(04-14-2020 01:32 PM)Fighting Muskie Wrote: Bullet is spot on. Had realignment among the P5 occurred more rapidly and the process not been so drawn out the most recent wave of expansion might not have occurred.
In the WAC, Idaho and NMSU would have been the only two left and unable to rebuild.
The MAC would have seen no need to accommodate UMass’s transition.
With C-USA getting cut down to 5 schools: UTEP, Rice, USM, UAB, and Marshall you’re probably just looking at a merger with the SBC.
If a moratorium had been in place while the 2010-2013 alignment occurred, there’d be almost a dozen schools still in FCS.
The reason P5 realignment hasn't moved faster is because there are 3 obstructionists to the process: Texas, Notre Dame, and North Carolina and if you could add a 4th it would be Stanford. Of the four I understand N.D.'s position and Stanford's, I suppose I understand the other two as well.
Notre Dame wants to keep independence. Therefore it prefers to lend its weight to hopefully keep a weaker conference that can provide them bowl slots from getting raided to death. The Big East worked for a bit and now it's the ACC.
Stanford's motives are academic in nature and they prevented the Texa-homa deal in part due to academic snobbery. And while willing to take Texas they weren't as accommodating to their friends. Otherwise the Big 12 would be kaput and a P4 would have already ended the discussion about how many at large bids in a playoff which here to fore has failed to produce more than 3 worthy teams on any given year. So why in the hell would we want to add more?
North Carolina and Texas both want to keep fiefdoms together. With 4 North Carolina schools in the 14 team ACC field and with Virginia voting with them most of the time they that core of 5 dominates the rest not so much by what they can decide but by what they can stop.
In Texas's case they just want as much of a Texas centered conference as they can keep. So what were in the two weakest conferences (Big 12 in footprint and ACC in competitiveness) in 2010 have now seen Texas keep a lock on 3rd of the P5 while the PAC and ACC claw to stay out of the cellar.
So we have a stalemate where a conference that doesn't dominate either of the regions it is in (Northeast and Southeast) and produces low revenue is propped up by Notre Dame and a conference too small to remain viable is actually doing well with 2 top 7 revenue producers anchoring their lineup. Meanwhile Stanford's move in self interest in 2010 against the Texa-homa deal has essentially left them with nobody to expand with and in a static position near the bottom of media revenue due to lack of content and lack of West Coast interest and no East Coast exposure.
If either the ACC or Big 12 had been picked apart it would be over.
That's why the next round will be so interesting. It's the last shot at big money for some in Big 12 not named Texas and the last shot for the football first schools of the ACC. I feel that the disparity in revenue is going to cause something to go "pop".
We'll see where things stand when we do finally have a P4 and then the proliferation of FCS schools moving up won't matter because we'll likely have the formation of an upper tier.