Another earthquake to reorganize conference leaves college football swing – The Denver Post

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The Southeast Conference is getting bigger and stronger in a way.

Three other major conferences formed an alliance, whatever that means.

The Big 12 is a walking dead man.

After a period of relative stability, college football is heading into a new season reeling from the aftershocks of another major earthquake.

Not even Nostradamus would be willing to venture a guess as to how the whole thing would change.

But it’s very clear: The SEC will become a 16-team behemoth with the addition of 12 major strong teams Oklahoma and Texas, a move that will happen by 2025 at the latest and possibly sooner.

The Big Ten, the Atlantic Coast Conference and the Pac-12 have all backed away from the defense, hoping that some kind of shadowy partnership would prevent the SEC from spreading its tentacles any further.

Which makes the Big 12 the odd guy, who seems destined to join the Southwest Conference and others in the defunct league group, remembered only by those who pick up a history book.

The SEC’s motives are clear: to strengthen its stranglehold on college football — and by extension, all college athletics.

But the hastily assembled partnership announced this week between its three most viable competitors in the Power Five (plus Notre Dame, a quasi-member of the ACC) must come up with a clearly defined vision if it is to keep the SEC in check. .

This is not an easy task.

Consider the difficulty of the Big Ten-ACC-Pac 12 – 41 alliance of schools stretching from Boston to Los Angeles, and from Miami to Seattle, a group of institutions that have little in common other than making sure the SEC doesn’t block everyone’s rays.

Given how quickly all of this has to come together, it’s perhaps not surprising that so few details have been provided.

“There is no contract. There is no signed document,” said George Klyavkov, commissioner of PAC 12. “There is an agreement between three gentlemen and a commitment of 41 presidents and advisers and 41 sporting directors to do what we say we are going to do.”

Well, we all know how valuable gentlemen’s agreements and non-contractual obligations are in the world of college athletics.

Frankly, we’d bet a thousand bills for your dollar that all 41 schools would continue to focus primarily on what benefits them individually, not the collective good.

Heck, they couldn’t even agree on what position they would take on a proposal to expand the College Football Playoff from four to 12 teams (a move that seemed certain to happen until everyone hit the reset button after the SEC. Oklahoma and Texas devoured like some kind of game Pac-Man.).

This is not a voting block. “We have not committed ourselves to voting together on anything,” Klyavkov said, and every word makes this seem less and less like a viable alliance. “We’ve committed to discussing all of these issues, and trying to come up with solutions that are in the long-term interest of college athletes.”

Okay.

At the moment, the alliance’s only real goal seemed to be some kind of precarious commitment not to go after each other’s members.

But suppose the SEC comes sniffing about Clemson – a powerful ACC that has been one of its few serious competitors? Or perhaps Florida, if the Seminoles could once again become relevant in college football?

As we know, the SEC usually gets what it wants.

Conference has been largely the sun that the rest of college football has revolved around since its first major expansion three decades ago, which blew up the familiar convention model that has governed the sport through its modern existence.

When the SEC poached Arkansas out of the Southwest Conference (as part of an expansion that also included the then-independent state of South Carolina), split in two and replayed the conference’s championship game, it changed the look of the sport forever.

The Southwest Conference collapsed, the Big Eight swooped to pick up the remnants (to become the Big 12), the ACC grabbed Florida, and the Big Ten began scrambling for schools to join the eleventh member, Pennsylvania.

The SEC made its next big move in 2011, bypassing Texas A&M and Missouri from the Big 12. The Big Ten and ACC were busy expanding too, becoming a 14-team league, while the Pac-10 grew to the Pac 12.

The 12 big schools were reduced to 10 but managed to survive by keeping Texas and Oklahoma in the fold.

But this was always a poor arrangement at best, and it finally felt like a far cry from word this summer that both the Longhorns and Sooners were secretly in talks to join the SEC — pulling the trigger in a lucrative move that has been largely on the radar since the start of the re-run. This organization lasted 30 years.

Now, there is no hope for the Big 12 – especially after it was not included in the new alliance arranged by the other members of the Power Five.

All he got were hollow words.

“We want and need the Big 12 to do a good job,” said ACC Commissioner Jim Phillips. “The Big Twelve are important in college athletics.”

Not for much longer.

Iowa and Kansas could end up in the Big Ten. Oklahoma State and TCU are potential candidates for Pac-12 (although the university insisted Thursday that it had no plans to expand). West Virginia geographically fits into the ACC. Texas Tech, Baylor and Kansas may have to join a G5 conference like the American Conference or Mountain West.

If nothing else, let’s hope a viable competitor appears before the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The conference has ruled college football for far too long, taking 11 of the last 15 national championships and showing no signs of slowing down, certainly not as long as Nick Saban has been in Alabama.

When Oklahoma — which ranks second to Crimson Tide in a pre-season AP poll — and Texas come on board, the balance of power will tilt even more in their favour.

This is great for the Securities and Exchange Commission.

It’s not good for college football.

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Paul Newberry is a sports columnist for the Associated Press. Write to him at pnewberry (at) ap.org or at https://twitter.com/pnewberry1963 and check out his work at https://apnews.com/search/paulnewberry

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More AP college football: https://apnews.com/Collegefootball and https://twitter.com/AP_Top25

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