Clemson, South Carolina football in same division? It would happen in ‘Super League’ plan

An 80-team “Super League.”

European soccer-style relegation.

Television money distributed to players via NIL.

Clemson and South Carolina in the same division?

Those details are the vision of College Sports Tomorrow, a group of influential sports leaders who’ve been pitching conference leaders and other key college football stakeholders on a bold new plan that would modernize but forever change the structure of the sport.

College football is currently in a evolutionary period defined by NIL, the transfer portal and, most prominently, sweeping rounds of realignment that have dramatically altered the sport’s conferences and done away with a number of historic rivalries as schools try to stay afloat in a billion dollar enterprise. The NCAA has faced significant criticism for its handling of modern college sports.

College Sports Tomorrow is aiming to fix some of those issues with a dramatic proposal.

The Athletic first reported on the details of the Super League on April 3, but the plan went fully viral Tuesday on social media after the sports business website Sportico published a story revealing new details about the proposal, including the suggested geographic breakdown for the league.

Sportico’s Daniel Libit and Eben Novy-Williams say they obtained a confidential slideshow “pitch deck” that College Sports Tomorrow circulated to stakeholders in mid-February that revealed, among other details, that the group is pitching an 80-team league with eight 10-team “divisions” arranged geographically.

In the proposal, longtime rivals Clemson and South Carolina are paired together in the super league’s “Southeast Division” with six other current ACC schools (Duke, Florida State, Miami, N.C. State, North Carolina and Wake Forest), one other current SEC school (Florida) and one current Big 12 school (UCF).

Under the plan, per The Athletic, the changes apply only to football (the clear revenue driver in college athletics), and other sports would “stay in their current conference structure.”

The proposal’s seven geographic divisions are “permanent” and made up of current Power Five schools, with an emphasis on keeping traditional rivalries in place or rekindling those that have been affected by the past decade of college football realignment.

The eighth and final division will be made up of teams from the “Under League” (Group of Five schools), with eight of the 10 teams in that division rotating out annually based on results from that league’s playoffs.

Every team in the super league would play 14 regular-season games across 15 weeks before qualifying teams participate in a 16-team, bracket-style playoff over a five-week period (with flexibility to eventually expand to a 24-team playoff).

The playoff teams would be the eight divisional winners and eight wildcard teams as determined by set tiebreakers (similar to the NFL) with no selection committee.

Here’s a full list of proposed divisions under the Super League (which, as noted by The Athletic and Sportico, faces significant hurdles and realistically couldn’t come to fruition until some time in the 2030s because of Power Five conferences’ current TV contracts):

College football super league divisions

• West: Arizona, Arizona State, Cal, Oregon, Oregon State, Stanford, UCLA, Southern Cal, Washington, Washington State

• Southwest: Arkansas, Baylor, Houston, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, SMU, TCU, Texas, Texas A&M, Texas Tech

• Plains: BYU, Colorado, Iowa, Iowa State, Kansas, Kansas State, Minnesota, Nebraska, Utah, Wisconsin

• Midwest: Cincinnati, Illinois, Indiana, Louisville, Michigan, Michigan State, Missouri, Northwestern, Ohio State, Purdue

• Northeast: Boston College, Maryland, Notre Dame, Penn State, Pittsburgh, Rutgers, Syracuse, Virginia, Virginia Tech, West Virginia

• Southeast: Clemson, Duke, Florida, Florida State, Miami, NC State, North Carolina, South Carolina, UCF, Wake Forest

• South: Alabama, Auburn, Georgia, Georgia Tech, Kentucky, LSU, Mississippi State, Ole Miss, Tennessee, Vanderbilt

• Under League Division: Boise State, James Madison, Liberty, Miami Ohio, New Mexico State, Toledo, Troy, Tulane, UNLV, UTSA (temporary)

In the Super League model, eight teams from the Under League will be “relegated” back to the Under League based on results and eight other teams from that league will be “promoted” into the Super League in their place based on playoff results in that league. A number of popular European soccer leagues, including the Premier League, have used this model successfully.

The Under League, Sportico reported, will be organized into eight divisions of seven teams, which were not detailed in the slide deck the website obtained.

The College Sports Tomorrow model also proposes a name, image and likeness setup in which players get shares of a “collectively bargained ‘FB Player Pool’ ” that comes from the Super League’s television revenue and is organized by seniority (5% to all rostered freshmen, 15% to sophomores, 30% to juniors and 50% to seniors and graduate students).

The model, per the pitch deck obtained by Sportico, also “encourages student-athlete persistence” and lays out a stricter transfer portal format “to increase odds of graduation and simultaneously creating an even greater incentive for schools to invest in, retain, develop and graduate players.”

The proposal faces a number of hurdles in getting off the ground. The Athletic reported that conferences have been hesitant to meet with CST leaders on the proposal as to not upset their current broadcast partners, and all of the top conferences have signed TV media deals through at least 2029 (as well as a massive extension with ESPN to broadcast a 12-team College Football Playoff for six years starting this fall).

Clemson and USC together again?

A Clemson-South Carolina pairing in the Super League’s “Southeast Division” would create an interesting dynamic for two teams who have not shared a conference or division since 1971.

The Tigers and the Gamecocks were both charter members of the ACC starting in 1954 and competed as conference foes for 19 years until USC left the ACC. South Carolina competed against Clemson as an independent until joining the SEC in 1991.

Clemson and USC boast one of the nation’s fiercest and longest-running football rivalries. In fact, before the SEC opted for a conference-only schedule in 2020, blocking the teams from playing that year amid the COVID pandemix, they’d played 111 seasons in a row from 1909-2019, the second-longest active streak behind Minnesota-Wisconsin (1907-present).

South Carolina’s SEC status has long been seen as an advantage Clemson can’t offer to recruits, so the Gamecocks understandably haven’t been thrilled about the idea of their rival Tigers joining the SEC over recent rounds of realignment.

USC’s former athletic director, Eric Hyman, told The State in 2022 that USC made it clear it didn’t want Clemson in the SEC during a 2012 realignment cycle that eventually saw the SEC bring in Texas A&M and Missouri.

During recent rounds of college football realignment, which have seen the SEC and Big Ten emerge as the premier “destinations” over the past few years, South Carolina leaders have also lobbied against Clemson as an expansion candidate, per various national reports.

The Tigers remain in the ACC, where they’ve been a member for 71 years, but took the major step last month of suing their own conference in an attempt to break out of the league’s grant of rights and explore potential moves to other conferences to increase their revenue long-term.