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The P4 are catching their breath, trying to figure out how to avoid a 2 billion dollar lawsuit and generate 1.3 billion in a 12 or 14!? team playoff: https://www.espn.com/college-football/story/_/id/39619331/sources-14-team-college-football-playoff-momentum

I might put Burrow's senior year #1 with Vince #2. Colt makes the top 10.

Its possible. Its getting harder to schedule as an Indy. They've only got 3 or 4 P4 schools on their schedule now. WKU was interested a year ago, but couldn't find a partner then.

A lot of people were expecting them to be #12 in CUSA instead of #13 in the MAC. Delaware announced they were joining CUSA in late November. Sure that's somewhere on this thread. With the Atlantic 10 becoming a 1 or 2 bid league, I guess UMass decided it wasn't worth staying for basketball: https://www.msn.com/en-us/sports/other/sources-umass-set-to-become-13th-member-of-mac-for-25-26-season/ar-BB1iVNwr

That's possible.

Let's be real. #15 KSU would be 11-1 and #3 UGA would be 11-2 because of SOS.

Kind of a cowards way to do it. Does the SEC want to look like a bunch of aggys? Earn your spots. Get incentive pay based on spots earned. Maybe average over 2-3 years so it doesn't go way up and down. I don't like 3 guaranteed for the Big 10 and SEC at all. What is even more stupid about that idea is that you have to do all kinds of stupid NFL type tiebreaks to figure out who #3 is. With 12 teams in a 5/7 model, the SEC would average around 4 in the BCS/CFP era. Big 10 would be about 3.5. But it goes up and down.

https://sports.yahoo.com/with-college-sports-at-key-juncture-what-does-the-future-of-the-ncaa-tournament-and-cfp-look-like-164559682.html?guccounter=1 Good article by Dellenger talking to the P commissioners and Aresco about changes. Pettiti is privately talking about 14 and 16 team playoff models. Sankey wants more money. And realigning the whole NCAA is in the air.

https://www.espn.com/college-football/story/_/id/39520319/college-football-playoff-board-managers-expected-vote-5-plus-7-format WSU/OSU seem to be coming to some sense on 5-7. If they try to burn down the next two years to get a guarantee later, they are likely on nobody's list for expansion (or scheduling other than in-state schools). ""...For our two schools in the Pac-12 as it's currently configured, there is no question that five-seven, with seven at-larges, is better than six at-larges," Schulz said. "That's part of the discussion we're having within the conference footprint -- or the two schools -- is that very point. There's no question our football coaches are going to want to compete for one of those seven slots, and seven is going to be better than six." Schulz said he views the revenue distribution as a separate conversation from the 5+7 model, and he's not trying to use one to influence the other. "We've got to be a good colleague in the college football world," he said. "We asked for the opportunity to have a hearing on [revenue distribution], that was granted. We have to be really careful about saying, 'If you don't give us exactly what we've asked for, we're going to hold up some other things.' The decision has to be one made by us and Oregon State and we're still going through that decision-making process leading up to that meeting next week. There's no assumption to be made that we have to get X to get Y, either way....""

I don't remember any school adding a men's sport. A number of schools have added women's sports.

https://www.foxsports.com/stories/college-football/heres-what-college-football-will-look-like-in-2026 Somebody on another board found this article from 2016. This guy predicted the drivers (TV contracts, paying players, content instead of coverage) and the time frame. Called the expansion of the playoff. It could have been written today. There isn't the 24 team super league he predicts, but people are thinking about it. "...The next window for mass shuffling will start around 2023, when all five* power conferences’ primary rights deals come up within a three-year span. (The Big Ten has not yet formalized its forthcoming TV deals, but reports indicate they will be for six years, ending in 2023. The SEC’s contract with CBS expires in 2024, but its ESPN/SEC Network deal is in place through 2034.) Perhaps more important, the College Football Playoff's 12-year contract ends with the 2025 season. As I’m about to outline, the next big realignment shift will go hand in hand with the evolution of the playoff. Only two years into the four-team system, you can already see what direction the sport is headed. The playoff race now dwarfs all other aspects of the season, including the other bowl games...."

