new agency created by the settlement to police those restrictions.

But without an antitrust exemption, any school or player who doesn’t like a punishment they receive for bursting through those guardrails can file a lawsuit and give themselves a pretty good chance of wiggling out of a penalty. The CSC’s plan — crafted largely by leaders of the Power 4 conferences — to enforce those rules without an antitrust exemption was to get all their schools to sign a promise that they wouldn’t file any such lawsuits. On the same day that Congress’ attempt crumbled last week, seven state attorneys general angrily encouraged their schools not to sign the CSC’s proposed agreement.

In the wake of the attorneys general’s opposition, a loose deadline to sign the agreement came and went, with many schools declining to participate. So, college football is steamrolling toward another transfer portal season without any sheriff that has the legal backing to police how teams spend money on building their rosters.

That’s why college sports fans have heard head football coaches like Lane Kiffin openly describe how they negotiated for the biggest player payroll possible in a system where all teams are supposed to be capped at the same $20.5 million limit. Right now, the rules aren’t real. The stability promised as part of the House settlement doesn’t appear to be imminent. Meanwhile, the tab for potential damages in future antitrust lawsuits continues to grow larger with each passing day.

Collective bargaining isn’t easy, either. Under the current law, players would need to be employees to negotiate a legally binding deal. The NCAA and most campus leaders are adamantly opposed to turning athletes into employees for several reasons, including the added costs and infrastructure it would require.

The industry would need to make tough decisions about which college athletes should be able to bargain and how to divide them into logical groups. Should the players be divided by conference? Should all football players negotiate together? What entity would sit across from them at the bargaining table?

On Monday, Athletes.Org, a group that has been working for two years to become college sports’ version of a players’ union, published a 35-page proposal for what an agreement might look like. Their goal was to show it is possible to answer the thorny, in-the-weeds questions that have led many leaders in college sports to quickly dismiss collective bargaining as a viable option.

Multiple athletic directors and a sitting university president are taking the proposal seriously — a milestone for one of the several upstart entities working to gain credibility as a representative for college athletes. Syracuse chancellor and president Kent Syverud said Monday that he has long felt the best way forward for college sports is a negotiation where athletes have “a real collective voice in setting the rules.”

“[This template] is an important step toward that kind of partnership-based framework,” he said in a statement released with AO’s plan. “… I’m encouraged to see this conversation happening more openly, so everyone can fully understand what’s at stake.”

White, the Tennessee athletic director, has also spent years working with lawyers to craft a collective bargaining option. In his plan, the top brands in college football would form a single private company, which could then employ players. He says that would provide a solution in states where employees of public institutions are not legally allowed to unionize.

“I don’t understand why everyone’s so afraid of employment status,” White said. “We have kids all over our campus that have jobs. … We have kids in our athletic department that are also students here that work in our equipment room, and they have employee status. How that became a dirty word, I don’t get it.”

White said athletes could be split into groups by sport to negotiate for a percentage of the revenue they help to generate.

The result could be expensive for schools. Then again, paying lawyers and lobbyists isn’t cheap either. The NCAA and the four power conferences combined to spend more than $9 million on lobbyists between 2021 and 2024, the latest year where public data is available. That’s a relatively small figure compared to the fees and penalties they could face if they continue to lose antitrust cases in federal court.

“I’m not smart enough to say [collective bargaining] is the only answer or the best answer,” Dickey said. “But I think the onus is on us to at least curiously question: How do you set something up that can be sustainable? What currently is happening is not.”

Players and coaches are frustrated with the current system, wanting to negotiate salaries and build rosters with a clear idea of what rules will actually be enforced. Dickey says fans are frustrated as they invest energy and money into their favorite teams without understanding what the future holds. And athletic directors, who want to plan a yearly budget and help direct their employees, are frustrated too.

“It has been very difficult on campus. I can’t emphasize that enough,” White said. “It’s been brutal in a lot of ways. It continues to be as we try to navigate these waters without a clear-cut solution.”

This week White and Dickey won’t be alone in their frustration. They’ll be among a growing group of peers who are pushing to explore a new solution.

SOUTH BEND, Ind. — Notre Dame athletic director Pete Bevacqua said the ACC engaged in a sustained, targeted social media campaign against the school’s football team late in the season that has forever changed the relationship between Notre Dame and the league.

