Will the SEC stay at 16 schools? A scenario where Florida State fits? SEC realignment mailbag (2024)

Realignment is terrible. It’s the ruination of everything we’ve come to love about college sports. It’s also great content. (I believe I already used this lede in a previous column, but can’t remember for sure. It was probably three dozen realignment-is-bad columns ago.)

SEC readers — as well as anybody in particular out there — we know you’re torn. You want to talk about the season, but realignment has intruded. So let’s do both: two mailbags this week, one just about realignment questions, the other about everything else.

Assuming the SEC doesn’t jump into the frenzy between then. Good segue to our first question.

(Note: Submitted questions have been lightly edited for clarity and length.)

Please tell me the SEC will sit out this round of realignment. Sixteen is enough. — Robby W.

This round? If that’s defined as this late summer period then yes, the SEC will very likely sit it out. The qualifier is only because of the Florida State nuclear scenario, where the school backs up its histrionics by announcing before the Aug. 15 deadline that it is leaving the ACC for the 2024 season, and the SEC pounces. I’ve found little appetite within the SEC to do that, for reasons explained in my column last week: Florida State needs the SEC much more than the other way around.

The one argument I’ve heard that does give me pause: What if Florida State is absolutely leaving the ACC, and this becomes a situation similar to Texas (and with it Oklahoma) in 2021, where the two schools were going somewhere, so the SEC was smart to act rather than let another conference grab them. That played out behind the scenes, and this one is playing out publicly because Florida State is trying to get a better deal from the ACC, or trying to get other ACC schools to band together to challenge the grant of rights, or it’s just the nature of Florida State’s administration to sound off. Or all of the above.

Regardless, if Florida State is absolutely available, would the SEC be worried that the Big Ten or Big 12 would grab the Seminoles and encroach on its territory? (Yes, UCF is about to join the Big 12, but … yeah.) I’m still not sure that’s compelling enough for commissioner Greg Sankey and SEC presidents to act. There might be some trepidation not only from Florida but from others in the SEC about how Florida State has handled its business lately. The SEC likes for schools to check their egos at the door, which so far Texas has done, but the Longhorns still aren’t officially in the league.

The other complication would be who comes with Florida State. The natural assumption is Clemson, but while FSU is making hay about raising funds to perhaps get out of its grant of rights with the ACC, does Clemson or anyone else in the conference have both the money and the stomach to do it? The Pac-12’s fall was swift last week, maybe it also happens to the ACC. More likely, this plays out slowly, which leads to the more long-term question about the SEC and expansion.

SEC leaders seem genuinely happy to stay where they are and don’t feel the need to equal the Big Ten’s number: “Size doesn’t matter,” one league source told me early this week, adding that it’s about quality, not quantity. That doesn’t mean the conference will sit still. It just means it can afford to wait for the ideal candidate(s).

With all this realignment, at what point do the “haves” in the B1G and SEC decide to replace the “have-nots” in their respective conferences? For example, wouldn’t it be much more lucrative to Alabama, Georgia, etc. to replace Vanderbilt with FSU instead of just adding FSU, which just dilutes the payouts? — Joe M.

In purely economic terms, yes. But it’s not quite that simple. For one thing, on-field success also drives the economics, and the more FSUs and Clemsons you have in your league, and the fewer Vanderbilts and Mississippi States, then the fewer wins everyone gets.

College presidents like money. They also like winning. But what if television people come to those presidents and show them how much more money they would make if it’s just the powerful teams playing each other? The SEC television package is already much more about Alabama-LSU than Missouri-Ole Miss. But Sankey and his presidents don’t have to ditch anybody. There is not an arbitrary maximum that a conference can have, only an average payout that higher-end teams start to get antsy about sharing with lower-end teams, àla Florida State in the ACC. And the bigger a conference gets, the more likely you have a scenario where football programs become a separate entity within college sports.

Football is driving all this, but it’s bringing all the sports with it, which doesn’t make as much sense. It’s fine to make cross-country trips in a sport that has only 12 regular-season games, and on weekends, but the travel costs to do it for every sport, not to mention the mental and physical load, are ridiculous. So I could see a day when the powers-that-be say: You know what, we should keep geography as a priority for the other sports, but let’s make football separate. And while we’re doing that, let’s just have the best football programs play each other.

They tried to do that in English soccer a few years ago, but the Super League collapsed because fans — as well as many players and coaches — revolted. They hated the idea, admirably so, since it would have shut out the lesser clubs and taken away both the romance of having a chance to become one of the elites and getting a chance to play the elites. It’s not as fun having a league just of Goliaths and no Davids.

But how would American sports fans react? We already have super leagues, they’re called the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL and MLS, where there is no relegation and promotion of minor leagues, not even our version of pro soccer. But college sports offered that more romantic notion of bringing in everybody, giving everyone a chance if they try hard enough. Yes, the comparison isn’t perfect, as the Super League was going to be 20 clubs, while the U.S. pro leagues are about 30, but that’s why the number 30 is thrown around if there is some sort of consolidation in college football.

