Realignment appears to be done for now.
The people who run college sports’ Atlantic Coast Conference got the message. The conference quickly grew from 15 to 18 within 36 hours or so after a meeting that did not resolve the question of how to expand the college football playoffs. The group was waiting on the ACC. The message? You better get your conference’s business affairs in order in a hurry because you are delaying the chance to extract more money from television and marketing partners. Because you did not add a Texas school and two Pacific coast schools to your Atlantic coast circuit by our meeting, we cannot expand the number of schools involved in the college football championship tournament forcing a delay. The people who wanted to expand the tournament wanted some certainty as to the structure of the most powerful college conferences and were waiting for the ACC poohbahs, the presidents and chancellors, to decide whether they want to add the Texas school, Southern Methodist University, and two California schools, the University of California, Berkeley and Stanford University.
The realignment of college football and college sports seems to be done in the higher echelon of the industry. The Big Ten, the Big 12, the Southeastern Conference and the Atlantic Coast Conference emerge as winners while the Pac 12 Conference is going to be a footnote in the dustbin of college sports history. The realignment is all about money and getting more money out of TV partners and marketing partners and the corporate partners who buy the big-ticket items like luxury boxes and premium seating in stadiums. The money is enormous yet none of it trickles down to the people responsible for the show. The athletes. Some athletes are making big money from marketing deals but most athletes get a scholarship with strings attached. The ACC’s decision has cleared the way for playoff expansion.
Evan Weiner’s books are available at iTunes – https://books.apple.com/us/author/evan-weiner/id595575191
Evan can be reached at evan_weiner@hotmail.com