Bevacqua said the ACC, in the process of promoting football member Miami for College Football Playoff inclusion, also damaged Notre Dame, which lost the season opener to the Hurricanes. Miami made the CFP field as the No. 10 seed, while Notre Dame dropped from No. 9 to No. 11 in the final standings and was left out. The Irish on Sunday declined an invitation to play in the Pop-Tarts Bowl, through an ACC tie-in, and ended their season at 10-2.

Notre Dame is an independent in football but has 24 of its sports teams in the ACC. In 2014, the Irish entered into a scheduling agreement with the ACC where they play at least five conference members per season.

“I understand they have to stand up for their teams in football,” Bevacqua said. “We just think there’s other ways to do it, and it has created damage. I’m not going to shy away from that, and that’s just not me speaking. People a lot more important at this university than me feel the same way. So I think it has done some real damage, and I think the ACC knows that.”

Bevacqua outlined a multiweek social media campaign, during which he communicated with the ACC. He said an initial post from the ACC’s official X account that appeared on Nov. 10, which included a side-by-side comparison of Miami and Notre Dame, caught his attention but attributed it to an individual staffer overstepping.

“Quite frankly, I was kind of expecting a phone call saying, ‘Hey, sorry about that, it won’t happen again,'” Bevacqua said. “But then it did happen again, and we started to communicate with the ACC, texts that I sent, emails that I sent, and it continued to happen.”

Bevacqua said he spoke with ACC commissioner Jim Phillips, and while he didn’t detail their phone conversation, he expressed Notre Dame’s displeasure with the social media posts. Another X post from the ACC account on Nov. 17 showed posts from media members citing Miami’s head-to-head edge against Notre Dame.

“We were definitely being targeted,” Bevacqua said. “And for better or for worse, we have a different relationship with the ACC than any other team in college football, other than the [football] teams that are in the ACC. Because we’re in the ACC for 24 sports, we have a scheduling agreement with the ACC. The ACC does wonderful things for Notre Dame, but we bring tremendous football value to the ACC, and we didn’t understand why you would go out of your way to try to damage us in this process.”

Phillips on Monday released a statement, in response to comments Bevacqua made on “The Dan Patrick Show,” that read in part, “The University of Notre Dame is an incredibly valued member of the ACC and there is tremendous respect and appreciation for the entire institution. With that said, when it comes to football, we have a responsibility to support and advocate for all 17 of our football-playing member institutions, and I stand behind our conference efforts to do just that leading up to the College Football Playoff committee selections on Sunday. At no time was it suggested by the ACC that Notre Dame was not a worthy candidate for inclusion in the field.”

After the initial tweet comparing Miami and Notre Dame’s profiles, the ACC had similar posts about other CFP contenders, including Alabama and BYU. On Dec. 1, the ACC account had a post entitled “Head to Head Matters” with Miami and Notre Dame, while several other posts mentioned Notre Dame but also Alabama and BYU. Phillips did not disparage Notre Dame in any of his media interviews leading up to the selections. The ACC Network, which is owned by ESPN and generally handles its own programming, re-aired the Miami-Notre Dame game more than a dozen times last week, which led to more communication between Bevacqua and Phillips, sources said.

Bevacqua has not communicated with Phillips since the selections, saying he has only spoken with SEC commissioner Greg Sankey — whom he talks to regularly — about the CFP format and process. Bevacqua said “all things can be healed” and that while he’s not necessarily looking for an apology from the ACC, he will “sit down with ACC leadership and have a very frank, honest, hopefully productive conversation.”

Notre Dame is tied into the ACC’s grant of media rights, which run through 2036.

“Up until this moment, I think the relationship between Notre Dame and the ACC has been unbelievably healthy and mutually beneficial,” Bevacqua said. “That’s, I think, one of the reasons why we were so flabbergasted by this.”

ESPN senior writer Andrea Adelson contributed to this report.

Twelve years into the College Football Playoff, the committee may have been tasked with its toughest decision yet.

On one hand, there’s Alabama, the bluest of blue bloods, a team that played the sixth-toughest schedule in the country, with seven wins over FPI top-40 opponents, and whose final loss — the one that put the Tide squarely on the bubble — came in the SEC championship game, while others like Miami and Notre Dame sat at home.

On the other hand, there’s Notre Dame, the most storied program in the sport’s history with a legion of fans from coast to coast. The Irish are playing exceptional football, winning 10 straight all by double digits, and their lone losses, way back in August and early September, came to two other top-tier teams by a combined four points.

