Most of the readers here came to this blog because of my writings on conference realignment. However, long before realignment became a year-in and year-out news story, I’ve been writing about and advocating for a legitimate full-scale college football playoff. If there’s one structural item in all of sports (whether college or pro) that has gnawed at me ever since I was a kid, it’s that the way that college football determines is champion is asinine. The best that we could say about the college football postseason is that it has gradually become less asinine over the years. What made it parti ..read more

It has been a whirlwind for the past three weeks since the Big Ten announced that it was expanding with USC and UCLA. I have a lot of thoughts on what the Big Ten will (or more likely, won’t) do in terms of further expansion, the fight for the upper hand between the Pac-12 and Big 12, and how conference realignment may impact the playoff. At the top of my mind, though, is the ACC Grant of Rights agreement (the “GOR”) and how that document is holding the league together. As a reminder, the GOR entails each school of a conference granting control of its media rights to that conference for the t ..read more

Jon Wilner reported today that the Big Ten is adding USC and UCLA as early as 2024 and multiple other reporters have confirmed. There could be an announcement as early as tonight. I’ll be honest: I have been quite skeptical of predictions of any major moves by the Big Ten in the wake of Texas and Oklahoma leaving for the SEC and thought that we were in the end game for power conference realignment. Clearly, that was way off base. While the SEC adding UT and OU involved the movement of two massive brand names, it was still in some ways a small “c” conservative expansion with schools in states ..read more

Last week, the Pac-12 announced that it was not seeking any expansion at this time in the wake of its announced Big Paclantic Alliance with the Big Ten and ACC. While some fans of schools remaining in the Big 12 that are hoping for another power conference home may cling to the “at this time” qualifier from the Pac-12, the practical reality is “at this time” really means, “We’re not expanding unless Notre Dame and schools such as, well, Texas and Oklahoma are coming through that door.” Therefore, reality is setting in for the Big 12 that it will ultimately need to expand and, to that end, the ..read more

The Big Ten, Pac-12 and ACC officially announced the formation of their Alliance today, or as we will now affectionately call it, “The Big Paclantic”. (Props to Frank the Tank commenter Mike on that awesome name. The best commenters in college sports are here on this blog.) As expected, a press conference with the commissioners of the three leagues was very high-level without many details. Here are my quick thoughts on the major topics of interest: COLLEGE FOOTBALL PLAYOFF EXPANSION The message seemed to be that all of the Alliance commissioners are in favor of college football playoff expans ..read more

Quite a bit of interesting off-the-field college football news dropped at the end of last week. First, Andy Wittry obtained a Rose Bowl memo to the Big Ten and Pac-12 from earlier this year that outlined what the Granddaddy of Them All is seeking from a new playoff system. That was then followed up by a story with potentially even greater impact, where The Athletic reported that the Big Ten, Pac-12 and ACC were exploring an alliance that could range from governance issues to scheduling. As I stated in a prior post, the power of the SEC expansion move to add Texas and Oklahoma is that it reall ..read more

For most conference realignment moves, the timing may often be surprising, but the logic behind them makes sense. The SEC taking Texas and Oklahoma is a perfect example: the move came out of nowhere last week and shocked the college football world to its core, but it’s a move that makes perfect sense for the parties involved with increased money and power. Every once in awhile, though, conference realignment causes a story that goes beyond the realm of reasonable possibility, such as a Power 5 conference commissioner publicly going postal on ESPN. Yesterday, Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby se ..read more

Newton’s Third Law of Motion states that for every action in nature, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Ever since news broke last week that Texas and Oklahoma were looking to leave the Big 12 (which was made official today) and join the SEC, one of the most common questions has been how the Big Ten and the other Power Five conferences would react. As sports fans, many of us have a preternatural desire for clean and organized structures, such as seeing 4 superconferences with 16 schools each in college football as a logical endpoint. However, conference realignment doesn’t work that way ..read more

(Image from Omaha World-Herald) When I first started writing about conference realignment over a decade ago, it was always clear to me which school was the biggest prize for every conference: the University of Texas. Whatever metric is used for conference realignment value, Texas has a perfect score in all of them – national historic football brand, rabid fan base, massive home state delivering multiple key TV markets, elite academics and a top recruiting area for football and virtually every other sport. Adding Texas was the original dream for Big Ten expansion and the Longhorns were the cent ..read more

It has been a long time since my last post and we have a lot to catch up on (to say the least). There will be more to come, but let’s focus on a timely topic: the very real possibility of college football playoff expansion. Last week, the College Football Playoff management committee issued a press release about its latest meetings where it stated that it had a working group exploring expanding the playoff with “some 63 possibilities for change. These included 6-, 8-, 10-, 12- and 16-team options, each with a variety of different scenarios.” While CFP Executive Director Bill Hancock had all o ..read more