UCLA’s Kelly advocates for single P5 conference

Paolo Uggetti, ESPNDec 17, 2023, 01:57 AM ET

In a news conference ahead of UCLA‘s LA Bowl win over Boise State, Bruins coach Chip Kelly called for a complete revamping of college football’s structure following the forthcoming dissolution of the Pac-12.

“It’s sad,” Kelly said Friday. “The fact that there’s not going to be a Pac-12 next year, the fact that Washington State is not going to be [in] a conference next year, the fact that Oregon State is not going to be in a conference next year, we failed.”

Kelly’s solution includes establishing a conference commissioner and having football break away from other sports, something he has advocated for in the past. As conferences such as the Big Ten, SEC, Big 12 and ACC keep adding teams from, in some cases, both coasts, Kelly’s ideal scenario is for a version of independence that leads to consolidation.

“I think we should all be independent in football,” Kelly said. “You can have a 64-team conference that’s in the Power 5 and you can have a 64-team conference in the Group of 5, and we separate it and we play each other.”

Kelly said he believes there should be one TV contract that includes every conference, where potential regional divisions are sponsored by brands and the overall media offering is stronger and more appealing to potential TV partners.

“That’s a lot of games, and there’s a lot of people in the TV world that would go through it,” Kelly said. “You can sponsor each one. Instead of calling it Group of 5 and Power 5, you can call it Amazon, Nike, bid that out to things.”

Beyond the branding of conferences and divisions, Kelly explained how he believed the scheduling could work in this new format to retain rivalries while also creating new ones.

“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,” Kelly said. “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 team every year so that we can still keep those rivalries going.”

In what was perhaps the staunchest point of his answer, Kelly called for revenue sharing between schools and players, which, in his mind, would alleviate a lot of the murkiness that name, image and likeness has brought to the sport in recent years.

“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,” Kelly said. “And the fact that they don’t get paid is, really, the biggest travesty.”