College football’s dynasty era is over, and the sport is better because of it

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TEMPE, Ariz. — To describe what parity looks like in a sport that never before conceived of its possibility, you need to go beyond the group of blue bloods that wake up today in an existential crisis and deeper than the shiny-object programs that are suddenly competing for national titles out of nowhere.

In fact, you need to be here, standing on the field at a sold-out Mountain America Stadium on a cloudless afternoon. You need to be here, surrounded by more than 50,000 fans who showed up to watch an Arizona State team that lost by 32 points last week but created an atmosphere worthy of the No. 1 team in the country. And you need to strategize as the Sun Devils creep closer to the goal line against Texas Tech in the final minute and the students begin filtering toward an entrance to the field, hoping victory will invite them into the center of the storm.

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Graham Rossini, Arizona State’s athletic director, is standing near the goal post just beyond the stadium’s north end zone. Occasionally, he turns to the crowd and lifts his arm, asking for noise. And as running back Raleek Brown pushes into the end zone with 34 seconds left, putting the Sun Devils ahead 26-22 just when it seemed like they’d blown the game a few minutes earlier, Rossini nodded and smiled.

“We’re going to sell out the season,” he told Yahoo Sports. “Our crowd creates energy, our team performs, the fans keep coming back.”

This isn’t Alabama. It’s not Michigan. It’s Arizona State, a program that claims an unrecognized national title in 1975 and didn’t do much over the next 50 years until it came out of nowhere last season to make the first 12-team College Football Playoff.

Now, the place is on fire. And as the students created a mosh pit at midfield, chanting “ASU, ASU!” and taking selfies with players, there was no better college football scene in America on Saturday — at a program that looked completely dead just three years ago.

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“I think it’s awesome,” said Arizona State coach Kenny Dillingham, a 35-year-old who was a teenager at nearby Chaparral High School when he decided he wanted to one day be the coach here. “The parity in college football now, it’s just crazy. Anybody can beat anybody any week, the way it’s set up. And everybody builds programs different ways.”

Welcome to the new era of college football. We’ve known it and we’ve seen it, but as we reach the second half of the 2025 season, the impact of movement through the transfer portal, player compensation and an expanded playoff field have changed the sport in previously inconceivable ways.

Outside of Ohio State and maybe Alabama (at least until the next loss), every one of the sport’s traditional blue bloods wakes up today in some stage of an existential crisis. Meanwhile, Indiana is the nation’s No. 2 team, Georgia Tech is looking increasingly like a favorite to make the CFP and ESPN’s “College GameDay” is rightfully headed to Missouri at Vanderbilt next weekend.

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It’s different, alright. And it’s glorious.

“College football was built around this culture of two teams are going to be alive at the end, so we have to win every single game and if we don’t we’re going to have a massive meltdown,” Texas A&M coach Mike Elko told Yahoo Sports last week. “That’s just how college football was built. You don’t see that in the NFL. There’s no internal meltdown from the Bills or the Chiefs if they lose a game. The Super Bowl champions are probably going to lose four or five times. That’s what’s happening in college football now. The end goal is to make a 12-team playoff and win the 12-team playoff and I’m not sure everybody has adapted to that new reality.”

Yes, it’s a reality causing heartburn at places like Penn State, which committed nearly $50 million in buyout money to James Franklin last week, and traditional powers like Florida, Florida State and Auburn where fans are itching to get rid of their current coaching staff. Even at a place Georgia, where the team is 6-1 and still very much alive to win a championship after coming back to beat Ole Miss, 43-35, it just doesn’t look like it used to.

As one athletic director at a perennially contending program told Yahoo Sports on Sunday: “It’s like only Columbus, Ohio, that’s fully happy.”

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But that’s the inevitable outcome of talent being spread around, and the reason why those at the top of the food chain fought against player compensation for so long.

The handful of programs that hoarded all the high-end talent can no longer keep players on their roster with the goal of developing them into starters by their third year on campus. Coaches can’t get by just being elite recruiters. The margins have contracted to the point where, everywhere you look, it seems like games are coming down to the fourth quarter and a coaching decision here or one individual play there becomes the separator on a given day.

In other words, it’s starting to look a lot like the NFL.

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“There’s a parity now where new programs can enter the conversation,” Rossini said. “Let’s empower great leadership and coaches and see what we can do.”

Are there downsides? Of course.

Money adds layers of complications that coaches and administrations never had to deal with before. Some schools are struggling to adjust to the reality that different stuff matters now. And you are certainly hearing more from the NFL side that the lack of roster continuity from year to year and handing out six- and seven-figure contracts to college students is negatively impacting player development.

That’s all fair.

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But how can you argue against what the sport looks like now at places like Arizona State?

A couple years ago, you’re not getting sellouts for a 4-2 team that just got beat by 32 points, and you’re probably not getting a locker room that’s fully invested for the second half of the season when they have no chance at winning anything important.

That was the old reality. The new one?

“It means a lot to us as players to sell out that crowd after a game like last week,” Arizona State linebacker Keyshaun Elliott said. “I couldn’t even look at social media because of how embarrassed I was.”

Now, Arizona State has an opportunity to do what it did last season when it won six straight to take the Big 12 title and get into the CFP.

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“Anytime you have a win like this, it rejuvenates your program,” Dillingham said. “If you just win, everything takes care of itself.”

Isn’t that how it should be?

The dynasty era is over. This is now a year-to-year, week-to-week enterprise and nothing in American sports is delivering more drama for a wider array of teams and fan bases.

This is what parity looks like. It may have happened accidentally, but it happened nonetheless. The bluebloods finally lost. Everybody else won.

This news was originally published on this post .