(03-31-2013 10:45 AM)CPslograd Wrote: It's theoretically possible in the future that the SunBelt becomes the everybody else FBS league. In that case I could see Davis and or Poly in the Belt for football only. But again, this is years and years away.
This is why I was looking at the question in terms of follow-on impacts of shocks that have already hit and might hit in the near term future.
When I reckon the west is going to be pretty stable in terms of the
survival of the conferences, that is for the medium term future, and can be mostly traced back, either more or less directly, to the Big12 GOR and the collapse of the "Big East of Reno" experiment, which saw the MWC kind of "accidentally" go to 12 with a CCG and quite reasonable divisions, leaving no obvious change at the top.
Then with the New Big East only raiding one team west of the Mississippi, from the MVC, and no obvious further raids likely, and the FBS Mid-Major activity following the Old Big East collapse focused in Texas and east of the Mississippi, the Mountain West and Pacific Coast is relatively sheltered.
Stuff rolls downhill in conference realignment, so if another conference goes out of existence, as the unworkable 5-team trans-American Great West is finishing the process of doing, I'd expect it to be in the lower ranks, and somewhere in the Plains through to the Eastern US.
All of that is speculative, of course, but its speculation that has some structure to it based on the current alignment and current status rankings of conferences. As far as a decade from now when the Big12 GoR is getting close enough to its expiration for a Big Conference to consider wearing the impaired rights for a few years if a school meets a need ... too much depends on the speculation about what happens in the intervening decade to lend any structure to the speculation.
Really, just specify some assumption, and you can play all sorts of bizarre speculative games. I could speculate that runaway global warming and the collapse of cable in favor of online streaming has meant that all conferences have restructured to footprints that can be covered in an electric bus or electric train trip, so the "big" conferences are connected by electric overnight sleeper train routes. Then I spend a long detour to guess where those train routes are, and then sketch out the four Majors of 2025 after travel costs and collapsing media revenues forced the SEC to split.
Flip it around and go all Jetsons, with every school having automated driverless buses going 150mph on an upgraded driverless car interstates, and the possibilities of "a bus conference/division" switch around.
And that's just assumptions that transport and media changes compared to today. Regulatory changes in football from concussions, changes in federal funding of education, ... the list could go on.
Guessing 2025 could be fun, but it would just be a widely ranging set of Science Fiction stories that all just happen to be talking about conference alignment and set a decade ahead.
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Which conferences will Not survive current realignment?
