Mark Bradley: The ACC finds new friends. The SEC needs no friends.
Mark Bradley, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley: The ACC finds new friends. The SEC needs no friends.
Mike Ehrmann/Getty Images North America/TNS
An SEC logo is seen on an end zone pylon before Missouri takes on Auburn during the SEC Championship Game on December 7, 2013, at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta. (Mike Ehrmann/Getty Images/TNS)
Mike Ehrmann/Getty Images North America/TNS
An SEC logo is seen on an end zone pylon before Missouri takes on Auburn during the SEC Championship Game on December 7, 2013, at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta. (Mike Ehrmann/Getty Images/TNS)
Chip Scoggins: Clumsy college ‘alliance’ mostly about money while chaos lurks in background
Eric Gay
There are plenty of options on the table.
The ACC, Big Ten and Pac-12 could simply be trying to gain political clout within college athletics by voting together on key issues such as playoff expansion. Or they could explore revenue-generating ideas such as pooling their media rights packages and a scheduling alliance.
If politics is their main priority, there may be some options available for the Big 12 to still partner with them in some form.
But the Big 12 would feel very lonely if those other conferences decide to move forward with a scheduling alliance that leaves Big 12 teams out of their future nonconference plans.
The possibility of the Big 12 forming a scheduling alliance with the Pac-12 seemed like the most realistic positive step forward for Big 12 members in realignment. If that is no longer on the table, because the ACC, Big Ten and Pac-12 would rather schedule their own marquee games then what is Plan B?
It’s difficult to say how long a scheduling alliance could take effect, though. K-State, for example, has future home-and-home series arranged with Arizona, Colorado, Rutgers and Washington State as far out as 2031. Asking teams to back out of all those games could be complicated in the short term.
Eric Gay
There are plenty of options on the table.
The ACC, Big Ten and Pac-12 could simply be trying to gain political clout within college athletics by voting together on key issues such as playoff expansion. Or they could explore revenue-generating ideas such as pooling their media rights packages and a scheduling alliance.
If politics is their main priority, there may be some options available for the Big 12 to still partner with them in some form.
But the Big 12 would feel very lonely if those other conferences decide to move forward with a scheduling alliance that leaves Big 12 teams out of their future nonconference plans.
The possibility of the Big 12 forming a scheduling alliance with the Pac-12 seemed like the most realistic positive step forward for Big 12 members in realignment. If that is no longer on the table, because the ACC, Big Ten and Pac-12 would rather schedule their own marquee games then what is Plan B?
It’s difficult to say how long a scheduling alliance could take effect, though. K-State, for example, has future home-and-home series arranged with Arizona, Colorado, Rutgers and Washington State as far out as 2031. Asking teams to back out of all those games could be complicated in the short term.
Chip Scoggins: Clumsy college ‘alliance’ mostly about money while chaos lurks in background
Michael Ainsworth
There is quiet optimism across the industry that the College Football Playoff will still expand beyond its current form to 12 teams in the near future, but it is unlikely to happen nearly as quickly as some originally thought.
Could a consolidation of power conferences do more than simply slow the process?
Maybe. The SEC seems content to continue on with four playoff participants with games being played exclusively on ESPN. But the ACC, Big Ten and Pac-12 might have other plans. Several different TV networks share playoff rights in most pro sports. The NCAA men’s basketball tournament is also spread across four networks, not just CBS.
Some believe a conference alliance could force the playoff to let other networks bid on its media rights and drive up the price. A 12-team playoff would be worth more on the open market than a four-team version, so odds favor expansion.
But will they still allow automatic access for the nation’s top six-rated conference champions?
The Big 12 will certainly hope so. If its remaining teams stick together, one of them will have access to the playoff every year. That would help the Big 12 remain a viable conference in some form.
Michael Ainsworth
There is quiet optimism across the industry that the College Football Playoff will still expand beyond its current form to 12 teams in the near future, but it is unlikely to happen nearly as quickly as some originally thought.
Could a consolidation of power conferences do more than simply slow the process?
Maybe. The SEC seems content to continue on with four playoff participants with games being played exclusively on ESPN. But the ACC, Big Ten and Pac-12 might have other plans. Several different TV networks share playoff rights in most pro sports. The NCAA men’s basketball tournament is also spread across four networks, not just CBS.
Some believe a conference alliance could force the playoff to let other networks bid on its media rights and drive up the price. A 12-team playoff would be worth more on the open market than a four-team version, so odds favor expansion.
But will they still allow automatic access for the nation’s top six-rated conference champions?