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2024/02/06/espn-fox-and-warner-bros-discovery-to-launch-joint-sports-streaming-platform-this-year.html This will have a significant impact. "Walt Disney's ESPN, Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery plan to launch a joint sports streaming service this fall, giving consumers a new way to access marquee live sports for the first time, the companies said Tuesday.... From Disney, that includes ESPN and its sister networks, such as ESPN2, ESPNU, SECN, ACCN, ESPNEWS, as well as the ABC broadcast network. Warner Bros. Discovery's networks that showcase sports are TNT, TBS and TruTV. Fox will include the Fox broadcast station along with FS1, FS2 and BTN...."

We can afford it. We probably should add men's soccer and women's gymnastics. We should be able to shortly be nationally competitive in both. Don't know that we would ever be regularly competitive in wrestling or lacrosse. Those sports are just bigger elsewhere.

They never counted those as they were not competitively bid. Its just that medical and engineering research dollars shot through the roof, leaving those schools without medical or engineering schools behind.

If so, why did Nebraska lose their AAU membership after joining the Big 10? And South Florida got admitted while in the AAC? Sure, it means Stanford and Cal get consideration for the ACC. But it still took SMU's boosters to buy Stanford and Cal in. Texas, Florida, Georgia, Vanderbilt, Rice and others have all done fine academically without being in the Ivy League or Big 10 or even the Pac 12 or ACC. The academic alliances have nothing to do with conference affiliation. Texas is working on the Giant Magellan Telescope in Chile with (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_Magellan_Telescope) University of Arizona Arizona State University Astronomy Australia Limited Australian National University Carnegie Institution for Science FAPESP Harvard University Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute (한국천문연구원) (KASI) Smithsonian Institution Texas A&M University University of Texas at Austin University of Chicago Weizmann Institute of Science

Its not going to make any difference on academic alliances. That is not impacted by sports conferences.

With UVerse we've had one of the 4 local network channels off the air for several weeks. Just yesterday another one was off. The cable companies are not rolling over for anyone.

28 members of FBS were FCS or not even playing football 30 years ago. 19 of those weren't FBS or weren't playing football only 20 years ago. 16 of those moved up 2012 or later. There is a lot of FBS that wouldn't be missed. As for Division I, 40 years ago over 100 of the 364 were Division II, III, NAIA or not playing sports. You could lop the bottom 10 conferences out of NCAA basketball and nobody would notice as they hardly have any fans.

And the Tennessee president got his bachelor's at Tennessee, but his master's at OU! I thought when I looked it up I would find a bunch of UNC, Cal and Michigan degrees.

Well the current Alabama president IS an aggy.

Two key quotes from that article: "The joint advisory board is tasked with tackling the most pressing challenges before the industry in what Big Ten and SEC commissioners describe as an “urgent” mission to find solutions for issues such as ongoing antitrust lawsuits, most notably the multi-billion dollar House case; disagreements over the NCAA’s new governance proposal, Project DI; and the unsettled landscape of athlete transfer movement, tampering charges and name, image and likeness (NIL) inducements.... Settling on an acceptable athlete compensation model is perhaps the most pressing issue before the Big Ten and SEC’s advisory group, as well as the other FBS leagues. A new model could rectify both the House v. NCAA antitrust case and the current landscape of college football and basketball recruiting — a space which coaches and administrators describe as a pay-for-play, unregulated free agent marketplace...."

For those who didn't notice BOW's thread.

Swaim's tweet, for all we made fun of what he posted, did start the endless Shaggy realignment thread, so it is with sadness to share this tweet. He is going into Hospice.

The meat of the FSU argument seems to be on pages 25-31 of their 59 page document linked in the article.

https://www.on3.com/teams/florida-state-seminoles/news/fsu-takes-aim-at-former-acc-commissioner-john-swofford-in-amended-complaint/ FSU amends their lawsuit. "In a 59-page amended complaint for declaratory judgment — 21 pages longer than the original complaint Florida State filed in December — the university took sharp aim at former ACC Commissioner John Swofford for a number of allegedly self-serving actions it says cost member schools millions upon millions of dollars. FSU’s attorneys also rebutted several claims from, and questioned the legality of, the ACC’s complaint...."