Forward Progress: The Definitive Guide to the Future of College Football

by Bill Connelly

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.

Genres: Sports, Nonfiction, Football

256 pages, Hardcover

Published September 2, 2025

Reviews

[Josh Jablonski · Rating 5 out of 5]

A love letter, a history lesson, and a forecast of the future of college football. Fantastic read! Anyone that loves this great American sport will love this book!

[Josh Peterson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have read quite a few books about CFB over the years and FORWARD PROGRESS is easily my favorite.

Incredible history of the game, with a peek forward to what's next. What I enjoyed the most was optimism about the flawed sport that is CFB. Highly, highly recommend.

Bravo, Bill.

9/10

[Jesse · Rating 3 out of 5]

Better than I worried it would be. It's a weird, self-inflicted predicament, because I keep reading these new state-of-college-fb books, and there hasn't been a great one in a while, and yet I keep reading them. Most of them feel like the rough draft of the first draft, throwing together a bunch of columns nobody edits any more without bothering to remove repetitions or contradictions, since we're really just extending the online brand into the historically respectable but now mostly irrelevant world of "books," I think they call them.

Definitely some of that here, and historical research that, from his account, he got from Taylor Branch's big Atlantic article, but also some good reporting and contemporary info about the overweening greed and shortsighted selfishness of the two big conferences (SEC/Big Ten) that basically keep tilting the football playing field in their own direction--as he notes, they've now hogged the revenues while dodging responsibility for paying their fair share of compensation to players for their labor. And that continues the NCAA's long-honored, if that's the word, strategy, if that's the word, of stonewalling, offering circular arguments (you gotta give to Brett Kavanaugh for how succinctly he demolished the organization's long-standing argument that you couldn't pay college players because...college players have never been paid, at least openly, and so not paying is crucial to the entire enterprise), and straight-out lying about why its policies are its policies. See, we're just maintaining competitive balance by ensuring that the free market doesn't apply to college sports, which obviously has let just about anyone win national titles. (Honestly, in that light it's kind of funny to read about Alabama boosters complaining about the new NIL unfairness that seems to have made them less dominant.)

I would love some sort of sociological analysis here--is this just the kind of organizational behavior you see when anyone is trying to maintain market dominance? Astonishing how often tech companies champion libertarian principles until their valuation is in the billions, at which point they suddenly love them some government cronyism. And Connelly makes the point that that's what the two big-conference commissioners are doing now, basically doing their best to stomp out any surprises, any possibilities of another Boise State/Appalachian State/TCU, etc. by cornering playoff spots, hogging revenue, and maybe eventually daring to try that same Super-League concept that European soccer fans roundly rejected. Also of interest: surprising-to-me research about how often previous super-conference notions have been mooted, how frequently some sort of playoff was suggested before we got the BCS, how repeatedly figures within the game have called for some sort of commissioner to exert oversight. (He has even thought out a massive national conference structure, complete with relegation, that I'm sure will never happen but that would be great fun in practice.)

Could all of the greed and machinations dry up the fan love for East Carolina and Iowa State, not to mention your FCS successes, if the big two keep tilting things their own way? He seems to be all over the place on that one--look at how NASCAR blew it! And baseball! But apparently not college football! At least not yet. This definitely makes what I guess you could call an anthropological case for college fb as one of our most cherished civic institutions, at once national and intensely local, and for the dream that someone, somewhere might steer it away from oligopoly. Probably not, though, right?

[Michael Elkon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bill is one of the sharpest CFB analysts out there. He got his start as a data guy by creating SP+ but he combines that love with a historian's eye for context (the chapter on the history of conference realignment was something) and a fan's love for the game. The implicit premise behind the title is that the past of the game dictates the future, so by explaining how we got to a place where two conferences (and their media partners although Bill can't be too explicit about this because he works for ESPN) are trying to dominate everything, we can project these trends into the future. The historical content here was especially nice because a lot of what fans complain about now as existential threats to the future of the sport - TV having too much of a say, player movement and compensation being unregulated, decisions at odds with long-standing traditions - have been gripes forever. History doesn't repeat but it does rhyme.

[Preetam Chatterjee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Connelly is a master of data-driven sports narrative. His subject is college football, but really his theme is change—how strategy evolves, how tradition collides with innovation. He charts the progression from ground-and-pound rushing attacks to the spread offenses of today, weaving playbooks, coaches, and analytics into a story of cultural evolution. For a non-American reader, the jargon can be overwhelming, but the book still fascinates because Connelly makes clear that sport is history written in play calls. During Puja, when processions felt like choreography and rituals like rehearsed formations, Forward Progress read almost like a comparative anthropology: football fields and festive streets both embody collective movement scripted by tradition and flair.

[Nicole Auerbach · Rating 5 out of 5]

To steal a descriptor he likes to use, I'll put it this way: Bill Connelly is one of college football's best observers. He sees the same things we all do but pulls on threads that most of us wouldn't grab. And that's how we got this book, which is a great distillation of the current state of college football. It reveals, in plain English, how we got here, why things are so messy at the moment — and where it all might go. (And where it definitely won't go.)

This book is a must-read for any college football fan who wants to actually understand the business of college sports and how that backdrop explains just about everything that happens on the field.

[Devin Gingerich · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you’re like me and you lost the thread of which direction college football has gone post COVID and post NIL (and post Purdue being relevant + graduation, so attention diverted), this book is for you. A very comprehensive social commentary on conference alignment, money trails, and provable solutions to issues that have worked for other sports leagues. Some pockets of the book seem redundantly explained, but a great book overall and glad I read it.

[Patrick Tarbox · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s good and offers some nice perspectives, maybe a little too much “Bill C chats with his pals”, but that doesn’t make it bad, maybe limited. It is also hard because with Joe much is changing, the shelf life of this will likely be limited (Mike Gundy gets quoted a lot and has been fired in the months since). Still a good read and worth your time.

[Christian Dibblee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting take on a sport I enjoy. In general, I think Connelly does a good job identifying and diagnosing the various issues with college football and the sometimes paradoxical thoughts we have about how to solve those things. That said, I felt that this book needed an editor at various points—it runs a little long in many places.

[Brett Rodman · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wanted to give it 1 star to be in denial of one part Bill said about college football fans like me “Sankey knows they’ll never lose the hard core fans”. But it’s true we persist and adapt but ain’t going anywhere.

[Matthew Edwards · Rating 5 out of 5]

Man I love all of Bill's writing. He does such a great job capturing the spirit of college football in his story telling. And this was no exception. Great read, definitely would recommend it for every fan of college football!

[Nicholas Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible read for any CFB fan with any interest in the mechanics of the sport and what the future may hold, as well as how the past shaped today.