The Devil Lies In The Big Picture

Metamorphic realignment of the major athletic conferences is just a matter of time. It began but did not snowball last year when Nebraska and Colorado abandoned the Big 12. It may not occur this year, despite the fact that that the eyes of Texas A&M are clearly focused on the SEC. But the floodgates are going to open, within a matter of days or at most a year.

Every major athletic program, eventually even the University of Texas, that is not in the Big 10, the SEC or Pac 12 will see the benefits joining one of the Big Three. And the Big Three know they can renegotiate their TV contracts if they expand, e.g., The SEC would be adding a market with 24 million viewers if Texas A&M joins.

Predicting who will end up where is fun but foolhardy; there are just too many possible scenarios. Will the SEC add Florida State, which makes sense from a football standpoint, or would they solicit Duke and North Carolina to upgrade their basketball? Will Notre Dame remain independent or concede that it belongs in the Big Ten? Where will Texas and Oklahoma go, the SEC or the Pac-14?

Details aside, the overall structure figures to look like this. The Big Three will all expand because the temptation to get more TV revenue is too great. The Big 12 will become a minor conference. The ACC and the Big East will have to merge. And, most importantly, the gap between the BCS and the other schools will grow even greater.

The Big 12 survived Nebraska and Colorado’s departures and Texas A&M can be replaced, but two structural problems will compel Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, and eventually Texas to leave. The first is the fact that the amount of TV revenue each school, absent Texas, can generate is going to fall farther behind what schools in the Big Three can earn. And second, the competitive advantage Texas has, because of the way income is distributed among members and because of its pending TV network, has generated major resentment. It was the final straw for A&M and it will be the Impetus for Missouri, Kansas, and Oklahoma.

The Big East has already fallen far behind the other BCS conferences and the ACC continues to lose ground to the SEC. Now imagine how wide that gap would grow if the SEC added FSU and Clemson (North Carolina would make more sense, but would they abandon Duke?) and the Big Ten added Pitt and Rutgers. The biggest remaining schools would see consolidation as a matter of BCS survival.

And you can be sure that survival will be the first priority. Boise State and TCU have proven that non-BCS schools can compete at the highest level, but the competitive obstacles are about to become a lot bigger.

Will it be good for college football to have 60 or so teams consolidated into just four super conferences? Will the NCAA have any real power or will it effectively reside with the BCS? Will there still be one set of rules for all the Division 1-A schools or will the BCS schools insist on implementing, for example, ‘full cost of attendance’ legislation, which would further seal the non-BCS school’s competitive fate? Will the bowl system survive or be replaced by a playoff system?

Those debates will come, but right now schools in the Big Three are going to focus on how to get even richer and the others are going to do everything they can to avoid ending up in the poorhouse.

Note that none of this scheming figures to advance the educational mission of any of these schools, but watching this process unfold is sure going to be educational.