Welcome to the Big Ten Experience™

A satirical journey through what could happen with a little too much PE….

It is a crisp Saturday afternoon in October 2040 and 112,000 people have gathered at what was once known as Michigan Stadium. You will know it today, of course, as the Loadsamoney Arena presented by DraftKings. The naming rights were sold in 2031 for a sum that was described at the time as “transformative” but is now described, more accurately, as “not nearly enough.”

The Betway Visual Experience Hub (the scoreboard) is cycling through its seventeenth consecutive advertisement when the teams finally emerge. The crowd, largely corporate clients, stirs briefly. A few even peak up at the football on display.

This is what college football looks like now. Thanks to a group of confident executives who convinced a room full of university presidents that this was all going to be fine.

How did we get here?

Down the rabbit hole

It started, as these things often do, with a proposition that sounded impressive.

In 2026, the Big 12 became the first conference to formally embrace private capital investment, opening the door to outside equity partners. It was framed as a necessary response to the House v. NCAA settlement and the spiralling cost of athlete revenue sharing.

The logic was not unreasonable.

The Big Ten, never an organisation comfortable being second at anything, watched the Big 12’s arrangement closely. As a defensive measure, they opened talks with Loadsamoney Capital, a private equity firm whose previous portfolio included a chain of airport lounges and a majority stake in three mid-tier European football clubs.

Loadsamoney had identified college football as what their investor deck called “a significantly under-monetised emotional asset class.” That meant they thought there was more juice to be squeezed from the sport.

By 2027 the deal was done. Loadsamoney acquired a 20% stake in Big Ten Enterprises, the conference’s newly created commercial subsidiary, for $3.8 billion. Commissioner Tony Petitti called it “a landmark moment.” A senator from Washington called it “the beginning of the end.” Both were right, in their own way.

The Sponsored Everything Era

The first thing to go was subtlety.

Within eighteen months of the Loadsamoney deal closing, every visible surface of Big Ten football had a commercial partner. It was not just the stadiums too. The jerseys gained a sponsor patch in 2028 and the referees gained one in 2029, which at least gave fans something to laugh about when calls went against them.

The coin toss has been sponsored since 2030 by a payday loan company, which most observers felt was a bit close to the bone.

The bowl system did not survive the decade. Loadsamoney’s internal modelling determined that a closed, invitation-only playoff structure, one that guaranteed the Big Ten teams maximum exposure in the highest-value windows, was worth considerably more than the traditional bowl and playoff ecosystem. Once the Big Ten decided this, the other conferences had to follow.

The Rose Bowl, Cotton Bowl, Peach Bowl and Orange Bowl all were absorbed. The CFP was quietly restructured into the Loadsamoney Champions Series, a forty-eight-team invitational that, critics noted, seemed to feature a suspicious number of Big Ten clubs regardless of on-field performance.

The purists called it the death of college football’s soul. Loadsamoney called it “optimising the postseason product.” The television ratings, at least initially, held up.

The Transfer Market Arrives

NIL growth had already blurred the line between amateur and professional sport beyond recognition by the early 2030s. But as players lurched further towards professionalisation, the concept of a transfer fee took hold.

Loadsamoney’s lawyers, working alongside three other PE-backed conference entities, drafted the framework in 2033. It was called the Collegiate Player Movement Protocol. In practice, it meant a player could move mid-contract to another school for a negotiated fee.

By 2036, the first seven-figure collegiate “transfer fee” had been paid. Penn State to USC, for a quarterback whose name you would recognise. The headlines lasted a week before people forgot.

But USC, did not forget. As a private school they had hired Loadsamoney to consult on their own business model. They decided that in order to persue sustainable growth, sporting success was secondary to player trading. They invested heavily in recruiting players in skill positions to simply sell them on and earn transfer fees from them. Since 2037 they have had a losing record every season but have made record profits each year, primarily from flipping recruits.

The “Saving” of Rutgers

Rutgers, as one of the more commercially underpowered programme in the Big Ten, always looked vulnerable to this new world.

Given its location, Loadsamoney offered its “help” to rebrand and improve its return on capital. It created a strategy for the school to improve its global appeal as a starting point. In 2035, Rutgers Scarlett Knights were renamed “Newark Metro Reds, presented by Amazon”.

Each season ticket holder received a miniature helmet that year as an incentive to get early sales in. 40% of the proceeds went to Loadsamoney as they had been securitised.

Half of the University board resigned that year.

What the Fans Got

Oh yes, the fans.

They got premium streaming packages.

The Big Ten’s media deal, renegotiated under Loadsamoney’s guidance in 2029, disaggregated the broadcast rights into six separate packages across four platforms. However, fully watching your team through a season normally required all six. Many didn’t bother and illegal streaming increased by 70% through the 2030s.

The student sections were reduced at several venues to make room for premium hospitality suites. At one Big Ten stadium it was eliminated entirely for marquee games, replaced by what the university’s athletic department described as “an enhanced corporate partner experience.”

UCLA ripped out both end zone seating areas and replaced them with pools and two bars with a DJ.

Ticket prices for general admission to a Big Ten home game now average $540. In 2025 they averaged $101. A lot of attendees are now out-of-town neutral fans or tourists. Students tend to attend baseball and softball games now instead.

The Crumbling of All Held Dear

The revenue gap between the Big Ten’s top and bottom earners has tripled since 2027. The smaller programs find themselves in an increasingly awkward position. They are nominally members of the most powerful conference in college football, but structurally incapable of competing for recruits or staff.

Loadsamoney’s modelling, it emerged, had always accounted for “natural attrition” among lower-revenue members. Several have since been quietly pushed toward associate membership arrangements. One left entirely.

College football has always had inequality. But it was inequality within a system that at least nominally valued the whole. What Loadsamoney built was a system designed, from the ground up, to serve its highest-value components and treat everything else as a rounding error.

Just Satire, or a Dystopian Nightmare?

Ok, that will do. Back to today and reality.

This is fiction for now, but how much of a stretch would this vision for the future be?  The Big Ten’s initial flirtation with outside investment stalled in late 2025 but has probably not gone away completely. The financial pressure that drove the conversation will only intensify.

The elements mentioned above are all in jest and extreme, but they do have a hint of possibility about them.

In writing this I do not mean to demonise Private Equity or outside investment. There is a lot of good that outside professionals can bring to the sport. But those on the inside need to decide first what they want this sport to look like over the next 20 years and tread carefully.