Then on the metaphorical third hand is Miami, a team that began the season with fireworks, sagged in the middle, then responded to its No. 18 placement in the first set of rankings by reeling off four straight wins by an average of 27 points per game. Oh, and Miami holds a head-to-head win over Notre Dame, albeit one that came in the first week of the season and that the committee may or may not consider from week to week.

Spread around a few garnishes of Texas, Vanderbilt and BYU on the plate and add a dessert course of a Duke-JMU argument that could result in bumping a Power 4 conference from the playoff entirely and it’s a tough year to be a committee member.

There have been others, of course. In 2014, the committee punted on a tricky Baylor-TCU debate in favor of Ohio State, and the Buckeyes won it all. In 2017, amid a chaotic final week, the committee handed its final bid to Alabama, despite its absence from the SEC championship game, and the Tide went on to win a championship. In 2023, the committee snubbed an undefeated Florida State, because of an injury to QB Jordan Travis, and the Seminoles have gone on to lose 18 of their next 25 games.

The results after a controversial decision always seem to lead to the same conclusion: The committee got things right.

And yet, as the committee so often notes after each rankings release, the results alone don’t tell the whole story. In football, perhaps more than any other sport, the process matters. And the committee’s process, from the outset of that first playoff 12 years ago, has been a mess.

The ultimate verdict of Sunday’s final ranking showcased the disaster vividly.

Step away from the whole process, and the decision to rank Miami ahead of Notre Dame makes perfect sense. They have the same record. Miami won head-to-head. Most rational folks, aligned with neither side, would acknowledge the committee came to a sensible conclusion.

But look at the process and try to follow the committee’s rationale, and it’s like climbing the stairs in an M.C. Escher painting.

In the first ranking, Notre Dame was eight spots ahead of Miami. Both won out, both by big margins, and each week along the way, Notre Dame remained ahead of Miami. Last week, Alabama — fresh off a near disaster in the Iron Bowl — leapfrogged Notre Dame despite the Irish dominating Stanford 49-20. That was a head-scratcher, unless, of course, you believed the minor conspiracy that the committee was setting up a direct comparison between Miami and Notre Dame by having them ranked one right after the other.

And, what do you know, that’s what we got. After BYU lost its conference championship, the Cougars dropped in the rankings — something that didn’t happen to Alabama for a similar blowout defeat, it should be noted — and Notre Dame and Miami were separated by nothing other than the committee’s whims.

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Saban hopes Notre Dame’s snub leads to CFP changes

Nick Saban gives his thoughts on the structure of the College Football Playoff in light of Notre Dame being left out.

So while both sat home on their couches on championship weekend, Miami somehow did enough to push its way into the playoff instead of Notre Dame.

Is it a reasonable conclusion? Yes!

Is it a ridiculous process that got us here? A thousand yeses!

Let’s consider how the committee evaluates teams for a moment. Which variables matter most? We’ve gone from Florida State’s battle against game control in 2014 to Notre Dame’s résumé boasting two quality losses in 2025.

Does head-to-head matter? For five weeks it might not, but in the last week it clearly did.

The committee is supposed to evaluate a school’s entire body of work, but does that mean a September loss can’t be overshadowed by clear and obvious growth throughout a season?

Do conference championships matter? Winning them is supposed to be a factor — though, ask 2023 Florida State about that — so shouldn’t a loss matter, too? A year ago, committee chair Warde Manuel said it might — including docking SMU two spots after a three-point loss to Clemson in the ACC conference championship game, even if it didn’t knock the Mustangs out of the playoff. But Alabama’s 21-point loss Saturday meant nothing.

Ranked wins are great, but of course the committee decides who earns the distinction of being ranked. The eye test is the best argument for one team, the data for another, and no one can be sure which metric matters more, because again, it depends. For a committee composed primarily of former coaches and active ADs, the human element — perceptions, expectations, projections, biases and misunderstandings — loom like a cloud over every mention of strength of record or game control.

Or boil it down to the most basic debate: Are we trying to find the best teams or the most deserving? And how do we even define those two things? From week to week, the answer is a shrug emoji and a Mad Libs of metrics and records pieced together like those magnetic words people put on their refrigerator.

All of this leads to arguments, which is likely a feature of the system, not a bug. Debate is part of the DNA of sports. But ironically, no one seems to contradict the committee more than the committee itself. The case for Team A so often sounds like the mirror image of the case against Team B. Alabama jumped Notre Dame in last week’s rankings after an ugly win over Auburn, but Miami’s dominant victory on the road against a ranked Pitt team made no difference. When Texas A&M needed a Houdini act to beat South Carolina, that wasn’t a knock on the Aggies, the committee chair said, but when Alabama narrowly escaped those same Gamecocks, it was a flaw in the Tide’s résumé. Ranked wins are great — but only if the team was ranked at the time, or maybe if it ends up ranked in the future. Also, the committee does the ranking so, whew.

