Forward Progress

A cinematic celebration of college football’s exploding influence and a rigorous look at how and why the sport may look totally new once again

College football in 2025 would look unrecognizable to a fan, player, or coach from even the recent past. Between massive influxes of television money, dramatic conference realignments, a restructuring of how the game crowns its national champion, and even a full revision of what it means to be an ＂amateur＂ athlete, America’s most popular sport is rupturing, evolving, destroying itself, or getting with the times--depending who you ask.

And the dramatic changes won’t be stopping any time soon. A complex media landscape, a transfer portal and endorsement money for players, and coaches carrying themselves like branded celebrities unto themselves are just a few reasons why the game will continue transform at a breakneck pace.

Forward Progress is the definitive and most comprehensive examination of how we got to this wild era in college football and what’s in store for the game’s future. Rather than offer easy or trite predictions about the game’s future, renowned sports-data journalist Bill Connelly examines the crucial factors and forces that will drive these changes, showing fans how factors like influxes of private capital or a shift toward actually paying the game’s players the money they are worth could lead college football in new directions.

Travelling from the pivotal 2006 Rose Bowl--a game so loaded with stars and money it felt silly calling any part of it ＂collegiate＂--to the present day, Connelly’s compelling storytelling and trademark data distillations illuminate the many moving parts that compose this shifting landscape.

Bill Connelly has been a staff writer for ESPN since 2019. One of the pioneers of the college football analytics movement, he is the inventor and proprietor of the SP+ ratings, the most prominent advanced predictive metric in college football today. He previously wrote for SB Nation and Football Outsiders.