Realignment Madness! Utah, ASU, and Arizona to the Big XII

What a week it's been, Cougar fans! Last Thursday, Colorado formally announced its intention to leave the Pac-12 and join the Big 12 for the 2024 season (see my breakdown of that move if you haven't already). Since that announcement, speculation about the fates of the Pac-12's remaining nine programs has been rampant. In the last 48 hours, things have really gotten crazy. While reports had circulated for several days that Arizona's departure from the Pac-12 was basically a done deal and that Oregon, Washington, Arizona State, and Utah might not be far behind, all of that was nearly put to bed when rumors began to surface that the nine Pac-12 schools had agreed to stay together under some form of the AppleTV media deal presented by Pac-12 commissioner George Kliavkoff earlier in the week.

But then, out of the blue, the news broke like a thunderclap across college football: the Big 10 had decided to formally invite Washington and Oregon. Just like that, any hope the Pac-12 had of staying together was effectively dead. The only thing left to determine was what would happen to the other seven teams in the conference. And frankly, by that point, the answer was a foregone conclusion.

A lot of BYU fans (myself included) had held out hope that Utah might somehow be left out of this arrangement, but at the end of the day, the Utes are a valuable brand and have a great football program, so Brett Yormark's logic favored the Big 12's interests over our petty vindictiveness. Oh well.

So what does this mean going forward? Well, first and foremost for BYU fans, the Holy War is back—like, really back, on an institutional level. For the first time since leaving the Mountain West Conference after the 2010 season, BYU and Utah will play a regular annual game on Thanksgiving weekend. While the schadenfreude of seeing Utah left out in the cold would have been rich, bringing back the Utah game with conference implications is a refreshing change. It also produced a couple of the best Twitter moments of the day, as BYU's official athletics department account enjoyed the moment and Utah Governor Spencer Cox threw shade at some of the Pac-12's...erm...more dedicated defenders in the media.

But moving beyond BYU for a moment, let's talk about how these latest realignment moves will impact the college football landscape at large.

It's important to be clear-headed about where the Big 12 stands. You'll get very little argument from most in the sports world about one of the Big 12's two main revenue-generating sports—when it comes to men's basketball, the Big 12 is the best conference in the nation. It's not even particularly close. In fact, the pre-realignment Big 12 was arguably already the best basketball conference before adding perennial powerhouses Houston and Arizona. The addition of those two teams leaves no doubt whatsoever—when it comes to basketball, it's the Big 12's world and every other conference is just living in it. For BYU, that presents a rather intimidating prospect—the Cougars have struggled in basketball for the last couple of seasons (though three straight wins against Utah have certainly been welcome), and they'll now be transitioning from the WCC, where they've had the luxury of home-and-homes against tomato cans like Portland and San Diego, to the Big 12, where every game will be at least as tough as St. Mary's and the Cougars will potentially have to face five or six teams at or near Gonzaga's normal level. It will be tough sledding for a few years, but should set the program trending in the right direction.

But now, of course, we have to talk about the other main revenue-generating sport: football. Since the implementation of the four-team College Football Playoff in 2014, a total of 36 teams have participated in it. Even if you only include pre-realignment membership, the SEC and Big 10 have combined for 19 of those 36 appearances—over half. Now, with the SEC adding Oklahoma and Texas and the Big 10 adding USC, UCLA, Oregon, and Washington, the "new" SEC and Big 10 are responsible for 25 of the 36 possible CFP appearances—in other words, over 2/3 of all CFP teams have come from the realigned SEC and Big 10. The ACC has seven appearances, the realigned Big 12 has two, and independent Notre Dame has two. It's clear, then, that the landscape of college football will be increasingly dominated by the SEC and Big 10. Which begs the question—who's next? Is there a definitive third-best conference in college football?

Well, the CFP numbers would suggest that it's the ACC. However, those numbers don't tell the whole story. Six of the conference's seven CFP appearances have been by one team: Clemson. Florida State, the conference's other marquee program, has one appearance. The ACC is a stunningly top-heavy conference, a fact which hurts it big time in terms of national prominence. And there's another thing hurting it—a really, really, really bad TV deal. The conference has a contract with ESPN through 2036 (not a typo) which only pays $23.3 million per school per year. Contrast that with the Big 10 and SEC, whose latest deals pay $67 million and $51 million per school per year, respectively. Even the Big 12's new TV deal pays about $31 million per school per year. Next to those numbers, the ACC just can't compete financially. And you know what that means...more realignment!

Yes, the ACC seems to be the next conference on the chopping block. With a terrible media rights deal locked in until the heat death of the universe, the ACC has virtually no prospect of achieving financial parity with the other remaining P4 conferences any time soon, and its biggest programs are already looking elsewhere as a result. While there have been various proposals for unequal revenue sharing that would benefit the conference's top programs, a deal like that would be manifestly difficult to pull off. That probably means that it will make financial sense for Clemson and Florida State to eat the buyout cost and abandon ship. And if they do, it will be open season on the rest of the league.

So where does the ACC's impending doom leave the Big 12? Well, solidly in third place, for starters. With the ACC out of the way, the Power 5 has become the Power 3, or maybe the Power 2.5. But even being a "lesser" power conference is better than nothing, and the Big 12 will presumably have the opportunity to add some cachet by absorbing some of the ACC's leftovers when that conference's demise finally comes. Adding Pitt and making the the Backyard Brawl with West Virginia a conference game would be delightful, for example. We're rapidly heading towards an arrangement with three super-conferences of about 20 teams apiece, and the Big 12 will be a part of that arrangement.

That doesn't necessarily secure the future forever. There is a dark but all-too-believable timeline in which college football eventually goes to a full Power 2 setup where any really competitive national powerhouses are absorbed into monstrous versions of the SEC and Big 10, leaving the rest of the former P5 out to dry. But the Big 12 can't afford to worry about that right now. Making hay while the sun shines is an important principle, and right now, thanks to Brett Yormark's aggressive and prescient leadership, the Big 12 is in a position to make some serious hay. Enjoy it, Cougar fans.