Off Topic: NCAA Football - Are Super-Conferences for Realz?

Departing from my usual posts about transportation issues in DC, tonight I'd like to talk about another subject near and dear to my heart: College Football. Readers of this blog will remember that I am a huge University of Virginia football fan (homer) and season ticket holder.  Yes, I am a masochist.

It is looking more and more like there is some actual fire underneath all the smoke being blown around these days about the possible expansion of the Big Ten and PAC 10 football conferences. For a while now, there have been whisperings in the sports world about a coming day when the world of "big boy" college football (the teams that play in bowl games each year) consists of four "mega-conferences" of 16 members each, in sum representing over half the schools in the top division of college football (FBS, or Football Bowl Subdivision). This 'fearsome foursome' of leagues would have the power to structure a playoff system among themselves, and thus avoid sharing all that big-time bowl revenue with lesser schools (the other half of the FBS; we'll call them the "have nots").

Until recently, I have been of the opinion that this was all a lot of nonsense, pie-in-the-sky daydreaming on the part of media hacks who needed a story and had an approaching deadline. "Holy crap! Ten minutes to press time and I got nothin'! Let's pump out another piece on conference re-alignment!" But over the last few weeks, the volume of these conference re-alignment rumors has grown quite loud - and the lack of denials by the parties involved are speaking volumes.

A couple weeks ago, the first shockwaves hit the public when reports surfaced that the Big Ten was studying expanding its membership by one, three, or as many as five schools, from the current eleven up to the magic number of 16.

(Here let me assure the reader that I KNOW 10 + 5 does NOT equal 16, but tell that the the folks in the Midwest - the Big "Ten" conference actually has ELEVEN members, since the early 1990s. One is apparently not so big as the others).

By all accounts, if Notre Dame would simply stop giving the conference the stiff-arm and join up with the eleven Big Ten members (ahem), then Big Ten expansion would likely end there, at twelve. An even dozen schools happens to be the perfect number to host a conference championship game for big bucks. Feel me? The problem is that the conference and the Fighting Irish have been down this road before - like, twice. Notre Dame maintains that it is perfectly content remaining an independent football program (not a member of any conference) - and why not? Notre Dame is one of the wealthiest and most storied programs in all of college football. They have their own TV contract with NBC (a.k.a. "the Notre Dame Broadcasting Company"), a rarity that pays them more money than virtually any conference can pay any other team. The Irish are flush. And their other sports programs, including basketball and the "non-revenue" Olympic sports, play in the Big East conference. The Big East has pressured Notre Dame to join them for football, too - but that would be an even WORSE deal for the Irish, financially, than joining the Big Ten. So no, thanks.

But the times, they are a-changin'. It has been quite a while now, like a decade, since Notre Dame was relevant in the world of college football. Ty Willingham and Charlie Weiss, their last two coaches, were unable to "wake up the echoes" of Notre Dame's previous gridiron glory. They basically suck, and NBC no doubt has noticed. It remains to be seen if NBC will renew their big, fat contract with Notre Dame when it expires, and THAT is the leverage the Big Ten hopes to use to finally convince the Irish to sign up and become a member of an expanded "Big Ten plus One plus One" conference.

Assuming the Irish continue to play hard-to-get, though, the Big Ten is now preparing to go all DEFCON-5 on Notre Dame's world by offering conference membership to as many as four members of the current Big East Conference. Such a move, which would cause the collapse of the Big East (losing half its members would be a pretty bad day, no?), would then leave the Irish basketball and other sports programs without a home, all of a sudden. And just look at who would love to help the Irish find a warm bed to sleep in? That's right - the Big Ten will keep a light on "Touchdown Jesus".

Nothing personal, Big East and Irish - it's just business. BIG, fat, filthy-rich business.

So you're probably saying to yourself, "Self, where the hell is this guy going with all this?" Glad you asked! Two articles late last week brought all this into focus. The first one highlights a proposal (not publicly confirmed, mind you) by the PAC-10 conference to raid the Big XII conference of six of its twelve members (10 +6 ... there's that pesky number 16 again...). The second article talks about this proposal and the thinking of a few key players in this saga: the University of Texas (the real prize of the Big XII), the University of Missouri (who wants to be in the Big Ten so badly it is almost shameful), and the University of Nebraska (another potential target of the Big Ten).

Add to all this a series of non-denials by the president of the University of Missouri (a Big XII member who has one foot out the door headed to the Big Ten), and rumors that Nebraska is also being cagey with its current conference-mates about its future in the Big XII, and what you see is a smoking fire that is about to burn down the house.

