BCS leagues expanding - yeah?

Miami will visit Wake Forest in 2026. The trip will be the Canes' first to Winston-Salem since Halloween Day. Of 2009.
Conference rivals.

 

It’s a bad sign when your explanation looks like a Chipotle bag.

 

I have this sense that with only eight conference games per team per year and with no divisions, there will be several years in which several layers of tiebreakers will be required to determine the participants in the league title game.

 

I eagerly await the SMU-BC matchup on the first weekend of November at half-empty, drenched Alumni Stadium.

 

Holy shit that made me laugh.

Odds this ACC alignment makes it to 2030? Odds the planet makes it there?

 

At least they rotated Miami back on as a protected rival for Virginia Tech. Just because Wake is "close" doesn't make it a rival.

 

I get this feeling the whole thing gets blown up when the ESPN/CFP contract expires in 2025-26, if not before. Cord cutting and streaming are two things that are only going to accelerate with time and technology. The audience is getting more fragmented and viewing on multiple platforms, which makes figuring ad revenues that much more difficult. Somewhere along the way, the money-making machine is going to hit a major pothole. What we're doing now is probably not what we'll be doing by 2030.

Plus, I can't see the current conference structure being stable enough long-term, particularly for Olympic sports, to support the cost of coast-to-coast travel. You can't spend more than what you bring in forever. And schools without huge alumni bases can't keep raising tuition for pay-to-play.

We're heading for some sort of "semi-professional" Super Mega Division I football and basketball designations for the top 64 or 96 teams, with the rest either reducing their athletic budgets to match revenue or dropping down to FCS. And I don't know if that's going to be revenue-based or result-based.

Another problem is "one size fits all" may not work for some programs that are basketball-only, or have a wide disparity between football and basketball success. How does a school like Gonzaga fit in?

 

A quick search shows that there would have been a tiebreaker involved in 2014 and 2018, over the past decade, for the 14-team league.

Not too terrible. I figure most of the ties will be among the 3-5, 4-4 and 5-3 teams.

 

One way is through football only / basketball only conference affiliations. The AAC is replacing SMU with Army in football and attempting to get VCU to join for basketball and Olympic sports, using the two together as a replacement. Word is that they're actually trying to get VCU, St. Louis, and Dayton for hoops. They'd be a big boost to the basketball schedule.

I can see VCU joining, but I'm doubtful about the other two. Still, the A-10 contract expires at the end of the 23-24 season, so it's a possibility worth exploring.

I agree that some sort of a super conference setup is all but inevitable given the money involved and the shifts in the pay TV market.

 

Not sure how Xavier would feel about it, but Dayton is a much better fit in the Big East. St. Louis would give Creighton a travel partner.

 

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