NCAA Division I Football: A Comprehensive Overview

College football stands as one of the most popular spectator sports in the United States, with top schools generating substantial revenue annually. Within the landscape of college football, the NCAA Division I Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) represents the highest level of competition. Formerly known as Division I-A, the FBS comprises the largest schools within the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). This article provides a comprehensive overview of NCAA Division I FBS football, covering its structure, history, and key aspects.

Division I: FBS vs. FCS

For every sport except football, the NCAA divides schools into three major divisions: Divisions I, II, and III. However, in football, Division I is further divided into two sub-divisions: the Bowl Subdivision (FBS) and the Championship Subdivision (FCS). The NCAA classifies FBS football as a "head-count" sport, meaning that each player receiving any athletically-related aid from the school counts fully against the 85-player limit. By contrast, FCS football is classified as an "equivalency" sport, which means that scholarship aid is limited to the equivalent of a specified number of full scholarships. In turn, this means that FCS schools can freely grant partial scholarships, but are also limited to a total of 85 players receiving assistance.

Schools in Division I FBS are distinguished from those in the Division I Football Championship Subdivision (FCS) by being allowed to provide scholarship aid to a total of 85 players, and may grant a full scholarship to all 85. FCS schools are limited to financial assistance amounting to a maximum of 63 full scholarships, although some conferences voluntarily place further restrictions on athletic aid. Another NCAA rule mandates that any multi-sport athlete who plays football and receives any athletic aid is counted against the football limit, with an exception for players in non-scholarship FCS programs who receive aid in another sport.

Although FCS programs can draw thousands of fans per game, many FCS schools attempt to join the FBS in hopes of increased revenue, corporate sponsorship, alumni donations, prestige, and national exposure. However, FBS programs also face increased expenses in regards to staff salaries, facility improvements, and scholarships. The athletic departments of many FBS schools lose money every year, and these athletic departments must rely on subsidies from the rest of the university. In many states, the highest-paid public employee is the head coach of an FBS team. FBS schools are limited to a total of 85 football players receiving financial assistance. Nearly all FBS schools that are not on NCAA probation give 85 full scholarships.

Conferences and Independent Schools

Divisions are themselves further divided up into conferences, which are groupings of schools that play each other in contention for a conference championship. Most of the 136 FBS schools are members of an FBS conference, but there are also a small number of independent schools. FBS, or the Football Bowl Subdivision, consists of 11 different conferences: the ACC, American, Big 12, Big Ten, C-USA, Independent, MAC, Mountain West, PAC-12, SEC and Sun Belt conferences.

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Since the Western Athletic Conference discontinued football sponsorship prior to the 2013 season, there have been ten conferences in the FBS. Through the 2023 season, all of the FBS conferences had between 10 and 14 members, although independent Notre Dame has a scheduling agreement with the then-14-member ACC. The ten conferences are split into two groups for the purposes of the College Football Playoff. The "Power Four conferences" consist of most of the largest and best-known college athletic programs in the country. A school from one of the power conferences (including the Pac-12, which was a power conference prior to 2024) won every BCS National Championship Game (which operated from 1999 to 2014), and has won every College Football Playoff National Championship. The remaining five conferences are known as the "Group of Five".

Any conference may split its teams into two divisions; however, as of the 2024 season, the only FBS conference that uses divisions is the SBC. The American, the Big 12, and CUSA all previously utilized division systems before abandoning them after losing some of their member schools to realignment: UConn left the American in July 2020, and Marshall, Old Dominion, and Southern Miss left CUSA in July 2022, leaving both those conferences with an odd number of members, while the Big 12 has not used divisions since the early-2010s conference realignment left it with 10 members. The Pac-12, however, chose to abandon divisions entirely as a result of the NCAA Division I Council ruling that conferences would no longer be required to maintain divisions in order to hold a conference championship. It was the first conference to entirely abandon divisions.

Season Structure and Bowl Games

The FBS season begins in late August or early September and ends in mid-January with the College Football Playoff National Championship game. Following the conference championship games, 12 teams are selected to compete in the College Football Playoff, while other eligible teams are invited to bowl games. For non-conference regular season games, FBS teams are free to schedule matchups against any other FBS team, regardless of conference. A small number of FBS teams are independent and have total control over their own schedule. Non-conference games are scheduled by mutual agreement and often involve "home and homes" (where teams alternate as hosts) and long-established rivalries. In order to balance out the difficulty of their in-conference schedules, teams from the stronger conferences frequently play non-conference games against teams from the weaker conferences or, occasionally, against FCS teams.

