Will Hall, Southern Miss’ fourth-year head football coach, is one of many expecting a major reconfiguration of the Division I college athletics landscape. Instead of worrying about it, he’s encouraging fans of his program to capture what he sees as an opportunity.
Changing times in college sports were punctuated most recently by the folding of the Pac-12 conference, along with the additions of Texas and Oklahoma to the SEC. Most believe the tectonic plates of conference alignment will continue shifting into a system that solidifies the already well-defined gap in resources among America’s collegiate programs. Some expect it to fracture altogether.
Hall holds to the latter, predicting DI college football schools will be cleaved into three tiers. At the top, he thinks 16 to 32 of the NCAA’s highest-resource programs will form their own league, while those programs that already struggle to make ends meet will be left behind.
“Obviously, you’ll have the elites of the elites – your Ohio States, your Michigans, your Georgias, your ‘Bamas, your Texases, and so on – that’ll have their way of doing things,” Hall said. “Then, you’ll have a level that can’t do anything and can’t pay players at all. They’ll be playing for scholarships.”
Since 1984, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the NCAA could no longer have full ownership of college football television rights, a steady flow of TV revenue has swelled to tsunami-esque proportions. According to the NCAA, $4.2 billion in broadcasting revenue poured into DI college athletics in 2022. With the most recognized brands and highest revenue programs coalescing into a smaller group, that number is expected to grow exponentially.
The bulk of that revenue had been previously shared by the Power Five conferences, but now will be drawn to just four conferences with the death of the Pac-12. In July 2021, the NCAA began allowing external payment to players for the use of their name, image, and likeness (NIL). With an abundance of resources, combined with a lack of regulation and no limit on players’ ability to transfer to new schools, the top programs expanded the canyon between themselves and the rest.
“A lot of people say, ‘I wish we could go back to the way it was,’” Hall said, noting that upcoming lawsuit settlements will provide some clarity. “Well, players were getting paid back then too. It was just called cheating.
“Social media talks about 10 to 12 schools and about three to five players at those schools. Outside of them, no one’s riding up in Cadillac Escalades or Lamborghinis. There are still 110, 120 players at those schools that aren’t getting that. Then, there are 120 other teams that have a whole roster to fill.”
An athletics program like Southern Miss, which has the second-lowest athletic budget in the Sun Belt Conference, is one that many would label in danger of losing its footing in the national picture and slipping into the lowest tier that Hall speaks of. While the head coach recognizes the urgency of the black and gold improving its position, he sees an opportunity for the program to move into a better position than ever.
“What we’ve got to do is get to functioning a little bit more like some of those other in-betweens that aren’t operating at an elite level budget-wise – the ACC and SEC teams that aren’t gonna make that cut with the elite,” Hall said, explaining that getting to a $2 million annual NIL budget would put Southern Miss in a strong position to move up a tier. “Southern Miss has been left behind so many times, and every time it’s been about TV money. That doesn’t matter so much anymore.”
The SEC is expected to soon follow in the tracks of the Big 10, who just inked a $1.1 billion dollar media rights deal, in becoming the next 10-figure league. But Hall doesn’t think the current makeup of conferences will last long. And when the “non-elite” programs are separated from the soaring influx of TV cash, there won’t be as much separation.
“You look at a place like Mississippi State, they get $52 million from the SEC every year. Without that $52 million, there ain’t a whole lot of difference between us and them,” Hall said. “I mean, UCLA’s head football coach left to go be an assistant at Ohio State – in the same conference. There’s a group of schools that are functioning at such a high level that no one, even in their own conference, can touch them.
“Look, there’s a tier that’s spending between 10 and 20 million dollars a year [on NIL]. That tier’s gonna run off and leave everybody. People say it’s the SEC and the Big 10 – it’s not. It’s a select few schools from each with a few others. We’re way closer to the bottom level of those two leagues than the lowest tier is to the elite schools in those leagues. We’re not that far away. If we can get to functioning on $2 million a year total, we’re right there with being like a lot of schools in the Big 10, ACC, and others.”
Southern Miss’ athletic budget ranked 125th in the NCAA in 2023, or ninth-lowest among FBS schools. But bright spots like an average baseball attendance ranking in the top 10 nationally, three straight years of improved attendance in basketball, and a record-high budget last fiscal year point to momentum in Hattiesburg.
Hall also points to the fact that the chaos surrounding the current landscape will result in a reversion to the “way things used to be,” albeit in a different form. He pointed to the fact that most Southern Miss athletes, such as current NFL players Frank Gore, Jr. and Jason Brownlee, chose to stay in the black and gold instead of moving up via the transfer portal.
Data from a national transfer portal study conducted by the NCAA solidifies his point that most current college athletes benefit from staying where they started. In the 2023 transfer cycle, 154 players transferred from Group of Five programs to Power Five schools. Just four of them, or 2.5%, went on to be drafted in the NFL, while about 12% of players picked in the 2024 NFL draft were products of a Group of Five program.
“The reality of it is most players stay. NIL allows them to stay,” Hall said. “Believe it or not, most of these kids still care about getting a degree – they want to. They don’t want to have to go start at a new school. They really care about their legacy. Frank Gore, Jr. cared about his legacy.”
But to get to a point where success is sustainable and separation from Group of Five peers is likely, Hall says it will take a fanbase-wide effort. Southern Miss’ NIL collective, To The Top Collective, has more than quintupled in the last eight months – from around 80 annual members to now around 400.
“[The situation] is as urgent as it could possibly be. If we can get everybody that loves Southern Miss to do what they can, we will run off and leave our competition,” Hall said. “One of two things will happen, we’ll out-recruit everybody at our level and win a bunch of games. And/or, it’ll put us in a position to when the next shift happens, a higher level will grab us. We have a fanbase that cares. Our No. 1 resource is our people. We just gotta get everybody educated and bought in.”
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