Football Conference Realignment

[carlspacklerrocks]

This article on the future of the sport is kinda long, but a pretty interesting read. The writer says he works in media and that TV is going to demand a lot of changes as it puts more money into college football including 4 16-team major conferences and an 8-team playoff. It also predicts that some current P5 schools will end up in G5 conferences and vice versa, based mostly on the size of the television markets they play in. It's a good offseason read and you can see the obvious implications of this if it's accurate.

http://www.thechaosindex.com/cest-l...-to-change-a-whole-lot-more-than-you-realize/

 

[NJFAN]

Long is an understatement .... If I read that lengthy article, I sincerely hope I am awarded a Master’s degree afterward. Lost me a paragraph #2.

 

[goodknight65]

The article is not only long, but horrendously biased in that it considers football as the only driving force for conference realignment. While football generates the most revenue, it also generates the most expenses, and most conferences take their basketball teams (and other sports to a much lesser degree) into consideration when making decisions on what schools they want to include. The author briefly mentions Saban's salary but overlooks the fact that Coach K is the highest paid coach in college sports, which should give you an indication of the relative importance basketball plays in the ACC. The ACC would never consider dumping Duke from their conference, even if they had the chance.

Further evidence is that Notre Dame, which does fine as an independent in football, chose to join the ACC for its other sports, and in the process had to agree to play 5 football games against ACC opponents.

The Big 12 is not quite as basketball driven as the ACC, but they surely won't be interested in dumping Kansas from the conference despite the market size of Lawrenceville. Likewise, I think that the Big Ten was probably more interested in Maryland as a basketball school than as a football school, and they invited Johns Hopkins to join the Big Ten in lacrosse.