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Get ready to rumble!

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This will be the last year of the Pacific Athletic Conference as all but two of their teams have signed new contracts with other conferences starting in 2024.  Colorado put the Big 12 on notice with a stunning upset of TCU in Fort Worth.  The Buffaloes hired Deion Sanders last year and he used the transfer portal to rebuild this team from top to bottom, bringing in his son at QB.  Shedeur Sanders passed for over 500 yards, picking the porous TCU defense apart.  Colorado will join the Big 12 next year.

With the transfer portal, it is a whole new ball game which is why I thought it was funny hearing Lee Corso speaking out against Sanders' approach.  He thought Sanders should have retained more players but the Buffaloes went 1-11 last year so there was little reason for Sanders to hold onto anyone from that team. 

With all these realignments due to take place next year, it is hard to call these conferences anything other than B1G, which the Big 10 now calls itself after luring USC, UCLA, Washington and Oregon away from the PAC(1)2.  It will now have 18 teams broken up into two divisions.  Gone is any sense of Midwest identity.

The same could be said of the Atlantic Coast Conference which will absorb Cal and Stanford along with SMU, which is fleeing the American Athletic Conference.  This will make for some very interesting road trips as teams will have to traverse the entire continent. 

The Big 12 took major hits last year in losing Oklahoma and Texas to the SEC, although not scheduled to start until 2024.  The Big 12 had already lost Nebraska to the B1G in 2011 and Texas A&M and Missouri to the SEC in 2012.  These were all big names and the conference has really suffered for it, but in a last ditch effort to retain its relevance it looted the PAC of four teams: Arizona, Arizona St, Colorado and Utah, which will give it 16 teams in 2024!

This effectively reduces the FBS to four major conferences, each with is own playoff system, so that it makes it much easier for the NCAA to determine its four-team playoff.  There was some talk it would expand to an 8-team playoff but that's doubtful now.  Three extra games is too much at the end of a long football season.  This leaves the lesser conferences like the Mountain West, which have produced good teams over the years, out in the cold.  With no takers, this is where Oregon State and Washington State will probably end up.

It is unfortunate but that's what happens when big money overtakes college sports. This all started with the massive television contracts the B1G and SEC secured with the major broadcast networks.  The ACC and Big 12 have much lesser contracts.  With the transfer portal that Deion Sanders so effectively used in rebuilding his team, it will be even harder for the Big 12 and ACC to compete for players who want to be in the spotlight.  This makes one wonder how long big football names like Clemson, FSU, Miami and even Colorado will stick around.  Everything is about getting a share of the big pie.

Of course there is a limit to how big you can make a conference - 18 to 20 would appear to be the max.  That means you might see some realignment within conferences as lesser teams get kicked out in favor of bringing more lucrative teams in.  In the SEC, schools like Vanderbilt and Missouri are perennial losers and don't add to television ratings.  The same goes for Mississippi and Mississippi State which have a very narrow market, albeit with a rich SEC tradition.  Kentucky is safe thanks to its excellent basketball program.  If the SEC wants schools like Clemson, FSU and Miami it will probably have to make room in its conference for them.  But then someone else will end up at the bottom.  It's a zero-sum game.

Another reason these "lesser" schools have no chance in big time sports is that they can't afford to match coaching salaries, this is why they often find their coaches being pilfered by big name schools.  They all start out at smaller schools.  Nick Saban was a linebacking coach at Kent State before getting his first head coaching assignment at Toledo, then Michigan St. and onto LSU where he won his first national championship, followed by many more championships at Alabama.  Urban Meyer followed a very similar route in getting his big break at Bowling Green before moving onto Utah, where he established his spread offense. He was then lured away by Florida, where he won two national championships in a remarkable five-year span, and then one more at Ohio St. These are the two most successful coaches of the last 20 years.

Deion started out at Jackson State, where he built a winner in three short years, and has now gotten off to a fantastic start at Colorado. The sky is the limit for "Prime Time."  I imagine he has his eyes set on coaching in the SEC or at his alma mater Florida State.  He was passed over by Auburn this past winter, which I'm sure the alumni will regret after seeing the performance of his team on Saturday.


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