(01-12-2022 11:11 AM)Fighting Muskie Wrote: There’s not a whole lot of love between the SEC and the other P5 conferences:
The Big 10 have long considered them their biggest rival and they’ve been at philosophical loggerheads on just about every issue.
The SEC’s models are a direct threat to the Pac 12’s access to the Rose Bowl, an institution they built. The Pac 12 will follow the Big 10’s lead.
The SEC took 4 of the Big 12’s best teams. If that’s not reason enough to oppose them, I’m not sure what would.
That leaves the ACC. I don’t think they like playing 2nd fiddle in the South and the academic wing on the conference is inclined to want to associate with the Big 10 and Pac 12.
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The potential saboteur is ND. They want an SEC style playoff that affords lots of at large spots. An alliance of 4 could leave them without a post season ally, unless they are incorporated into the ACC.
Eh - I really don't think that's the case. I've pointed out before that the Big Ten and SEC are actually the leagues that are the most similar to each other, which then causes them to overexaggerate their differences on a handful of items.
Ultimately, I honestly think it's (for better or worse) more fundamentally elitist than that. Whatever the Big Ten might want to say about the SEC or Notre Dame, those entities are revenue generators as opposed to revenue takers. They might have philosophical differences, but those parties and the other P5 conferences know that they all need each other in order to maximize revenue. Jim Delany probably did more to block playoff expansion over the course of 25 years than any single other person, but when it came to finalizing the current CFP system, he sat down with Mike Slive and got it done because the interests of the Big Ten and SEC were (and still are) much more aligned with each other than not.
It's the "revenue takers" that the Big Ten will always have much more of an issue with here. The Big Ten honestly doesn't care if the SEC gets 6 at-large bids per year. That's why no matter what fans on these message boards want to say, there hasn't been a single instance where the actual people in the room have suggested a cap on the number of at-large bids that a league can receive. Instead, the Big Ten is just pushing back on the notion that a "revenue taker" could *ever* take the spot of a revenue generator (however unlikely it might be in a given year).
Everyone that keeps talking about on-the-field "fairness" isn't getting the point where the bigger issue is off-the-field financial "fairness" - and note that "fairness" in that context is NOT equality, but rather ensuring that the most valuable entities are the ones that are receiving the lion's share of revenue.
Let's use a Hollywood comparison. Mark Hamill appeared in Star Wars: The Force Awakens for about 30 seconds and didn't even speak... and reportedly received as much as $3 million. Daisy Ridley had the lead role and made 10 times *less* than Hamill despite doing 100 times more work.
Is that "fair" with respect to the efforts in contributions to that particular movie? Probably not.
However, does the multi-billion franchise of Star Wars exist in the first place without Mark Hamill? Absolutely not.
Essentially, the P5 conferences are what Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford and the late Carrie Fischer were to the latest Star Wars Trilogy. Even if they had a fraction of the scenes of most of the characters in those movies, they were compensated way more because the Star Wars ecosystem wouldn't have existed without them in the first place.
The billions of dollars that an expanded CFP would generate do NOT exist without the P5 and ND - it's those particular entities that are bringing virtually the entire value of the system. A P5/ND-only playoff would effectively make the same as an all-FBS playoff system, whereas a G5-only playoff would be worthless. As a result, it's not a surprise that they would want access and money to reflect that disparity of value.