Joe’s Notes: A Summer Without Conference Realignment

In July of 2021, Texas and Oklahoma announced they would join the SEC. In June of 2022, USC and UCLA announced they would join the Big Ten. In July and August of 2023, six Pac-12 schools announced they would join the Big 12 and Big Ten. This year? Crickets. Thank goodness for the Olympics.

In seriousness, it’s been a while since we updated the lay of the land on realignment. Let’s pay that room a visit.

It really does appear there’s no surprise move growing in the dark right now. Nothing seems imminent, and while nothing seemed imminent in 2021 or 2022 until the moment deals were finalized, we shifted last summer to a much more transparent realignment process. Where Texas and Oklahoma held their meetings in secret, we followed the Pac-12’s dissolution in grueling detail. Where UCLA and USC announced their move out of nowhere, we’ve been privy to all the messy mechanizing in the ACC. Maybe this is a temporary change. Maybe we’ll be back to surprise realignment announcements one wave from now. Making the shift make sense, though, is the aspect where the involved parties no longer constitute college football royalty. Texas has long been adept at the art of cloaks and daggers. Florida State was never told about the cloaks.

Why is nothing happening? Stability and instability. On the stable side, Texas and USC got out of middle-class situations, and the fragile skeletons they left behind reached stability themselves, respectively purging entropy through reinforcement and collapse. On the unstable side, multiple reports and our own eyeballs point out that no one really knows what college sports will look like in five or six years. No one is comfortable getting aggressive when each week could include a batch of news like last’s:

• The Department of Education intends to attempt to enforce Title IX equality measures in the arena of revenue sharing.
• The NCAA is still attempting to get Georgia and Fairleigh Dickinson into at least slightly different versions of Division I.
• The House v. NCAA settlement—the one everybody [censored] their [censored] about and called a done deal—has been delayed, partly because the Fairleigh Dickinsons of the world don’t like having to pay so much money to stay aligned with the Georgias.
• Some shadowy figures (presumably administrators at power conference schools) are zeroing in on 105 as the new maximum number of players allowed on a football roster.

That list does not include developments in the ACC, where bickering is ongoing and media days have now begun, giving every reporter looking for a story an opportunity to stir the pot.

Against that backdrop, let’s go around the room and outline where things stand.

Big Ten, SEC

The Power 2 are, again, stable. They have the best teams, and as a result and possibly cause of that, they make the most money. They’re different enough from each other culturally that they’ve yet to really fight over expansion targets. The Big Ten and the SEC are the two great powers, and neither needs an additional school right now, and neither is presently a major threat to the other.

Big 12

Brett Yormark would probably still like to add UConn. This is probably why he recently talked about splitting basketball’s media rights away from football’s. Big 12 presidents don’t want UConn, though, because they don’t know if basketball rights can be spun off, so for the Big 12, it’s ACC schools or nothing. My impression is that the Big 12 would have to rewrite a lot of contracts with its media partners if it did add more schools, and my other impression is that the Big 12 has yet to wade into the waters of unequal revenue distribution between schools. These things would point towards the Big 12 not adding any ACC schools besides the big ones. Could they get them? Only if the Big Ten and SEC really didn’t want them.

Florida State

Florida State would still like to leave the ACC, and their state’s attorney general managed to get her hands on the conference’s grant of rights. I don’t think it’ll be delivered before the end of the month, and the ACC will be able to redact portions, but the treads on Florida State’s tanks keep inching forward.

The problem Florida State might run into, if they do successfully earn their ticket out of the ACC, is the Big Ten and SEC not wanting them. The Big Ten doesn’t want to lower its average academic prestige and it doesn’t like hanging out with schools it considers uncouth. The SEC wants big ballers and new television markets (cable’s still out there). Maybe one takes Florida State to stop the other, but that angle of mutually assured expansion is probably overstated. The Big Ten has gotten good enough that it doesn’t need to play a numbers game to beat the SEC. The SEC is still the SEC, and it’s actually gotten more choosy as the years have gone on. It would be shocking if the SEC added Missouri today.

Would Florida State bring in enough money to be worth it for the Big 12? I would think so. Not an expert, but I don’t think you need to be on that one. Florida State is a good product. It’s not good enough to move the needle for the Big Ten or the SEC, but the Big 12 is a different animal. A smaller one.

Ultimately, whether this is an issue at all hinges on a legal question with no clear answer right now. Is the ACC’s grant of rights ironclad? If it is, Florida State is stuck for at least a few more years. If not…game on.

Clemson

Clemson would also like to leave the ACC, and Clemson is also doing its best in the courts. The problem for Clemson is that it’s only recently become as big of a brand as it currently is, and how big a brand it is has fallen from its 2019 peak. Clemson is a little worse than Florida State at football right now, occupies an even smaller media market (again, one not unique to the SEC), and doesn’t come with the aura of the Bobby Bowden years. This is a little unfair—Clemson’s aura might increase when Dabo Swinney eventually moves on and his accomplishments take on a rosy historic glow—but the point is that Clemson’s value shrinks by the day, and it will continue to shrink unless they become a serious national championship contender again. Florida State has more staying power than Clemson.

Like Florida State, then, Clemson might successfully break free and then find itself without a home. If that happens, they’re probably likelier than FSU to stay in the ACC, having not burned as many boats. Again, though, they’d most likely be choosing between the Big 12 and the ACC. It’s the same choice, even if Clemson might have an easier time crossing the drawbridge back home.

