Matt Drinkall is the head coach at Central Michigan, a program that has made one bowl game in the last four years, and on Tuesday he spent 10 minutes saying the quietest part out loud about the 24-team College Football Playoff expansion, realignment, and NIL that any FBS coach has said on the record all year. “They’re gonna wring this sport out for every cent they can as long as they can and prostitute the sport for financial gain,” he said, which is one of those sentences that’s funnier the more you sit with it, mostly because of who was willing to say it and who wasn’t.
The timing is the whole joke. Drinkall’s answer landed days after ESPN and the CFP reportedly reached a handshake agreement worth roughly $345 million a year on top of the existing rights deal — the deal with ESPN that’s reportedly close to signing a 24-team field into existence starting in 2027, with the Big Ten and SEC already on board. Every person with standing to critique that deal in public (every commissioner, every athletic director, every committee member whose signature is somewhere on the paperwork) is also being paid by it. It’s the institutional version of letting a company’s accounting department audit its own expense reports: the people with the access to catch the fraud also sign the checks that depend on nobody catching it. Drinkall coaches in the MAC. He has nothing riding on the deal and, by his own evident math, nothing left to lose by describing it honestly.
He didn’t stop at the bracket. Asked a fairly ordinary question about playoff expansion, he widened it into a full accounting of the sport since COVID, starting with “All everything since COVID has just 100 percent been reaction,” and landing on the line nobody with a conference logo behind them has been willing to say out loud: “It’s just been a downward spiral that is nonstop until it’s going to be a smoldering dumpster fire left like the Truffula trees and the Lorax.” A MAC coach reaching for Dr. Seuss to describe the Playoff’s direction ends up delivering the most honest press conference line of the season; it works because it’s a children’s-book image applied without irony to adults who know exactly what they’re doing.
On the 24-team format specifically, Drinkall’s read is that the Group of Six slots are the carrot, not the point. He predicted the new bracket effectively splits off its own Power Four division behind the scenes, with the sport’s two richest leagues, the Big Ten and SEC, running the audit committee and clearing themselves every time while teams like his get just enough access to keep showing up. That’s not a complaint about losing; Central Michigan went 7-6 and made its first bowl in four years under Drinkall last season, which is actual overperformance for a program this thin on resources. It’s a complaint about being used as set dressing for a deal he’ll never see a dollar of.
The fair concession: coaches rip the system all the time, and most of it is noise, a guy venting about a schedule he doesn’t like or a committee that snubbed him. This wasn’t that. Drinkall wasn’t protecting a ranking or lobbying for a spot; he was describing, with his name attached and nothing to gain from it, a business model that treats realignment, the transfer portal, and NIL as one continuous mechanism for extraction. “None of it’s good,” he said, according to Yahoo Sports. “None of it is in the best interest of the student-athlete, none of it’s in the best interest of the sport.” He summed up the operating logic in one question: “How do I save my ass and make the most money right this second, right now?” That’s the actual incentive structure, described plainly by someone who has to live inside it with a fraction of the leverage.
Drinkall reached for boxing as his comparison, a sport that oversaturated itself into irrelevance decade by decade until casual fans simply stopped watching, and Ross Dellenger’s writeup captured the full version of the line.
https://twitter.com/RossDellenger/status/2112638644431233496
Boxing didn’t collapse because the fights got worse. It collapsed because the people running it kept squeezing until there was nothing left to squeeze that the audience hadn’t already walked away from. Drinkall’s betting the same math applies here, and he’s not wrong that the people with the power to test that theory are currently too busy signing the next check to notice they’re writing the ending.
None of this changes anything about the 24-team deal, which will almost certainly close with the same conferences and the same committee that’s been quiet all year, and Drinkall will be back in front of a podium in Mount Pleasant next week talking about a MAC game nobody outside it will watch. That’s the part that makes the whole ten minutes worth something: he said it knowing it changes nothing, which is a more honest position than every commissioner currently pretending the Playoff just lost its championship weekend by accident instead of by design.
