Realignment realities

What's really going on with this recent shake-up of the college football world and what's next?

It can be tough to get a good bead on what’s going on in realignment. It’s all very political, with schools misleading or lying about their situations until they officially change. Meanwhile the media who’s covering it all are the same institutions guiding the change. FOX sports and ESPN call the shots by telling these conferences and universities what the TV money will look like in different scenarios and then those schools act accordingly.

Talk about conflict of interest.

So when FOX sports or ESPN commentators tell you how good or awful different aspects of realignment are, you have to understand how completely compromised they are.

College football has been guided by pursuit of TV money for a long time now. The Big 12 was formed when the Big 8 needed the growing Texas markets to stay competitive because of the limited demographics in their flyover locales. I describe it in my book:

Recent headlines concern the fallout of USC and UCLA abandoning the PAC-12 and subsequent reports of the Big 12 reaching out to absorb what’s left of the westernmost Power-5 conference.

The Big 12 has really been at the heart of expansion and changes for much of college football’s big, television-guided transitions. The reasons are basically geopolitical in nature…