North Carolina (and Virginia, and Maybe Miami)

There is one lurking big prize out there, and it remains suspiciously quiet. I don’t believe North Carolina is on the same plane as Texas or USC in terms of cachet, but the Tar Heels are a big deal. They aren’t a football power, but they command one of the biggest brands in college sports, they have an Oregon-esque relationship with Nike through the Jordan Brand, the media market they offer would be unique for the Big Ten, and they’re a great school. UNC is one of the five strongest academic state schools, alongside Cal, UCLA, Michigan, and Virginia. The Big Ten would love to add more schools from that list. That list embodies everything the Big Ten wants to be, with the one exception being Cal, who ended up homeless thanks to their growing apathy about sports. Virginia does care about sports, even if they’re a long way from good in football. The Hoos might be a nice dance partner for the Tar Heels. This makes the silence around those two and Miami suspicious. Florida State’s doing an imitation of Alex Jones trying to see the documents. UNC, Virginia, and possibly Miami are either sitting on their hands or operating like Oklahoma and UCLA did a few years ago.

The Rest of the ACC

There are theories about the ACC’s middle class—think Louisville, NC State, Virginia Tech—trying to bolt for the Big 12, but these are far-fetched. They’d face the same legal hurdles as the big guys, and the benefit wouldn’t be all that large. The race to the fire escape made sense within the Pac-12 because the Pac-12’s media deal was expiring. The Pac-12 was on fire. The ACC isn’t. At least, not yet. With the ACC, the fire escape door is locked, and it is tricky and expensive to try to find the key.

The Pac-2

Dennis Dodd (who also had the piece on Big Ten and/or SEC presidents recoiling in horror at the uncouthness of FSU) wrote an update last week on the Mountain West, Oregon State, and Washington State, and his take was that the Mountain West might not want Oregon State and Washington State. The stated theory was that the football teams might not be that good, which would then mean the Mountain West might make the playoff less often. That isn’t believable, though, which either means someone’s lying or someone’s wrong. More likely, Mountain West powers have realized that they want less competition at the top of the league, needing only to outdo the AAC and Sun Belt champions to earn College Football Playoff invitations.

I have no idea what will happen with those two schools. The Mountain West is the logical eventual destination, but logical isn’t what makes things happen. What makes things happen is the incentives matching up between schools and conferences. I hope these two schools tried really hard to land that Big 12 membership before Colorado jumped. They would have been safe if they’d gotten the Big 12 to take them. If they didn’t try, it’s a lot harder to feel bad for them. (It sure seems like they didn’t try.)

The Rest of College Sports

People don’t like to mention the good parts of realignment, but it does create a vehicle for upward mobility, which is something aforementioned people do like, provided you can get them to recognize it. I’m unaware of any huge movements elsewhere at the moment, but the proposed intra-Division I split could really change incentives depending how it works out logistically. I have no idea how a school like Boise State would feel if it found itself atop a pseudo-FCS again.

Miscellany

Apologies for how old some of these are. Slow week or not, a lot happened while we were on vacation:

• I’m fascinated by Carlos Alcaraz’s run of majors. Winning three of five is no joke, and neither is winning four before the age of 22. I’m curious, however, how his body is going to hold up as he gets deeper into his prime. He’s not exceptionally small. Novak Djokovic is only two inches taller than him, and Federer and Nadal only stand over him by an inch. He is, though, a little small, and he’s battled some injuries already. It’s reminiscent of Pedro Martinez. Pedro peaked for the Red Sox at 27 and 28, but he started getting hurt at 29, and he went from great to good only a few years later. His last two full seasons—they were his age-32 and age-33 years—look better in hindsight than they did at the time, with the benefit of perspective erasing what had been an inconvenient comparison with 2000 Pedro. Still, the question persists as to what more he could have done had his body been able to withstand the things he did on the mound. Thankfully for Alcaraz, even age 27 is a long ways off. But tennis is different from baseball in the 90’s and 2000’s. Even baseball is different from baseball in the 90’s and 2000’s.
• For the next two years, Oregon State and Washington State will maintain their relationships with Pac-12 bowls, and if I had to guess, nobody knows exactly how it’s going to work. Bowl selection has already grown messier in recent seasons, conducted mostly in backrooms. I wonder if the initial realignment shocks, coupled with some contract overlap, could really throw the process into turmoil. It wouldn’t be the worst thing—everyone would eventually find their space, and we might get better matchups in a pure “draft” than we do right now—but it would make for a crazy Sunday in December.
• Lawrence Frank, the Clippers’ president of basketball ops, said the Clippers weren’t involved in the decision to remove Kawhi Leonard from the Olympic roster, going on to express disagreement with the call. This is partly weird because the initial statement from Team USA gave the impression, at least to me, that the Clippers made the decision themselves. Whatever it is might not be consequential, but something there is odd.
• As it does with so many things, the NBA is making an event out of expansion, with Adam Silver spilling the tea last week that once the new TV rights are finalized, the league will look towards…well, it’s going to be Las Vegas and Seattle, right? Maybe there’s a surprise thrown in, but it seems like the biggest legitimate suspense with this will be how much it’s delayed while the impending TNT lawsuit keeps those TV rights from becoming final. They’ve almost said out loud that Las Vegas will get a team. It would seem out of character for the league to be absent from Seattle—a large city teeming with male podcast listeners—even without the Sonics history. I suppose the real suspense could become whether the Thunder give up the SuperSonics trademarks, and whether the NBA pushes them in that direction. I’m assuming they still have them, but maybe the Nationals were abnormally dickish with their retention of the Expos name.