SIAP: Texas, Oklahoma formally apply for SEC membership with an effective date of July 1, 2025
It has begun in earnest. I would say the chances that they actually wait until 2025 are slim to none.
Virginia, VT if necessary
UNC, Duke and NC St if necessary
GT, ND.
That gets 20 and expands into the south a bit. Convince ND that the ACC is a dead man walking (which they are).
Talk about the Pac12 schools after that. But if you go west, you MUST get the California schools.
You cannot raid the ACC until 2036. Discussing ACC teams is just pointless.
You can certainly raid them. The buyout is $50 million. Easily covered by increased revenues from TV rights.
Grant of rights has nothing to do with the buyout. Sure, theoretically you could pay the $50m buyout and leave the conference before the next TV deal is up. But until 2036 every dollar you get from your new conference would be going to the ACC office and getting divided up to the leftover members. Nobody is going to do that.
Happening right on the heels of NIL control slipping away. Predictable, so plans made in the event were sprung into action. Most notably because SEC, which was better at enriching players under the table than anyone else (not that anyone else wasn't doing it), recognized that this levelled the playing field to a degree in terms of providing avenues of getting money to athletes to entice them to come to a specific program.
The SEC advantage in power and influence had therefore maximized and could only decline. So now is the time to strike, and form Division Zero football (or whatever you want to call it).
College football no longer as even cosmetically about amateur sports combined with education, but strictly as a marketing tool for schools using EMPLOYEES (players) who get compensated, medical coverage, and an apprenticeship in an expected career in professional sports, their academic skills be damned. Irrelevant, but at least up front and honest about it. Not significantly different than, say, some universities having a prominent residency program at a university hospital to train compensated physicians for their future outright profession.
Not many schools can support such a structure to legitimately provide a professional football apprenticeship, but we all generally can name them. Its formation is inevitable for better, for worse. Doesn't matter. It's coming. The SEC saw that, had contingency plans in place that were mutually beneficial to two of the programs on the short list that could support such a professional apprenticeship system (OU and UT), and figured that it would be better for their leaders to midwife Division Zero football than to wait for someone else to do it, as, once again, they have the most power and influence (and only decreasing pending the full ripple effect of NIL universality).
To this end, the more interesting question is NOT how the Big Ten should respond to create the scaffold of its own apprenticeship league, but to which structure the schools that could support a Division Zero system should subscribe: Big10 or SEC? Fortunately, Michigan remains one of the two bookends, so it has a real option here. Indeed, it comes as no surprise that Michigan and Ohio State have had at least SOME contact with the SEC over migration.
We as the fan base, however, have to get used to the loss of a lot of traditional rivalries. The days of pretzelling the divisions to accommodate small to midsize programs while maintaining traditionally "obligatory" matchups is gone gone gone. It's all up in the air.
Inevitable. Dictated by the need for growth. SEC making the power move now demonstrates it has gotten as much competitive advantage out of the old model that it can, so now its time to cash in its chips and take control of what comes next.
I dont understand how this is ever going to work. Like it or not the "blue bloods" of college football were built beating up on the majority of the rest of the conference for decades. Once you put a bunch of blue bloods in one conference there has to be a certain number of losses to go around. Schools that are used to winning every year will get frustrated and coaches will be fired left and right.
Look at Arkansas, not a blue blood but they've never won an SEC title in football in the nearly 30 years they've been there and they were pretty successful in the SWC.
Missouri was pretty good in the Big XII and their first few years in the SEC but since Pinkell retired and Florida and Georgia hired better coaches they're going to have a hell of a time making up ground they've lost.
It will work like the NFL.
Except likely with some sort of relegation mechanism eventually.
Remember, to the schools (administrators), it's not so much about the wins. It's about the money. They'll happily take being part of a league in which they cannot dominate (indeed a structure in which anyone dominates is bad for ratings and hence money) in return for one that grants them a nearly certain revenue stream in the tens of millions.
Reading a lot of fluff articles that OSU and UM are entertaining going to sec. I’m sure there’s no truth to it but has anyone seen anything?
Who knows what OSU is thinking, but the notion that Michigan would abandon the Big Ten for the SEC is beyond farcical. The people who believe it have zero understanding of the institution, its culture, its history, and its role as one of the founding members of the conference.
I mean even more basic than that, the Big 10 makes as much money as the SEC. They trade places on who is the highest paid conference based on which one has sign the most recent TV deal.
Again, nobody who stinks at football in the Big 10 stinks because they can't keep up with SEC revenues.
Seems like a lateral move, but should they both leave BIG crumbles imo. I would think they would really have to throw something at UM to make them jump. OSU would definitely go I would think. Just purely speculating from a football standpoint.
Michigan football makes a ton of money in any scenario. And the university overall would continue to be flush with cash if it didn't have a football team at all. That's what makes schools like M different. They're universities first. Football helps raise their profiles, etc. But they'd be totally fine without football. Perspective!
All of those universities would be fine without football. They just don't know it yet because who really wouldn't be fine with football is a certain type of alumnus with a certain type of competitive mentality.
The main difference is that some schools have a lot more of those alumni than others. Michigan has certainly more of those than Cal Tech or Johns Hopkins, but also certainly fewer than OSU and Clemson.
But because Michigan does have a lot of those alumni, too, it's not going to get rid of football no matter what happens.
The next 4 years of road trips are going to be...interesting for those two teams. Can't see them enduring that for 4 more years.
Dan Patrick has an interesting scoop (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNe-pgHh_hI).
Even though the BIG has a financial advantage, I don't see a scenario where the BIG selectively poaches from the PAC unless the BIG also has to shed / replace teams, in which case the BIG and PAC would dissolve and be replaced with a new league. For example, Wash. St. and Ore. St. were founding members of the PAC, so would be hard to just ask Oregon and Washington to abandon them while the BIG stays intact. It would have to be all or nothing in my view, which means 26 teams with Nebraska possibly moving to a western pod. As a backup, the PAC can always add the leftover B12 schools and Boise (for football) and Gonzaga (for basketball).
If the BIG/PAC merger doesn't happen, then the ACC could be in real trouble. The SEC's next logical step towards domination on the field is to add Clemson/FSU/Miami/VA Tech. To respond, the BIG adds UNC/UVA/Duke/GA Tech, and then the ACC basically ceases to exist (conveniently removing the GOR barrier).
Wildcard here is ND. They could be in a real trouble. I don't think they can exist independently if there are 2-3 superconferences pooling resources. If the BIG/PAC merger happens, probably will not be room for them and they will be begging the ACC. If the ACC gets picked apart by the SEC and BIG, they would then be begging to join the BIG or the SEC (unthinkable for them). They had better hope the status quo exists, but even so, I can already see negative recruiting centered around them being left out of a realignment.
Notre Dame is a national brand, and means a lot of money to any conference. Every conference would jump at the chance to associate with them. They are a take for everybody, the SEC included. The question is if they can maintain their independence in the future, but they’ll never be left without a seat at the table.
What are the odds OSU goes? You know, THEE OSU?