Chip Kelly calls for football to break away from other sports, athletes to get share of revenue

Chip Kelly has been one of the most outspoken coaches about the impact of conference realignment.

Over the summer, the UCLA coach suggested football break away from the other sports and become independent — similar to the model Notre Dame has as an independent in football and an ACC member in its other sports. Those comments came after the Pac-12 effectively disbanded while the Big Ten, Big 12 and ACC secured schools on both coasts.

But conference realignment isn’t the only issue in college sports at the moment. NIL and the transfer portal are also dominating the conversation, and the idea of revenue sharing with athletes is seen as the next big one. Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh is helping lead the charge to give athletes a slice of the pie, issuing that call again after the Wolverines made the College Football Playoff. President Joe Biden also discussed revenue sharing during a meeting with former college football players and advocates last month.

For Kelly, the idea of football breaking away and being on its own would present that type of opportunity. Instead of each league having its own media rights deal, he argued football would be under one TV umbrella. He even suggested having the “divisions” sponsored by different brands.

Either way, Kelly’s point was to ultimately give the athletes their share.

“I think if you went together collectively as a group and said there’s 132 teams and we all share the same TV contract, so that the Mountain West doesn’t have one and the Sun Belt doesn’t have another and SEC has one and they have another, that we all go together,” Kelly said during a Friday press conference. “That’s a lot of games, and there’s a lot of people in the TV world that would go through it. You can sponsor each one. Instead of calling it Group of Five and Power Five, you can call it Amazon, Nike, bid that out to things. A lot of different things.

“But I think if we still do the same thing and take all that money — and I would do this, and I think this needs to be done. That money now needs to be shared with the student-athletes, and there needs to be revenue sharing and the players should get paid and you can get rid of [NIL] and the schools should be paying the players because the players are what the product is. And the fact that they don’t get paid is really, the biggest travesty. Not that I’ve thought about it.”

Chip Kelly: Football can have two 64-team ‘conferences’

Part of Chip Kelly’s solution was to break up the “Power Five” and the “Group of Five” into two “conferences” of their own. The Big Ten, Big 12 and ACC will all have schools on both coasts starting in 2024, and one of the criticisms of realignment was the regional tradition is starting to go away.

Kelly’s solution would combat that and make football, truly, a national sport.

“I think we need to have a conference commissioner, and I think football should be separate from the other sports,” Kelly said. “Just the fact that our school is leaving to go to the Big Ten in football, our softball team should be playing Arizona in softball. Our basketball team should be playing Arizona in basketball. But because football left — and they’re saying, ‘Well, how do you do that?’ Well, Notre Dame’s independent in football and they’re in a conference in everything else. I think we should all be independent in football. You can have a 64-team conference that’s in the Power Five and you can have a 64-team conference in the Group of Five, and we separate it and we play each other.

“You can have the West Coast teams and then every year, we play seven games against the West Coast teams, and then we play the East. So we play Syracuse, Boston College, Pitt, West Virginia, Virginia. Then, the next year, you play against the South while you still play your seven teams. You can play a seven-game schedule, you can play four against another division opponent and you can always play against one Mountain [time zone] team every year so that we can still keep those rivalries going. Not that I’ve really thought about this, and not that I’ve spent a lot of time on this.”