(04-21-2013 11:05 AM)ark30inf Wrote: So many people say this and its not true. Realignment is not an endless conveyor belt. The SEC, Big 10, Big 12, Pac 12 are not going to keep adding until they get to a 100. The number of possible slots are VERY limited.
The slots in every FBS conference are going to be completely full up at some point and the conveyor belt will lock up and movement will stop.
Some school who dreams of the SEC is going to be left just outside the door....pretty much forever. Some FCS school who dreams of an FBS move-up will be left outside the door....possibly for a generation.
You have a limited number of FBS conferences with a limited number of slots each. You might have some minimal jockeying around at the lower levels like you did when Temple got kicked. But they will be extraordinary cases.
I don't see any of the majors dissolving in the future. I think it is highly unlikely that any of the majors drop teams in the future no matter how much regret they might have. Wake Forest, Vandy, Miss State, Indiana, Oregon State, and Baylor are most likely not going anywhere. Once those slots at the upper levels are filled they tend to stick for a very long time.
Even if mighty FIU starts selling out every game, builds a state of the art stadium that rivals everything in FBS, wins National Championships, and gets on tv every week and rakes in the money they will not move because there will be no slots available to move to without kicking a Vandy or Indiana out. Won't happen.
The bottom line is that you will find yourself in a conference at some point that will probably be your home for a long time. The "pecking order" won't mean nearly as much. At that point it will be time to stop wishing, hoping, begging, and griping and focus on unity and a long-term strategy for moving up the conference rankings instead.
In the words of The Eagles "There is no more new frontier, we have got to make it here."
We MIGHT be at that point right now and just don't know it. I won't be surprised if there are a few more moves and I won't be surprised if there aren't any at all.
I wouldn't be so sure. Historically speaking, conferences over 12 generally change at some point. 14- and 16-team conferences are just too unstable. There are too many voices and mouths to feed.
The WAC was fairly geographically compact when it was at 16. Instead of losing schools, half broke off into the Mountain West. The Big East went to 18 schools. The C7 broke off into a new conference.
There used to be a relatively strong three-way rivalry between Nebraska, Kansas and Missouri. Now all three are in a different conferences.
The only BCS conference I see staying stable is the Pac-#. There are quality teams in the current footprint, which is relatively (by western standards) compact. Meanwhile, Missouri is in the conference titled Southeast (and in the eastern division no , West Virginia is in the midwest, Maryland and Rutgers are in the Rust Belt. The ACC is no longer Atlantic focused (Indiana?) and runs from the northeast to southeast with teams in the midwest. There's talk of teams from Florida and the Carolinas going to either the Big 12 and/or Big 10.
At some point there will be a saturation point. At some point, schools like Missouri, West Virginia, Boston College will realize they may get a bit more money, but are spending a bunch and have no rivalries (which is the lifeblood of college athletics) and the product is withering.
It may be gradual, it may be a flashpoint (Ark State, La Tech and Lamar all left the SLC in part because UTA dropped their football program) or it may be like the C7 where a group of schools in one conference decide they aren't getting what they need. Point is, we are entering a mass amount of realignment that has historically proven to be unstable. Defending the whole process's as eventually ending stable might be a little silly.