Talks regarding a potential college football “Super League” have been a key topic over the past couple of weeks.

Multiple proposals for a prospective college football “Super League” from various organizations have recently gone public. With documents describing how each of these concepts would work, one question remains at the forefront.

Are any of these college football “Super League” proposals actually practical? Let’s dive in and take a look.

A 20-person collective of university presidents, athletic directors, and leaders in the sports and business industries, dubbed “College Sports Tomorrow,” laid out its plan to the world on Oct. 1.

The league would hold the top 72 programs in the nation, mostly made up of the current Power 5, and compete in a new Power 12 conference, made up of a dozen six-team divisions. Schedules would factor in geography and team success while still preserving established rivalries. The season would stretch 21 weeks and include multiple bye weeks. It would start in late August and end in early January, while the playoffs would look completely different.

Standings would be entirely determined by win/loss record, capped off by a 24-team playoff featuring the 12 division winners and 12 wild card spots, which non-division winners with the best records would fill.

But wait, what would happen to the other 62 and counting Division I college football programs across the country?

College Sports Tomorrow groups those schools into the Group of 8 conference, formerly known as the Group of 5. The Group of 8 has eight uneven divisions and would be known as a “second tier” to the Power 12. These schools can make the jump to the first tier through a promotion and relegation system.

The league’s name? The College Student Football League, or the CSFL.

“Historically, the beauty of college football has been how many schools around the country were competing for the championship,” College Sports Tomorrow member Jimmy Haslem said in a CST statement. Haslem is the owner of the Cleveland Browns and a longtime booster of his alma mater, the University of Tennessee. “We need to bring college football back to the broad, national model of its golden years in a system which fosters more competitive balance.”

While most have jumped straight to how the CSFL would affect the sport on the field, the main reasoning behind the proposed league is more about what’s been happening off it.

The CSFL would have a players’ association representing collegiate footballers as university employees. A union would allow players’ input on rules and compensation, while the CSFL avoids antitrust lawsuits due to a non-statutory labor exemption. Each program would be given a salary cap for player compensation. The CSFL would also have a rule limiting players to two transfers within five years.

With the NCAA still fighting against student athletes becoming school employees in federal court, it remains to be seen if revenue sharing and a player union are even possible at this point.

While there are many positives with the CSFL, like promotion and relegation, college football would start to look and feel a lot like its big brother, the NFL. By trying to bring back the “golden years” of college football, the members of College Sports Tomorrow fail to realize that their plan only narrows the gap between the collegiate and pro levels, losing what makes college football distinctive in the first place.

The noteworthy spokespeople of College Sports Tomorrow have been adamant against the term “Super League,” as the collective pointed to the inclusion of all 134 current FBS programs in their proposal with two divisions, and the promotion and relegation model. But another proposal completely threw that philosophy out the window when it was first reported on Tuesday.

A group of former Disney executives proposed a 70-school structure, eliminating the bottom 64 FBS programs from this proposal, with absolutely no contests against FCS competition. The playoffs include 12 teams.

The catch? The SEC and Big 10 would have multiple automatic qualifying spots, and each regular season matchup between schools in the now separate conferences would be marked as conference matchups.

Think what you will think about what this might play out on the gridiron, but the real story of this new idea dubbed “Project Rudy,” comes with the dollar signs.

“Project Rudy” would be funded by Smash Capital, a private equity firm, whose $9 million would go towards a tiered revenue system. What does that exactly entail? In this system, the SEC and Big 10 would evenly split 59% of the revenue.

“I’ll double down on my thoughts,” said Northern Illinois Athletic Director Sean Frazier to CBS Sports. “I think it’s a great concept and it takes care of the ‘haves.’ But the ‘have nots’ are going to be scrambling.”

With nearly half of the FBS level being completely cut out of this new age of college football, multiple guaranteed playoff spots for SEC and Big 10 teams and a revenue system that favors said conferences, the rich would only continue to get richer thanks to “Project Rudy,” leading to a disenfranchising of three-fourths of the college football landscape.

On Thursday, SEC and Big 10 officials, including commissioners Greg Sankey and Tony Petitti, met in Nashville, Tennessee, to discuss a number of issues. The recent “Super League” proposals weren’t even on the agenda a couple of weeks ago.

“It’s no coincidence they ramped up their public relations schemes around our meeting,” Sankey said at the meeting.

Both commissioners strongly criticized the proposals, with Petitti stating that he still needs to see something that either the SEC or Big 10 couldn’t achieve themselves.

“The notion that college football is broken is just not right,” Petitti said at the meeting. “You cover our game on a weekly basis, you see the interest — speaking of the Big Ten and SEC — the size of the audience, the passion, the quality of play, all of it. Are there things that we can do better? Of course, but that’s our responsibility to do that.”

For a quarter of a century, multiple organizations’ “Super League” proposals have been completely shut down before they could even get off the ground. But why?

The higher-ups in any business care most importantly about the profit margins. The biggest revenue driver has been media rights, and it will only continue to stay that way. The current Power 4 conferences are all locked into TV deals with the major networks: ESPN/ABC, Fox, CBS and NBC. ESPN recently signed a six-year, $7.8 billion extension with the FBS conferences to host the brand new expanded College Football Playoff through the 2031-32 season.

It’s what kept conferences from meeting with College Sports Tomorrow representatives about the CSFL months back: these conferences can’t afford to jeopardize their TV deals.

Until the contracts to these media rights deals are finished, with some expiring over a decade down the road, don’t expect either the CSFL or “Project Rudy” to get much more traction than Sankey and Petitti denouncing their efforts.