One of the biggest ongoing questions regarding realignment is who to believe. For a long time, a general conference realignment rule of thumb was that nobody knew anything until moments before relevant news was announced. This is how it worked with Texas and Oklahoma moving to the SEC. This is how it worked with USC and UCLA moving to the Big Ten. This is even how it mostly worked with Colorado leaving the Pac-12 to return to the Big 12 twelve days ago. The conversations happen and the decisions are made at such a high level that it’s relatively easy to keep secrets, and there’s substantial value in keeping them for the schools and conferences involved.
Over the last year, though, and now especially over the last two weeks, the doors have blown wide open. We’re seeing a lot more of the process than we previously saw. It’s chaotic and disorganized, and one interpretation of this wildness is that these processes are messier than we ever thought. I don’t think that’s the right interpretation, though. I think the causation is reversed. We aren’t suddenly seeing more and then learning it’s wild. We’re seeing more *because* it’s gotten wild. A lot more is happening, and happening fast, than was previously the case. There are no secrets left to keep. It is a free for all, to a degree we haven’t seen before.
A large part of this is that power conferences didn’t formally exist until about thirty years ago, when the Bowl Coalition took its first wobbly steps towards what became the BCS later in the 1990s. The Southwest Conference was part of the Boal Coalition, making it something of a power conference (I’ve debated on this point before—the SWC was *very bad* at its end, but it had that access), so when four of its schools were left as scraps after Texas, Texas A&M, Baylor, and Texas Tech left to join the Big 8 and become the Big 12, that’s the closest historic precedent to today. That, though, was comparably neat and comparably tidy. None of the other power conferences had appetites for SMU, TCU, Houston, and Rice, and so those four joined the WAC and Conference USA. We’ve seen mass conference movement for years—the Big East spawned as a football league in 1991, the SWC disbanded after 1995, the Big East started hemorrhaging schools in 2004, things have accelerated since—but we haven’t seen it get this frantic. Never have so many parties been panicking at once. Again, this ties back to the concept of formal power conferences. If the Pac-12, a league with straightforward playoff access and a Rose Bowl berth, can fall apart, then not only will its schools start ringing sirens but the ACC will as well, for fear of a similar fate.
The result is that it’s harder to tell where news is coming from than it was even two months ago.
For most of the post-UCLA/USC timeline, we knew where the leaks were originating. Most of the time, it was the Big 12. Sometimes, it was schools hoping to join the Pac-12 in UCLA and USC’s place. On the later end, it became the Pac-12. The Big 12 met with Gonzaga? I wonder who’d want us to know that. The Big 12 is heavily courting Arizona, Arizona State, Colorado, and Utah? I wonder who’d want us to know that. SMU and San Diego State are ready to accept invitations to the Pac-12? I wonder who’d benefit from such news. The Pac-12 media deal is going to rock our freaking socks? I wonder who described it that way. Even in the immediate wake of Colorado’s defection, reports leaned heavily on the prospect of the Big 12 adding UConn despite such a proposal flying in the face of all available logic at the time.
The obvious implication with each leak was that stakeholders were using the media to play a pressure game and a propaganda game, and that the media was happy to oblige, raking in advertising revenue as fans of college sports flocked to the rumor mill. Then, last week, it all became shockingly transparent. There was haze, there were reports that bordered on falsity, there were undeniably games being played. But the overall picture became clearer than we’ve ever seen it with these things. Why? I think it was because people were, and are, panicking.
I say all this to say that it’s interesting that we’re just now hearing about SMU again. This afternoon, Ross Dellenger reported for Yahoo that in addition to considering Stanford and Cal, the ACC is running the numbers on the little school from Dallas with a big old wallet.
SMU is an odd character in college athletics. It’s the only football program to have ever been assigned the death penalty, and that’s the thing for which it’s best known. The result of this narrow reputation is what seems to be a public overestimation of SMU’s greatness in the years leading up to the NCAA shutting the thing down. SMU had four very good teams in a row in the early 1980s, but only one had any sort of legitimate claim at a national championship, and voters chose Penn State instead. Beyond that, the track record is sparse. They weren’t a terrible program, but they weren’t great. In the twenty years before the “Pony Express” started rolling, the Mustangs had finished with a losing record fifteen times.
Recent history also isn’t excellent for the guys from Dallas. Despite playing mid-major competition, they’ve won ten games only once since the program was resurrected, and that 2019 performance included just one top-25 win, a victory over a TCU team that went on to finish 5–7. In other sports, results have been similar. SMU is fine, but SMU is not that good.
What SMU does have is the deep pockets and the great location. The Dallas-Ft. Worth media market is among the nation’s biggest, period, and it’s also very much into college football. It’s the kind of market that fifteen years ago would have been a big priority, back in the wholly cable-dominated landscape. But for as important as “linear television” still is to college athletics’ bottom lines, its importance has dropped a little as streaming has found a foothold, and that trend isn’t expected to reverse.
Dellenger’s report makes clear that SMU would not expect to gain a full share of revenue from the ACC’s media deal, something which has also been widely reported to be the expectation should the league add Cal and Stanford. He makes an interesting note, though, saying that in the ACC’s deal with ESPN, ESPN is obligated to increase payouts proportionally if any ACC expansion comes to pass—the “pro-rata” term we heard so much about with the Big 12 adding Pac-12 schools. This is the first I’ve seen such a claim, but if true, the implication I’m taking from this is that part of SMU’s ESPN revenue would be distributed across the 14 current ACC members? If ESPN is paying a full share for SMU, but SMU is receiving a partial share, the rest of that share has to go somewhere. If you’re confused, I’m right there with you.
