![]() ![]() That’s the ultimate endgame of realignment, and why it’s not actually realignment. It’s about brands now, because brands can be sold to anyone. They’ll want your kids to latch on to USC or Texas or Alabama, much like the Golden State Warriors or the Kansas City Chiefs have fans all over the world. When college football reaches the inevitable end of this road with 30 to 40 teams left at the highest level, the powers that be won’t want you to hand down your Washington State fandom to your children. You hope they still watch and wait for the next generation to grow up. How do you explain this move to Washington State fans? Or Oregon State fans? Or Iowa State fans? Or Kansas State fans? You can’t. This move is not only about this generation of fans, even though the immediate television money will be enormous. ![]() So it’s not hard now to imagine younger generations growing up with just two major conferences. Change in college football has been constant. My generation grew up with Big East football. What are the long-term effects? Some generations grew up with the Southwest Conference. That’s all in the short term, but let’s step back for a broader look. Ultimately, it’s two television organizations going all-in on the most valuable thing left on TV - live football - and leaving all kinds of change in the wake. Competition is needed to drive up the price, after all. It may feel like we’re heading toward an ESPN conference and a Fox conference, though Big Ten commissioner Kevin Warren has been a proponent of having multiple media partners. Even without the money, the other conferences are going to be squeezed out of the main TV windows on the biggest channels. ESPN will have the SEC in everything but the 10 p.m. We’re going to get Big Ten games from noon ET Saturday until Sunday morning. ![]() (And, yes, now it’s why we’ll get Texas-Texas A&M back.) It’s why we’ll lose so many more rivalries. It’s why we lost the Border War between Kansas and Missouri. It’s why we lost the Backyard Brawl between Pitt and West Virginia. They have to tell the league or someone (the TV value of schools).” … They just don’t want the optics of them deciding, but the money is coming from them. “They really don’t like to be known as deciding who is in what league, but don’t think there aren’t conversations of, ‘If we take this property, how much value are they going to bring?’ We’re not picking random schools. “I think they are quietly behind the scenes,” one FBS athletic director told The Athletic. That’s why this is all happening.Įven if ESPN and Fox don’t directly say “Add this team,” they make it clear who they’ll pay more money for and who they won’t. The Big Ten and SEC had already been projected to perhaps double the other Power 5 conferences in TV revenue by the end of the decade. Fox owns 61 percent of the Big Ten Network and reportedly locked up half of the Big Ten’s next media rights deal and is sitting in on the league’s conversations with other potential media rights partners. (ESPN denied the claim.)ĮSPN will soon have all of the SEC’s media rights. Last year, Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby alleged ESPN (his conference’s own media partner) was working to destabilize the Big 12 by nudging teams to the SEC and AAC and released a cease-and-desist. In 2011, then- Boston College athletic director Gene DeFilippo said ESPN told the ACC what to do in realignment, before later walking it back and issuing an apology, saying it was a misunderstanding. It’s like any other business now.ĮSPN and Fox will never say they had a hand in these moves, but you’d have to be oblivious not to see the role they play. ![]() It was, rather, slowly taking away everything that gave this sport its charm and moving toward a national corporate model, changes fueled primarily by money, especially television dollars. It was never going to be NIL and a handful of million-dollar deals for players that turned off fans. Don’t let it be lost that this is coming from “non-profit” organizations, either. Concern about the uncertainty in college athletics? Who do you think caused all that? Look in the mirror. Many did so while chasing any extra dollar they could find, even when that meant ending century-old rivalries and conference affiliations. College administrators spent a year-plus telling the public that they worried name, image and likeness would ruin the purity of college football and turn off fans. ![]()
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