And when those explanations get parsed by fans in the aftermath of perplexing decisions — Alabama’s “impressive” seven-point win over 5-7 Auburn allowing the Tide to leapfrog Notre Dame after a 29-point Irish win over 4-8 Stanford, for example — the outcome isn’t just disagreements and debate. It’s conspiratorial thinking. It’s a hollowing out of trust in the process. It’s a belief that the deck is stacked ahead of time. And that’s a disservice to the sport, the teams involved, and the committee itself. Good folks work hard and care about their role, but because their process is so immensely flawed, the presumption of nefarious motives isn’t just fodder for the message boards, but increasingly, mainstream thinking.

Imagine for a moment this wasn’t about college football. Imagine instead this was clinical trials for a new drug or a prized astrophysicist trying to explain an anomaly deep in outer space or, heck, assembling a bookshelf you bought from IKEA. Any such endeavor requires not just a result that seems to work, but a process that can be repeated, again and again, by a completely different set of people, before anyone gives it enough credence that a majority of people — even ones who don’t understand the process at all — believe in the work that was done and trust the results provided.

We don’t have to understand Einstein’s theory of relativity to believe in its basic principles. Relativity remains a theory, not a fact, but it is commonly accepted around the world by brilliant scientists and guys watching “Interstellar” at 3 a.m. on cable alike, because we can all appreciate a stringent process, rigorous testing, and an ability to withstand criticism from dissenting voices.

If we can do that for quantum physics, then surely we can do that for a college football playoff, right?

Instead, we’ll continue to argue. That’s OK. The arguments are part of the fun. But at the foundation of those arguments are real people — players, coaches, administrators, support staffs and even the fans. While no result will make everyone happy, the least this sport owes them is a process they can understand.

Way back on Nov. 4, Notre Dame was 6-2 with a three-point loss to Miami on its résumé. The committee believed the Irish were the No. 10 team in the country.

On that same date, Miami was 6-2 with a three-point win over Notre Dame on its résumé. The committee believed the Canes were the No. 18 team in the country.

This isn’t complicated math, but just for clarity’s sake: Five weeks ago, these two teams had the same record, Miami had a head-to-head win, and the committee believed Notre Dame was eight spots better. That would certainly seem to indicate a sincere and strong belief that, the Week 1 result be damned, the Irish were clearly the better team overall.

So, what has happened since then?

Notre Dame is 4-0 with a win over a ranked team and an average margin of 38 points per game. Miami is 4-0 with a win over a ranked team and an average margin of 27.5 points per game.

And yet, when the committee put its rankings together this time around, Miami is one spot ahead of Notre Dame.

There is every reason to be suspicious of the committee’s initial evaluation of these two teams. Perhaps those Nov. 4 rankings were a mistake. But the committee waited five weeks to correct that mistake, and during that span, the Irish absolutely demoralized everyone they played — including two teams that Miami also played, but Notre Dame won by more.

Nothing that has happened between the first rankings and the last suggests Notre Dame got worse relative to Miami, and yet a full nine spots in the rankings have shifted between the two.

If this was all about the committee playing the long game, using the opening scenes to set up a dramatic showdown between Miami and Notre Dame in the final act, then kudos for creating some exceptional TV.

As far as offering an honest weekly evaluation of college football teams, however, this was an absurd farce that served as a slap in the face to coach Marcus Freeman and his team and leaves us without the chance to see arguably the best player in the country, Jeremiyah Love, in the biggest games of the year.

Typically the difference between a No. 6 and a No. 7 ranking is negligible. Both get a home game in the first round, both have a good shot to advance.

This year, however, it’s a little different.

Thanks to the ACC’s pratfall of a season, two Group of 5 teams made the final field. That means both the No. 5 seed and the No. 6 seed get to play teams from outside the big-boy conferences, while the No. 7 seed lands a genuine contender on the docket in Round 1.

The loser of this lottery is Texas A&M, and that’s a pretty tough take to defend.

Let’s look at the résumés.