The Big 12 will certainly hope so. If its remaining teams stick together, one of them will have access to the playoff every year. That would help the Big 12 remain a viable conference in some form.
Chip Scoggins: Clumsy college ‘alliance’ mostly about money while chaos lurks in background
LM Otero
It’s starting to feel that way.
The ACC, Big Ten and Pac-12 could still look to expand by poaching Big 12 teams after they form an alliance, but it doesn’t feel like a priority.
Fans can probably give up the dream of a Big 12/Pac-12 merger.
If the other power conferences decide to stand pat, Big 12 teams could respond in one of two ways. The first would be all eight teams secretly working behind the scenes to sell themselves to another conference in hopes of earning an invitation.
All eight of the Big 12’s remaining members would prefer life in another power conference than life in a refortified Big 12 that has been relegated to second-tier status.
But there’s no guarantee such an offer will present itself for any of those eight schools. Kansas or Iowa State to the Big Ten? West Virginia to the ACC? Some combination of K-State, Texas Tech, Oklahoma State, Baylor and TCU to the Pac-12? It’s all fun to think about, but it also seems less likely now than it did at this time last week.
The other option: The remaining Big 12 teams unite and try to rebuild the conference via expansion or some type of merger with the American Athletic Conference.
There’s always the possibility this could bring them together.
Adding schools like Boise State, BYU, Cincinnati, Houston or UCF would make the Big 12 a competitive league, especially in basketball. But it would not be nearly as profitable as what Big 12 schools have grown accustomed to.
LM Otero
It’s starting to feel that way.
The ACC, Big Ten and Pac-12 could still look to expand by poaching Big 12 teams after they form an alliance, but it doesn’t feel like a priority.
Fans can probably give up the dream of a Big 12/Pac-12 merger.
If the other power conferences decide to stand pat, Big 12 teams could respond in one of two ways. The first would be all eight teams secretly working behind the scenes to sell themselves to another conference in hopes of earning an invitation.
All eight of the Big 12’s remaining members would prefer life in another power conference than life in a refortified Big 12 that has been relegated to second-tier status.
But there’s no guarantee such an offer will present itself for any of those eight schools. Kansas or Iowa State to the Big Ten? West Virginia to the ACC? Some combination of K-State, Texas Tech, Oklahoma State, Baylor and TCU to the Pac-12? It’s all fun to think about, but it also seems less likely now than it did at this time last week.
The other option: The remaining Big 12 teams unite and try to rebuild the conference via expansion or some type of merger with the American Athletic Conference.
There’s always the possibility this could bring them together.
Adding schools like Boise State, BYU, Cincinnati, Houston or UCF would make the Big 12 a competitive league, especially in basketball. But it would not be nearly as profitable as what Big 12 schools have grown accustomed to.
Chip Scoggins: Clumsy college ‘alliance’ mostly about money while chaos lurks in background
Conference realignment has not been kind to Bowlsby.
The Big 12 commissioner got caught with egg on his face when he shot down the idea of conference expansion at Big 12 media days, saying that it was no longer a priority for anyone because of the decline in traditional cable TV. And then Oklahoma and Texas were gone the following week.
He bounced back when news leaked about Bowlsby setting up an exploratory meeting with Pac-12 commissioner George Kliavkoff, but that now appears to have been little more than a casual chat between colleagues.
Big 12 fans were excited about the prospect of working with the Pac-12 in some form. Alas, the Pac-12 now has something else in mind.
There doesn’t seem to be much internal finger pointing at Bowlsby. Kansas State athletic director Gene Taylor staunchly defended Bowlsby in radio interviews last week, saying everyone in the conference was stunned when Oklahoma and Texas decided to exit the league and that he is working his hardest to lead the league in uncertain times.
But he does not look like a proactive leader at the moment.
Conference realignment has not been kind to Bowlsby.
The Big 12 commissioner got caught with egg on his face when he shot down the idea of conference expansion at Big 12 media days, saying that it was no longer a priority for anyone because of the decline in traditional cable TV. And then Oklahoma and Texas were gone the following week.
He bounced back when news leaked about Bowlsby setting up an exploratory meeting with Pac-12 commissioner George Kliavkoff, but that now appears to have been little more than a casual chat between colleagues.
Big 12 fans were excited about the prospect of working with the Pac-12 in some form. Alas, the Pac-12 now has something else in mind.
There doesn’t seem to be much internal finger pointing at Bowlsby. Kansas State athletic director Gene Taylor staunchly defended Bowlsby in radio interviews last week, saying everyone in the conference was stunned when Oklahoma and Texas decided to exit the league and that he is working his hardest to lead the league in uncertain times.
