Conference Realignment
So let’s see if we have this straight.
Pittsburgh and Syracuse are moving to the ACC conceivably for basketball but because basketball doesn’t make as much money, it is most assuredly for football. Connecticut is now petitioning to do the same. Last year, TCU signed up to move to the Big East, where all these teams are departing from, definitely for football purposes but had to agree to play basketball. But now that everyone is abandoning the Big East like a party the cops break up, TCU wants to rescind their move.
Meanwhile, Texas and Oklahoma are looking to join the new Pac-12. Texas A&M already left for the SEC not even a month before. The Pac-12 wants to add Texas Tech and Oklahoma State as well. Baylor, who was threatening to file a lawsuit when A&M said they were leaving, is now themselves looking to bail on the Big 12. While the Big 12 looks for replacements for everyone, namely Boise State and Norte Dame (although Notre Dame said no and Boise just agreed to move to the Mountain West to have a yearly conference battle with TCU who decided to depart the conference for the Big East and now regrets it), the Big Ten seems to be sitting idly by while the ACC, Pac-12 and SEC beef up their ranks. All the Big Ten has done was snatch Nebraska from the crumbling Big 12, which now seems like a small potatoes move, having given the Big Ten a petty 12 total teams while the ACC is looking at 14-15, the SEC is already over 14 and the Pac 12 seems to be approaching 16.
Then news comes down the pike that the Big 12 is talking to the Big East about absorbing the rest of its conference because, somehow, the likes of Missouri, Kansas, Kansas State, Iowa State and Baylor have any more legitimacy and interest than the remaining Big East squads.
Did you get all that?
What this means for the state of college athletics, I haven’t the foggiest. Super conferences now seem inevitable. A playoff system does not, although the schools are certainly trying to force the NCAA’s hand in this.
The most likely outcome is disturbing.
We are left with five conferences: the SEC, the ACC, the PAC, the Big Ten and the Big-something else. The football title game would be played each year between the winner of the SEC and the PAC because, really, no one else has a shot anyways. The NCAA basketball tournament is scrapped in favor of a round robin between the ACC and the Big-something else.
In the rest of the country, containing schools that don’t matter in conferences that hardly exist, games are played mostly for fun. Schools exchange patches with each other much like U14 soccer children used to do in the 90’s. Their records are kept but mostly for the sake of keeping consistency with how “sports are played.” If a team from a non-conference (as anyone from outside the five conferences will now be referred to) goes undefeated, they are criticized and heckled for the entire offseason for not choosing a fair and balanced schedule. A situation of their talent being superior and deserving of consideration in a conference schedule is never considered.
I see no other possible outcome besides this. Much as the Oracle can see what is to come but never change the future, this new college sports future almost seems inevitable at this point. All we, as sports fans, can do at this point is pray. Pray for a hiccup in this most evil of plans; pray for one of the schools with pull to come to their senses; pray for West Virginia to beat LSU on Saturday because, really, if that happens, this could set the whole plan back two decades. If one of the dying breeds can take down one of the best teams from the future National Championship automatic bid SEC, then who knows what might transpire.
So if you care even a shred about the landscape of college football, no, collegiate athletics as a whole, you will make a sign out of cardboard and magic markers that reads “Go Geno!”
