The shock and awe portion of realignment appears to have hit a pause. We’ve transitioned from the searing range of emotions in the immediate aftermath of USC and UCLA hopscotching to the Big Ten to the cold calculations of the next steps that will shape the future of college sports.
Talk of poaching, mergers and arrangements — notice an aversion to using the word “alliance” after the ACC/Big Ten/Pac-12 pairing quickly became a punchline — is quickly followed by chatter about consultants, projections, revenue share and per school payouts. Want to know where your school is going next? Follow the money.
“Everyone is an accounting major right now,” joked an industry source.
As the media consultants and CFOs crunch their numbers in preparation for the next flurry of moves — or perhaps the data drives folks to stay put? — let’s take account of what’s looming in the near future and the factors shaping the next wave of realignment.
Can a bicoastal ACC/Pac-12 arrangement really work?
There’s been a thesaurus leafed through on conference calls to find the best non-alliance wording to describe a potential long-distance arranged marriage between the ACC and Pac-12. Partnership? Loose scheduling consortium? Bicoastal arrangement?
They likely won’t have to pick one that works, as sources indicated on Thursday that there’s little chance of this happening in the form it is being discussed.
In what’s being discussed, the leagues would keep their form. And they would be bonded together through the power of large quantities of television inventory and the occasional sexy cross-country football matchup between, say, Miami and Oregon. (Sorry, Mario Cristobal.)
How creative can the leagues get? One idea being discussed, per sources, is a four-day in-season basketball tournament between the leagues as a way to drive up value. Perhaps there’s some football scheduling creativity? It sounds fun, but not all that lucrative.
The real play here is geography and quantity, as ESPN already owns all of the ACC rights through 2036 and would benefit from a presence on the West Coast, in particular for Saturday night football inventory.
But no one should hail this potential partnership as some sort of financial haymaker, especially for the high-end ACC schools worried about falling way behind the SEC and Big Ten. It’s novel, but unlikely to be a game-changer.
One of the appeals to the Big Ten going into Southern California was turning millions of television homes into…
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