If this PAC-10 proposal comes to pass, and the Big Ten grabs Missouri, Nebraska, as well as Syracuse and Rutgers from the Big East, the college football map will look like this:


The newly-enlarged PAC-16 (in red), would stretch from Seattle to Los Angeles to Austin, TX. The new Big Ten + 1 + 5 (in black) would stretch from Omaha to the Big Apple. What drives all this expansion talk? TV money, period. The more TV households you can attract to watch your expanded inventory of conference football games, the more green falls to the bottom line. You dig?

Now I've also included on the map above the current SEC (Southeastern Conference), the other big daddy of college football. Should the PAC-10 and Big Ten move to 16 teams, the SEC would likely be compelled to do likewise, or risk not having enough TV sets and football "inventory" to make the cash registers sing as loudly as the other two leagues. THIS is where things get hairy for my beloved UVA Cavaliers and their quaint little conference, the ACC. IF the PAC-10 deal goes down as outlined above, the SEC will be quite boxed in, geographically encircled by the other two big leagues. Where would the SEC find some new TV sets and inventory? It could go after some of those abandoned Big East teams, like West Virginia or South Florida (large schools with academic standards for athletes comparable to the SEC mean). OR, the SEC could set its sights on bigger game, such as ACC teams like:

• Florida State (the closest thing the ACC has to football royalty),
• Clemson (with 80,000 die-hard fans, Clemson, SC becomes the 3rd largest city in the Palmetto State on gamedays).
• North Carolina State (large school that would give the SEC a presence in Tar Heel State for the first time), and
• Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University (I dunno, I hear they play football there, too...).

The loss of those schools would be a devastating blow to the ACC, and new territory in Virginia and North Carolina would give the SEC an even more dominant position throughout the southeastern U.S., up to and including the Washington, DC metropolitan area (mmmm..... TV sets and inventory... yummy). The ACC and SEC overlap geographically, as seen here:


In fact, one can easily imagine the following "ACC Death Scenario":

1) The PAC-10 takes six schools from the Big 12 (per the ESPN story);

2) The Big Ten decides to abandon those TV sets in the Big East and instead extends offers to Missouri + Notre Dame + Maryland + UVA + UNC + Duke - but the Irish decide to remain independent (tsk, tsk);

3) The SEC offers FSU, Clemson, NCSU and VPI to dominate everything from DC south;

4) Assuming all schools accept these invitations (and all that new money would be hard to turn down), the ACC would then be down to FOUR members of the original twelve! To survive as a conference, it would have to essentially merge with the Big East, adding Syracuse, Pittsburgh, Connecticut, and Rutgers to get to eight members (thus covering the entire east coast from Miami to Boston, except for the Commonwealth of Virginia and the State of South Carolina). To get back to 12, they could add West Virginia, East Carolina, Navy and South Florida, all reasonably successful football programs with good fan followings.

5) Under this scenario, like all the others, the Big East ceases to exist entirely. Out West (see the big blue question mark in the map above), the leftovers from the Big XII, including Kansas and Kansas State, could form the core of a new league merging pieces of the Big XII, Mountain West Conference (MWC), and the Western Athletic Conference (WAC). There are a lot of pretty good football programs left high and dry out West in this scenario from which to form a conference: Fresno State, Texas Christian University, Boise State, Utah, BYU, etc..

Returning to the East, the ACC would now look like this:

Carry-over members:

1. Wake Forest

2. Georgia Tech

3. Miami

4. Boston College

(not a bad group at all)

Former Big East members:

5. Syracuse

6. Pitt

7. UConn

8. Rutgers

9. USF

10. West Virginia

(another pretty decent group)

Others to get to 12:

11. ECU

12. Navy

Others to get to 16:

13. Temple or Marshall

14. Louisville

15. Cincinnati

16. Old Dominion University (currently launching an FBS football program) - this would return ACC football to Virginia), or perhaps UNC-Charlotte (also starting up a football program).

In this scenario, the new "ACC-16" covers the entire East Coast except Delaware, RI, NH, and Maine. Honestly, that's not that horrible for a cobbled-together conference eaten alive by the big boys.

There are many dominoes yet to fall, but the stories linked above give me the impression that it is now a matter of "when", not "if", these mega-conferences start to evolve. The exact membership in each league is uncertain, but the football world in 2012 may look dramatically different than that which we know and love today.

Thanks to "Paul Westerdog" of Georgia Sports Blog for being the source of the map on which I doodled my conference footprints above.  The map shows all the FBS schools as of 2005, each represented by the school's football helmet.  If anyone knows the ultimate source of this graphic to be someone else, I'd be grateful if you passed that information along.