FBS teams are free to schedule up to 40% of their games against FCS teams, but FBS teams can only use one win per season against an FCS team for the purposes of bowl eligibility. The Football Bowl Subdivision gets its name from the bowl games that many FBS teams play at the end of the year, although other college divisions also have their own bowl games. FBS bowl games are played at the end of the season in December or January. During the 2024-25 bowl season, there were 46 FBS bowl games, including four first-round College Football Playoff games and the College Football Playoff National Championship. An FBS team typically must have a record of 6-6 or better in order to be bowl eligible. Many bowls have one or more conference tie-ins; for example, the Pop-Tarts Bowl provides a matchup between teams from ACC and the Big 12. A small number of long-established bowls played a major role in the Bowl Championship Series, which was used to select the national champion until the 2013 season, and these bowls continue to play a major role in the College Football Playoff.

College Football Playoff

Starting in 2014, the FBS began playing a tournament known as the College Football Playoff (CFP) culminating in a National Championship Game to determine its national champion, a system that has been in place from the 2014-2025 seasons by contract with ESPN, broadcaster of the games. The CFP featured four teams from its first season in 2014 through the 2023 season, and expanded to 12 teams in 2024. But since the CFP is not sanctioned by the NCAA, this makes FBS football the only sport without an NCAA-sanctioned champion. The FBS is the highest level of college football in the United States, and FBS players make up the vast majority of the players picked in the NFL Draft.

Historical Context

College football has been played for over one hundred years, but the game and the organizational structure of college football have evolved significantly during that time. The first college football game was played in 1869, but the game continued to develop during the late 19th and early 20th century. During this period, Walter Camp pioneered the concept of a line of scrimmage, the system of downs, and the College Football All-America Team. The 1902 Rose Bowl was the first bowl game in college football history, and the event began to be held annually starting with the 1916 Rose Bowl. In the 1930s, other bowl games came into existence, including the Sugar Bowl, the Cotton Bowl Classic, and the Orange Bowl.

The 1906 college football season was the first season played under the IAAUS (which would later change its name to the NCAA) and the first season in which the forward pass was legal. In 1935, the Heisman Trophy was presented for the first time; the award is generally considered to be college football's most prestigious individual award. In 1965, the NCAA voted to allow the platoon system, in which different players played on offense and defense; teams had previously experimented with the concept in the 1940s. In 1968, the NCAA began allowing freshmen to compete in games; freshmen had previously been required to take a redshirt year. In 1975, after a growth of "grants-in-aid" (scholarships given for athletic rather than academic or need-based reasons), the NCAA voted to limit the number of athletic scholarships each school could offer.

In 1968, the NCAA required all teams to identify as members of either the University Division (for larger schools) or the College Division (for smaller schools), and in 1973, the NCAA divided into three divisions. At the urging of several larger schools seeking increased autonomy and commonality, Division I-A was formed prior to the 1978 season; the remaining teams in Division I formed the Football Championship Subdivision or FCS (then known as Division I-AA). In 1981, members of the College Football Association attempted to create a fourth division consisting solely of the most competitive schools, but this effort was defeated. In the 1992 season, the SEC split into divisions and played the first FBS conference championship game.

The NCAA does not officially award an FBS football championship, but several teams have claimed national championships. Other organizations have also sought to rank the teams and crown a national champion. The Dickinson System and other methods were formed in the early 20th century to select the best team in the country, and the AP Poll and the Coaches Poll began rankings teams in the middle of the 20th century. In many seasons, selectors such as the AP and the Coaches Poll designated different teams as national champions. Often, more than one team would finish undefeated, as the top teams were not guaranteed to play each other during the regular season or in bowl games. In 1992, five major conferences established the Bowl Coalition in order to determine the FBS champion. In 1998, the two remaining major conferences joined with the other five conferences to form the Bowl Championship Series. The BCS used a rankings system to match up the top two teams in the BCS National Championship Game. However, even the BCS era saw split national championships, as in 2003 the AP Poll and the Coaches Poll selected different national champions.