Even if Dellenger’s report on the ACC’s TV contract is accurate and ESPN made a mistake which would allow the ACC to add just anyone, there’s still the question of whether it’s worth it for the ACC. Though respectable academically, SMU would grade out near the bottom of the ACC in that regard, if not exactly at the bottom. In sports other than football, SMU is no catch like Stanford is. The only real things SMU has going for it are location and its possession of a lot of high-dollar donors. Memphis has been banging the high-dollar donor drum for more than a decade thanks to its relationship with FedEx, and it’s still out in the alley waiting for the power conference bouncer to see its name on the list. So, the SMU question effectively amounts to: Does the ACC want a presence in Dallas?
The purpose of expanding right now, for the ACC, would seem to mostly be about narrative. The SEC is getting even stronger. The Big Ten is getting even stronger. The Big 12 is decidedly not on the level of those two leagues, but it’s stable and growing and looking like a really fun conference. The ACC? Its most valuable football program is complaining loudly about a contract it had a lot of power to build.
What I fail to see is any world in which SMU brings any sort of value to the ACC *unless* they’re a potential replacement for Cal. If they are, though, might Stanford balk? Stanford remains the real prize here for the Atlantic Coast Conference. No, it’s not the brand that USC or UCLA or Texas or Oklahoma is, and no, it’s not going to put a lot of butts in its seats for football, but if the name of the game for the ACC right now is momentum, being able to say, “Hey, we just added one of the five best universities in the country to our conference, look at us taking this whole thing seriously,” is about the best they can do. Adding SMU doesn’t do anything towards that end. It might even hamper the effort.
A lot of us know a lot of things about realignment, but I do keep finding myself continuing to learn more, and that seems to be happening with others analyzing this all and with those reporting on it, as evidenced by how quickly narratives flip. I say that to say that it’s possible I’m missing something regarding SMU. I have a hard time believing it has that much money, though, enough to make a ripple in the ACC’s collective bucket. I have a hard time believing Dallas-Ft. Worth is all that valuable to the ACC, either. If it was TCU, who just played in the national championship, I’d believe it. But I think the SMU thing is all smoke. And I think that smoke is coming almost exclusively from SMU.
The College Football Playoff
SEC commissioner Greg Sankey appeared on Paul Finebaum’s show this afternoon and hinted at redoing the new College Football Playoff format. This backs up a separate Dellenger report from yesterday highlighting the impact the Pac-12’s potential dissolution could have on the sport’s championship tournament. Per Dellenger’s sources, there’s an appetite to reduce the six automatic bids in the plans for the 2024 and 2025 playoffs down to five, or potentially to eliminate them altogether (I’ve got a guess on which conference is proposing getting rid of them altogether). Two very helpful details from Dellenger: The FBS commissioners (plus Notre Dame’s athletic director, I believe) would probably have to be unanimous to change the format from what’s currently planned in 2024 and 2025. After 2025, though, no contract is currently signed.
This last point is not something I previously understood, and this is a very big deal. When they said the format was set for 2026 and beyond, I thought there was ink on paper. The implication instead is that there’s an agreement on the format for 2026—that’s been there for a couple years now—but that nothing is actually set in stone. It’s up to the conference commissioners (and Notre Dame’s athletic director) to figure this out, but my impression is that at least some possibility exists that talks could break down to the degree where separate agreements become necessary, and that we thereby lose the unified national championship format. I don’t personally believe any of the power conferences would be willing to go this far, but the terrain isn’t exactly certain at the moment.
One other helpful detail from Dellenger: Evidently the NCAA, via the Division I Board of Directors, “gives more legislative authority and a higher revenue distribution to the (A5),” the autonomous five, the Power Five. I’m not sure what impact this really has on sports, but the thought is that even if the Pac-12 manages to restock, it will no longer be an A5. There will instead be an A4. So, there’s that, for whatever it’s worth.
ESPN in All of This
Pete Thamel, who continues to appear highly reliable with what he shares, didn’t mention SMU at all in his own ACC writeup this afternoon, but! If Dellenger’s report is true that ESPN would have to pay the same amount for SMU it pays for Clemson, and if I’m understanding that report correctly, ESPN has a big incentive to discourage any addition of SMU. Not that the ACC would make its decision based on what Pete Thamel includes in his coverage, but it’s certainly a conflict of interest.
Helpfully, Thamel makes clear that the ACC would need 12 of its 15 schools to vote yes on adding any new members. To me, that makes things a little bleak for those hoping for any additions. As we talked about yesterday, the ACC’s decision on Stanford and Cal appears to come down to a lot of somewhat arbitrary judgment calls. I would guess that it’s hard to get 80% of a league to agree on this, especially when Notre Dame has unique interests among the group and half the other schools have been actively collaborating in a legal attempt to bust out of the ESPN contract, something not unlikely to result in the other half being left behind.
What’ll Happen?
My read on all of this is that the ACC isn’t going to make a move, and that Stanford, Cal, Washington State, and Oregon State will have the decision to make. The Mountain West would doubtlessly take all four, and I don’t know that any prestige is gained for Stanford by playing the MWC instead of the AAC’s best teams, which makes me think the scenario in which the Pac-12 adds two or four AAC schools for a few years (let’s say SMU, Memphis, Tulane, and Rice, to illustrate) and then tries to raid the MWC is unlikely. This all seems to point towards the Pac-12 really dissolving, with Washington State and Oregon State going into the Mountain West and Stanford and Cal’s destination anybody’s guess. I’d kind of guess they do the Mountain West thing, though. The upside’s not all that bad there.
My confidence level is low on this, but that’s what makes sense to me.
Housekeeping
We’re trying to get back into covering things beyond only conference realignment, but it’s got our plate rather full at the moment. Conveniently, this comes at a time when the Cubs lost 11–2 to the Mets last night. Sorry, no time to discuss!