But he does not look like a proactive leader at the moment.
The ACC, Big Ten and Pac-12 are set to announce an alliance. Still unclear is what such an alliance would do, other than differentiate those conferences from the gargantuan SEC and leave the poor Big 12 standing alone. Or, to be more precise, crumbling alone.
By 2025 if not sooner, the SEC will welcome Texas and Oklahoma. Neither are in the Southeast. Both share the SEC’s worldview, which is, “Get out of our way as we seek to snag every single dollar in this billion-dollar industry.”
That the Big Ten and Pac-12, longtime partners in the Rose Bowl, would forge an alliance isn’t exactly news. Those two have moved in lockstep for decades. (Both canceled their 2020 football seasons this time a year ago. Both wound up playing a semblance of a 2020 season because nobody followed their lead.) Now as then, world waited with bated breath to see which way the ACC would move.
A year ago, the ACC was left to play a schedule that included no games against Georgia, Florida, South Carolina and Kentucky. (Example No. 759 of the SEC showing how little it cares about anyone or anything else.) This time the ACC is moving toward some manner of affiliation with the Big Ten and Pac-12, which doesn’t make geographic sense — who among us can wait for to see Virginia Tech take on Washington State? — but college football failed Geometry 101 a while ago.
The other Power 5 conferences have long looked with scorn on the SEC, of which four current members belong to the academically prestigious Association of American Universities, an AAU not to be confused with the AAU (Amateur Athletic Union) that serves as a feeder program for college basketball. The four: Florida and Vanderbilt, plus relative newbies Missouri and Texas A&M. Texas will make a fifth. The ACC, Big Ten and Pac-12 constitute a rounded-up 40 percent of the AAU’s 66-school membership.
The ACC’s move toward the Big Ten and Pac-12 was a process of elimination. The ACC surely saw no point in an alliance with the sinking Big 12. With Texas and OU, the SEC needs no more allies. We’re not sure exactly how, or even if, the three leagues will present themselves as an entity, but the belief is that they’ll become a single voting bloc — not to be confused with a single 41-team conference — for the sake of, you guessed it, TV.
Let’s say those leagues agree to adopt an eight-team in-conference schedule. Each could also agree to playing three games per season against teams from the other two leagues. Clemson playing Ohio State seems a no-brainer, although no network figures to be salivating over the notion of Rutgers teeing it up against Washington State.
As for the high-minded bit of AAU schools clustering into a Mensa super-conference: TV doesn’t give a hoot about that. (Smart folks already have a daily Super Bowl. It’s called “Jeopardy!”) TV is concerned, first and last and always, with ratings, which mean money. The bigger and presumably better SEC will have seven schools — Alabama, Auburn, Florida, LSU, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Texas — that have taken national titles since the BCS came into being in 1998. The ACC/Big Ten/Pac-12 will have five: Clemson, Florida State, Miami, Ohio State and USC.
The SEC’s annexation of Texas/OU was done so quietly that some of the league’s higher-ups didn’t know it was coming. A year ago, commissioner Greg Sankey all but willed the 2020 football season into being. Had his league folded in the wake of the Big Ten’s and Pac-12′s pullouts, toe wouldn’t have met leather last fall. Forget the NCAA, which has washed its hands of college football at the highest level. Sankey and his SEC call the tune for every program with a set of goalposts. Put it this way: The SEC, which has its own ESPN-affiliated network, is adding Texas, which has its own ESPN-affiliated channel.
Without Texas and Oklahoma, the SEC might have sought to align itself with the ACC, although those neighboring leagues don’t much like one another. With Texas and OU, the SEC has all it needs, maybe all it will ever need. The issue became which way the ACC, which is working under a new commissioner, would jump. (The Big Ten and Pac-12 also have newish commissioners.) Even the giants lost money in the shortened COVID season of 2020, money that’s gone forever. Anything to enhance a conference’s revenue stream is fair game.
Thus did the SEC poach Texas and Oklahoma, leaving the Big-12 in ruins. Thus has the ACC found solidarity with the Big Ten and Pac-12. In the realm of college athletics, the greatest fear is in not having a seat at the table when network contracts are being negotiated.
With money being available for NIL rights and a new collegiate home only a transfer portal away, the players have more leverage than they’ve ever known. The greatest power, though, remains with the bigger conferences. They’re the ones who can give TV what it wants, be it marquee regular-season games or a 12-team playoff.
Not so long ago, there were five big conferences. Now there are essentially two. There’s the SEC, and there’s the ACC/Big Ten/Pac-12 grouping, and then there’s everybody else. In college football, everybody else means nobody else.
