Well, my 3 yr old daughter and I did it—we broke college football.

If you’ve been following this thread you know that I’ve been trying to simulate realignment with 1989 as my starting point. I’ve tried to work out the probabilities of various scenarios and I let my daughter roll 10 six sided dice to determine the outcome.

In this scenario, the Big Ten and SEC have been at 12 members since 1991 and the Big 12 and ACC have been as well since 1996. The 2010 expansion resulted in the PAC 10 joining that number and for fans symmetry, the 2011 season had 5 12-member conferences.

In the real 2011, TAMU and Texas were having a tiff that led to TAMU joining the SEC—(the SEC was also incentivized in the contract to add 2 markets) so I felt obliged to simulate another potential realignment for 2011.

I set the probability for TAMU to the SEC at 20% (or a roll of 40 or higher). After all, bizzaro world Big 12 still has Nebraska so I thought the chances would be low. My daughter rolled a 39 and the expansion moved by 1.

In each round, I’ve given Notre Dame 5% odds at joining the Big Ten. For 2010, this failed by 1. Interpreting that close call as mutual interest, I bumped the 2011 odds up to 8% (a roll of 43 or higher). My daughter rolled a 48. Notre Dame became the 13th member of the Big Ten.

To give you an idea of how darn near impossible that dice roll is, rolling a 48 or higher has a probability of 0.937%. She made a freak 99-1 roll and no I have to figure out probabilities for candidates for the 14th member, not to mention how the other Power conferences react.

Needless to say, I’ve got some thinking to do before finishing this wretched exercise.