![]() But instead of keeping the West Coast schools together, they’d be spread around the league. From a football standpoint, the 20-team league could have four five-team pods. Plus, in this case, six could be better than four for reasons I’ll explain shortly. (Former Big Ten member University of Chicago is no longer a member of the consortium but remains a collaborator.) That group couldn’t possibly pass up a chance to ask Cal and Stanford to join. But then I also thought about the Big Ten Academic Alliance, the academic consortium of Big Ten schools. USC, Oregon and Washington are the best football programs, and UCLA is a national brand situated in America’s second-largest city. ![]() These are all AAU members, so they would get the academic stamp of approval from the other Big Ten presidents. Originally, I was going to suggest the Big Ten take USC, UCLA, Oregon and Washington. But now that the SEC appears ready to chomp down on the Big 12, it’s time to pitch the Big Ten on an opportunity to make sure that the Power 5 shrinks to a Power 2 instead of a Power 1. That might have created a league attractive enough to convince Oklahoma and Texas to stay. One of my reasons was that it would allow the Big 12 to win in an eat-or-be-eaten situation. ![]() I realize that I’m the one who wrote last year that the Big 12 needed to take half the Pac-12. The best move for the Big Ten - and for the idea of college football as a national proposition - is for the Big Ten to take half the Pac-12. The Big Ten and Pac-12 have been partners in the Rose Bowl for decades, but now is time for drastic action. It also wouldn’t be much stronger than the current Big Ten lineup and might cost individual Big Ten members money in the long run because even though Iowa State has been excellent recently, it isn’t a brand that stirs the blood nationally.īut to do it, he’d have to be ruthless to an old friend of his league. The league would get to 16, matching the number of programs in the new SEC. Iowa State is already in the Big Ten footprint, and Kansas shares a 300-plus mile border with a Big Ten state (Nebraska). Both Big 12 members belong to the academically prestigious Association of American Universities. If Warren is the type of person who thinks this process has rules, then he might be weighing whether to consider adding Kansas and Iowa State. 4 loses its two most valuable members this week, is being thrust into a position that would make even a veteran conference commissioner tremble. Kliavkoff, as the leader of the Power 5 conference that is No. Warren, as the leader of the only league that can still compete with the new SEC on the balance sheet, has a major opportunity if he wishes. If the SEC doesn’t want to stop at 16 members, the Super League could go from something we half-joked about when a bunch of professional soccer clubs tried to create one to a very real possibility. Just when I thought my first month on the job could not get more interesting…īoth commissioners now face uncharted territory as Oklahoma and Texas prepare to begin a series of moves that should land them in the SEC. Pac-12 commissioner George Kliavkoff came to the Pac-12 from MGM Resorts this month, and his limited sample size so far only tells us that he definitely brought his sense of humor with him. Big Ten commissioner Kevin Warren came from the NFL last year to replace Jim Delany, who had turned the conference into the nation’s wealthiest. We’re about to find out where the new guys fit into these groups. The second group usually wins, and the first group usually seems surprised when it loses. This round of realignment - just like all the rest - will be a competition between the people who believe there are rules to this sort of thing and the people who are limited only by the boundaries of their imaginations.
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