Since 2021, when the Supreme Court unanimously held in NCAA v. Alston that restrictions on name, image, and likeness compensation violated antitrust law, FBS football players have been able to make money from sources other than college scholarships.

Media Coverage

College football was first broadcast on radio in 1921, and first broadcast on television in 1939. Television became profitable for both schools and the NCAA, which tightly controlled the airing of games in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. The NCAA limited each football team to six television appearances over a two-year period. The 1981 Supreme Court case NCAA v. National networks such as CBS, ABC, NBC, several ESPN networks, and several Fox networks have all covered the FBS, as have several regional and local networks. As conferences negotiate their own television deals, each conference is affiliated with a network that airs its home games. In the mid-2000s, college and conferences began to create their own television networks; such networks include the Big Ten Network, BYUtv, the Longhorn Network (which was folded into the SEC Network in 2024), and the Pac-12 Network.

Conference Formation and Evolution

The Big Ten (then popularly known as the Western Conference) was founded in 1896, after which several other schools joined to form conferences, including the Pacific Coast Conference, the MVIAA, the Southwest Conference, the Southern Conference, the Mountain States Conference (also known as the Skyline Conference), and the Border Conference. In 1928, six schools seceded from the MVIAA to form the Big Six Conference, which later expanded to the Big Eight in 1957; the remaining schools formed the Missouri Valley Conference. In 1932, several Southern schools formed the SEC after breaking away from the Southern Conference, and in 1953 several more schools seceded from the Southern Conference to form the ACC. In 1946, several Midwestern schools formed the MAC.

Several elite Northeastern schools had formed the Eastern Intercollegiate Basketball League in 1901, and its members (plus Brown University, not an EIBL member at the time) signed the Ivy Group Agreement, which governed football competition between the signatories, in 1945; the Ivy League was formally founded in 1954, when the agreement was extended to cover all sports. In 1959, the Pacific Coast Conference dissolved, and most of its former members formed the new Athletic Association of Western Universities, which became the Pac-8 when more former PCC members joined. In 1962, several schools from the Mountain States Conference and the Border Conference formed the Western Athletic Conference.

Division I separated into Division I-A (the predecessor to the FBS) and I-AA (predecessor of the FCS) prior to the 1978 season. At that time, there were several independent I-A schools and twelve Division I-A conferences: the Southeastern Conference (SEC), Big Ten, Pacific-10 (Pac-10), Big 8, Southwest Conference (SWC), Western Athletic Conference (WAC), PCAA (which later changed its name to the Big West), Missouri Valley Conference, Southern Conference, Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC), Mid-American Conference (MAC), and the Ivy League. The Ivy League and the Southern Conference left for Division I-AA prior to the 1982 season, while the Missouri Valley Conference stopped sponsoring football prior to the 1985 season. In 1991, the Big East recruited several independents and began sponsoring football, becoming a major conference. In 1996, Conference USA (CUSA), formed the previous year by the merger of the non-football Metro and Great Midwest Conferences, also began sponsoring football. That same year, the Southwest Conference dissolved, and four of its former members joined with the Big 8 to form the Big 12 Conference. In 1999, eight schools broke away from the WAC to form the Mountain West Conference (MW). Prior to the 2000 season, the Big West stopped sponsoring football. The Sun Belt Conference (SBC) began sponsoring football in 2001.

Recent Developments

In October 2023, the NCAA announced major changes to FBS membership requirements. The average home attendance requirement, which had largely gone unenforced in the 21st century and was suspended in 2020 due to COVID-19 impacts, was permanently eliminated, effective immediately. Effective in 2027-28, minimums on both the total number of, and spending on, athletic scholarships in all FBS programs will be enforced. The number of required athletic scholarships will increase to 210, and the annual spending requirement rises to $6 million.

Conclusion

NCAA Division I FBS football represents the pinnacle of college football in the United States. With its rich history, evolving structure, and passionate fan base, FBS football continues to be a significant part of the American sports landscape. Understanding the nuances of the division, its conferences, and its championship structure provides a deeper appreciation for the sport and its impact on universities and communities across the nation.

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