Team A: No. 10 in FPI, best win vs. FPI No. 3, loss to FPI No. 13, No. 3 strength of record, five wins vs. bowl-eligible teams, six wins vs. FPI top 40

Team B: No. 12 in FPI, best win vs. FPI No. 15, loss to SP+ No. 6, No 6 strength of record, four wins vs. bowl-eligible teams, four wins vs. FPI top 40

They’re close, but the edge in nearly every metric is with Team A. That’s Texas A&M.

Or how about this: Against five common opponents, A&M has a scoring edge of 2 points, including a far better win over LSU, their best common foe.

Is it splitting hairs? Of course, but that’s the committee’s job. And the results of that hair-splitting are the difference between Ole Miss getting a rematch with a Tulane team it beat by 35 in September or facing off against a red-hot Miami eager to prove it belonged in the field.

3. Greg Sankey

On Saturday, the SEC commissioner was asked to state his case for his league’s bubble teams. He offered an inclusive take.

“I view that there are seven of our teams at the conclusion of the 12-game season over 14 weeks that merit inclusion in the playoff,” Sankey said.

And yet, here we are, with just a measly five SEC teams in the field, including one getting a first-round bye and three hosting home games. It’s a slap in the face!

Truth is, Vanderbilt was quite good this year, with a strength of record ahead of both Notre Dame and Miami, and the world would simply be a better place with Diego Pavia in the playoff.

Truth is, if the goal of the playoff is to seed it with the best teams — the teams capable of beating other elite teams and making a run for a championship — then Texas had as good a case as anyone, with head-to-head wins over Oklahoma, Vandy and Texas A&M.

Heck, compare these two résumés:

Team A: Three losses, the worst loss to FPI No. 53 by eight and three wins vs. FPI top-15 teams

Team B: Three losses, the worst loss to FPI No. 74 by 14 and two wins vs. FPI top-15 teams

Team A also has a 17-point win over a team that beat Team B.

So, who would you take?

Don’t ask Sankey. His answer is both. But Team A is Texas and Team B is Alabama, and the Longhorns have looked markedly better over the past month of the season than the flailing Tide.

You have to hand it to Manny Diaz. The man can make a coherent argument for a lost cause.

“We played 10 Power 4 teams. Comparing us to James Madison, for example, who had a fantastic season — their strength of schedule is in the 100s. Ours is in the 50s. Seven wins in our conference. Seven Power 4 wins as opposed to zero Power 4 wins. The ACC champions. … I’m watching them play Troy at home [in the Sun Belt championship] and Troy had a backup quarterback in for most of the game, right? And it’s a three-point game until, really, the last few minutes of the game when they were able to pull away. They won the game and their conference, but you just can’t compare going through the Sun Belt this year — the Sun Belt has been a really good conference in years past, but most of their top teams are just having down years. They’re not challenged the way they would’ve been going through a normal Sun Belt schedule. Then you start comparing strength of schedule — if you simply go into wins and losses, you have to look at who you’re playing against. That’s the whole point of why you play a Power 4 schedule. There’s a reason these coaches are all leaving to take Power 4 jobs. There’s a recognition that’s where the best competition is.”

That was no small jab at JMU, whose coach, Bob Chesney, is leaving for a Power 4 job at UCLA.

It also probably gets Diaz removed from Sun Belt commissioner Keith Gill’s Christmas card list, which given that ACC commissioner Jim Phillips can’t be pleased with Duke torpedoing his conference’s reputation by winning the league with five losses, is going to leave a lot of extra space on Diaz’s mantle this holiday season.

Alabama lost a championship game by 21 points to a top-four team. It didn’t budge in the rankings.

BYU lost a championship game by 27 points to a top-four team. It dropped a spot.

Did it ultimately matter for the Cougars? No. They weren’t sniffing the playoff unless they beat Texas Tech. But on principle, they ought to be angry about the double standard.

Moreover, BYU was the most overlooked team all season — the one that had a good case, a comparable résumé, and virtually no one outside of Provo cheerleading for them.

Which, oddly enough, feels about the same as last year, when BYU had a perfectly good case alongside Alabama, Miami, Ole Miss and South Carolina, and no one seemed to bat an eye when they finished a distant 17th — behind Clemson, even — in the committee’s final ranking.

Also angry this week: Virginia Cavaliers (10-3, No. 19 and dropped two spots — more than any other conference championship game loser, despite playing the closest conference championship game), Tennessee Volunteers, LSU Tigers, Illinois Fighting Illini and Missouri Tigers (all 8-4, all unranked, and all with a better strength of record than the Arizona Wildcats or the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets), Lane Kiffin (astonished the committee didn’t value his departure more).