So you could see the College Football League someday being born out of the best teams from the SEC, Big Ten, Big 12 and ACC. (And of course, Notre Dame, which at that point would finally have to join a conference.) But you can imagine how messy it would get within conferences as schools angle to be in the CFL (maybe we’d have to work on that name). Depending on how many teams are in this super league (25? 30 or more?), you’d imagine the certainties in the SEC would be Alabama, Florida, Georgia, LSU, Oklahoma and Texas, while Auburn, Tennessee and Texas A&M would also have great arguments for it. But what about Arkansas, South Carolina, Kentucky, Ole Miss? And how does this all get hashed out?

If you’re hoping this doesn’t happen, the pure messiness of putting it together is a hopeful thought. So is the television part of it: Would ESPN and Fox actually get together to form this super league? This is where the cause of the problems in college sports could be what keeps it from getting worse: Nobody is in charge, so nobody can step in to “fix” it by creating one big super league that locks out the have-nots.

If I’ve learned anything in business, it is that every significant decision has a cost-benefit analysis. What are the downsides to expansion that conferences and media haven’t highlighted as much as increased revenue? — Nathaniel W.

Do you mean other than all the things that have already been pointed out? Loss of traditional rivalries, travel costs and bloated conferences where teams don’t play each other as much?

Travel costs — time more than money — are still widely out of whack here. A history lesson: The notion of nationwide conferences has been around since the 1950s. I stumbled across talk of an “Airplane Conference” when researching a story on Georgia Tech’s conference affiliation history. But they abandoned it in large part because of travel logistics, and what’s changed since then? Plane travel isn’t that much faster. There isn’t high-speed rail from one coast to another. As a Michigan trustee pointed out this week, without chartering a plane, it takes just as long for someone to travel from Ann Arbor to London as from Ann Arbor to Eugene, Ore., because of connecting to smaller airports. Universities still tend to be located in smaller towns without big airports.

It's utterly indefensible on any other grounds. FACT: It will take less time for our student athletes in non-chartered travel to go from Ann Arbor to London than it will to Eugene. Should we consider adding University College London to add another TV window? (Dont give any ideas)

— Jordan Acker (@JordanAckerMI) August 6, 2023

What has changed is communication and the ability to take classes online, so the argument goes that students who are athletes (or student-athletes, if we’re still saying that) don’t miss much when they’re traveling, and in fact can do their work while away. Still, the perception that athletes are taking only online classes is not true. In fact, after the 2020 COVID-19 shutdown era, many students, professors and schools saw a renewed value in in-person classes.

That’s why anyone discounting the geographic part of this isn’t being realistic. Again, football can handle it because of fewer games. The other sports? It makes zero sense.

Who else can’t wait until we have two-to-three mega conferences, which end up splitting into divisions that just mirror the old conferences? Gonna be a hoot. — John G.

This was my prediction for a while. And there’s still a chance that we are indeed entering a television money bubble, as some are predicting. The SEC’s inability to get ESPN to pay more for a ninth game, and the Pac-12’s inability to get a decent television deal, are among the signs. That’s what it would take to make the travel costs matter enough to the bean counters.

But increasingly, the super league model seems just as likely, as complicated as it would be to put it together. It probably all depends on where the television money is at in a decade. Or five years. Or next year. Who knows at this point?

With realignment seeming to never end, would it be possible to mandate certain out-of-conference matchups still happen annually and not give the schools a choice (i.e., the Bedlam Series)? Could this be a way of saving tradition and rivalries considering this is what made most people fall in love with the sport in the first place? — Ryan Z.

Would it be a legislative overreach to require certain games to happen? Many people will argue that. Would a lot of people be very happy with their legislators if they did it? Yes. Or at least they would quickly move on and probably not vote their legislator in or out because of it. And it’s not like legislatures haven’t already been passing laws related to college athletics: that’s the mishmash of state NIL laws that Sankey has been railing about, which is why he, Alabama coach Nick Saban, Georgia athletic director Josh Brooks and others trekked up to D.C. in June to lobby for some federal help.

Speaking of which, if I’m Sankey and company, I’m ticked at the Big Ten for blowing a big hole in those efforts. They were a long shot anyway, but now, as I also wrote last week, there’s no credibility for college administrators to claim they should be bailed out in the name of preserving the sanctity of college athletics.

At least there’s no credibility for the Big Ten, Big 12 and anyone at Florida State. The SEC can at least point out that it has some moral high ground when it comes to geography. Every school in its footprint borders at least one state with an SEC school.

For now.

(Photo of Greg Sankey: Johnnie Izquierdo / Getty Images)