Most of the reshuffling doesn’t actually take place until after the new BCS system is decreed, and can be reversed in the name of sane travel scheduling when that happens (who really thinks Boise and San Diego belong and will stay in the Big East? :D). Rumors and speculation in the meanwhile are no more than that.
I don’t have any insight into how things might shake out in Big 12 or ACC country, but there’s been a lot of talk out here in the West as to how conference re-alignment might bring up something fairly new. You’re certainly right that neither Boise nor SDSU has any sane reason to be in the Big East, and with the BCS changes, they may never play a single game there. But they aren’t joining the Pac 12 any time soon either, and the Pac 12 is the only legit football conference left on the west coast.
So the talk lately has been about the possibility of a new football-only conference being created that would span the entire western half of the country. Any WAC or MWC or Conference USA team that might want to join would be given a place to park their football without having to worry about the crazy travel costs involved of sending your women’s track and field team from Honolulu to Albuquerque on a Tuesday afternoon. And the other half of this re-alignment would put all the “Olympic sports” of these teams in more geographically sane smaller conferences like the Big West and the WCC - which sounds bad on the face of it for bigger programs like SDSU (who’s already scheduled to join the Big West), but in fact puts their Olympic sports programs in better conferences than the WAC or MWC while saving hundreds of thousands if not millions per year in travel costs.
Whatever happens, it should be waaaaay different than what we have now.
The problem with conference realignment right now is that conferences got weaker, but haven’t been dealt a mortal blow yet. What needs to happen is for the Big 12 and ACC/Big East to die. Then, the PAC 10, Big 10, and SEC pick up the valuable programs out of those two, and a new combined ACC/Big East make a 4th power conference.
While it’s far from even being a potential deal, let alone a done deal: it does look like I’ve got some crow to eat:
FSU Trustee Chairman Talks Big 12 Deal
Well. Damn. I hadn’t heard just quite how shitty a TV deal the ACC signed. The long term and the backloaded contract are just bad negotiating. Didn’t anyone learn anything from the SEC?
I still think the Big10 is the best fit we could find overall* and looking at it purely as a sports fan, the SEC is still the dream fit**. Still it’s really beginning to look like our ACC days may be numbered.
Yum. Crow. munch munch ACK! Feather!
- It helps us academcially, we give them a recruiting/tv entry into Florida and the South, and the money is just mind-boggling.
** And from everything I’ve read FSU and Notre Dame are the only Eastern schools up for potential grabs that could remotely pay their way in at this point without dilution.
Zakalwe, I really do not know what FSU brings to the table to the SEC. IMO, they won’t bring anymore eyes to SEC.
Yes, they have a SEC type football following and program, but so does Va Tech, and Va Tech IMO brings much more exposure to SEC than FSU does.
Big 10? Absolutely, you have a great deal to offer to the Big 10. I can see that as a match made in heaven. The Big 10 Network would love to get into Florida!
FSU consistently bring great national ratings to their televised games*. Something the SEC has struggled with. It’s also about the SEC’s tv contract which only allows renegotiation to account for the extra value of the added team, not a general renegotiation**. There aren’t many schools that would cause a network to add that much money to the SEC contract, but FSU would create some fantastic regional match-ups. Further it could be accomplished with virtually no increase in travel costs for SEC schools in any sport. There would obviously be a lot to overcome including some bad feelings on both sides about previous attempts, but absent a further move out west, I think FSU makes sense for the SEC if they try to go to 16 teams. Hell, at 16 teams they could get both FSU and Va Tech and really fuck the ACC.
- For example we have significant booster populations in So. Cal and Chicago. Given Tallahassee, not many grads stay local.
** There was a great article about this a few months ago. Markets only matter if you have your own network (the SEC doesn’t and won’t any time soon). It’s about ratings at that point and just adding Va Tech to the SEC wouldn’t necessarily have much of an impact on the ratings of other SEC games in the Virgina area.
[quote=“notfrommensa, post:25, topic:621305”]
Big 10? Absolutely, you have a great deal to offer to the Big 10. I can see that as a match made in heaven. The Big 10 Network would love to get into Florida!
[QUOTE]
I don’t think so. You really need to be an AAU member to get considered (Nebraska was when they applied and I suspect they got kicked out because of the move). Furthermore, who the hell wants to send their baseball and volleyball teams so far away for road games?
[quote=“BobLibDem, post:27, topic:621305”]
[quote=“notfrommensa, post:25, topic:621305”]
Big 10? Absolutely, you have a great deal to offer to the Big 10. I can see that as a match made in heaven. The Big 10 Network would love to get into Florida!
FSU “qualifies” for AAU membership currently (i.e., their academics and research programs are above the mean for members). AAU is what I was referring to above about Big10 helping our academics. RE the travel costs, many of those programs already play road trips that aren’t much cheaper than coming to Florida State and opening Florida to the Big10 network more than pays the cost.
Reports are out that the BigXII and SEC will pit their champs against each other in a New Year’s Day bowl if they’re not selected for the BCS title game. If a conference champ makes it to the BCS-CG, then the runner-up will play in the specified bowl. I like it. They could have a rotation between the Cotton Bowl and the Sugar Bowl each season. The plan would start with the 2013 season.
That will likely put more pressure on FSU to consider the jump to the Big 12. With Big 10/Pac 12 champion bowl tie-in and now the SEC/Big 12 champions bowl, the irrelevancy of the ACC and the Big East grows even larger.
[This is a bit OT, but where else am I going to ask?] So, if the trend holds up, the SEC#1 will be in the NCG, the SEC#2 will be in this new bowl game. So the Sugar Bowl is now reduced to the #3 bowl for SEC teams? Or was this year just the first of many that there’s no SEC team in the Sugar Bowl?
Also, maybe I’m not thinking it through enough, but what’s the strategy here? I’m not saying it’s a bad move, but I don’t see the long term strategy. Having the winner of this game play the Rose Bowl winner and declaring that the champion?
I guess there’s some sort of “if x happens then this will achieve y, otherwise, if x falls through then this achieves z” logic, but I’m not seeing the whole picture. It’s like watching a chess game where somebody moves their queen across the board to take a rook, realizing that it’s a beneficial move, but not understanding the strategy behind it.