Ranking 25 most desirable schools for expansion. Where is Ohio state?

With all of the recent conference expansion, many teams and conferences are still trying to figure out where it will all stop. Ohio State is in pretty good shape as the so-called flag bearer of one of the two healthiest conferences — the SEC and Big Ten.

However, aside from that, many athletic directors and suit-wearing administrators across the other Power Five conferences are trying to figure out how they can survive and be as sustainable as possible in the future. Much of that will no doubt boil down to what schools remain or are a part of each conference in the future.

With all of that in mind, Sports Illustrated set out to rank every Power Five school and what their desirability is when it comes to conference value. It used five measurements with the lower index scores winning out:

Football Rank
Academics
All Sports
Attendance
Viewership

Using those metrics, SI attributed a total score for desirability. You can take a look at all 69 Power Five rankings, but we’re focusing solely on the top 25 here, with Ohio State sitting in an extreme position of strength, at least according to the formula SI devised.

But first, let’s get the explanation of each measurement out of the way.

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Explaining the metrics used according to Sports Illustrated

Football ranking: This is a five-year average of the Sagarin ratings from 2017 to ’21, using only the current and future Power 5 schools. Sagarin’s numbers are by no means infallible, but they do rank everyone and have been in popular use for a long time, so they’ll serve the purpose here. The top school: Alabama, to the surprise of no one. The worst: Kansas, also the surprise of no one.

Academic ranking: This is simply the most recent U.S. News & World Report’s national universities rankings, released in 2021. University presidents like to talk about this metric. So do TV execs, when they’re trying to justify moving UCLA into the same league with…