I don’t have a lot to say that hasn’t already been said about FSU being left out of the College Football Playoff this year. If you’re picking playoff teams by who’s most deserving, then the team should be in. If you’re going off of who’s best, then they shouldn’t.
Without Jordan Travis, the Seminoles are no better than No. 10 Penn State. The selection committee’s guidelines tell them to pick the four best teams, but in the past they’ve mostly gone by the four most deserving. Should they have been consistent with their past actions or actually hewed to the guidelines? And what does being consistent with the past mean when the committee members generally serve three-year terms? How relevant is what “the committee” did in 2017 or whatever other pre-covid year you want to pick when no one on those committees is there now?
This is what happens when you have a decentralized sport where no one is in charge. You might also think it’s a bad idea to have a signing period and transfer period overlap with the major hiring and firing period for coaches while some teams are practicing for and playing extra games (conference title games, early bowls) and others aren’t. The best and worst thing about the sport is that it’s not how anyone would’ve drawn it up.
Anyway, FSU being left out immediately led to a lot of hot takes about how the ACC is now dead as a power conference and that the Seminoles will expedite their exit. Inevitably, some other football-minded programs like Clemson and Miami will head out too, and anyone with a good brand like UNC will be fought over as well.
My question here is the same as always: if FSU is going to leave the ACC, where are they going to go? There are only two viable options, as I don’t think independence is going to work longterm for anyone other than Notre Dame.
One option is the Big Ten. I am not sure they’re going to have the appetite to expand soon, though, as they’ve got to deal with bringing in their four new west coast programs and figure out what that looks like. It also has other questions to answer, such as can going above 16 teams in a single football conference even work out? And getting even bigger than the 18 current/future members will likely force them to really redefine what “conference” means.
Then you have the SEC. It brought aboard Texas and Oklahoma because Texas and Oklahoma came to them asking for entry. It did the same with Texas A&M. The one and only time the league has been proactive about adding members since 1992 was bringing in Missouri to make an even 14 for 2012. Despite reputations, the conference has generally been more reactive about everything in this century other than the creation and expansion of the playoff.
Of course, FSU has basically been shouting for most of this year that it wants out of the ACC and would like to go somewhere else, please. If the SEC needs someone to come to them first, well, that requirement isn’t a problem.
The actual potential problem is that the SEC may not want to expand further. Again, going above 16 starts to break the traditional conference model. Arguably going above 14 does, since it makes divisions not viable anymore without sacrificing either intra-conference cohesion in scheduling or non-conference games. Time was, you could have a power conference with only eight members. There was a league literally called the Big Eight, before it added teams to become the Big 12 in the mid ’90s, and as recently as 2012 the Big East was a power conference with just eight. In a 16-team conference with divisions, each half of the conference would have eight.
Given the league’s propensity to take things on the slower side, I expect in an ideal world the SEC would like to wait a few years to see how the Big Ten does with its 18 teams. After all, the league was willing to sit back and watch the Big Ten Network experiment for years before deciding to work on making its own channel. And even once it did go for an SEC Network, it didn’t want to own half of it like the Big Ten did. It was content to let ESPN wholly own it to keep its level of risk lower.
If you expect that the next big thing coming for college sports is a superleague, then you don’t need to worry about the SEC’s positioning. It and its marquee members will have a place at the table no matter what. And if such a superleague comes about, then FSU, Clemson, and Miami will be a part of it. They’re too valuable to be left out, and yes, that’s despite the lackluster crowds at Hurricanes home games. They’re a valuable TV property.
The only reason I can see for the SEC to take on any new members is if somehow the superleague comes down to knockdown, drag-out negotiations between the Big Ten and SEC and the number of schools in each matters. But even then, a true superleague would want to trim some schools currently in both conferences. I don’t know where the line would be drawn, but schools like Vanderbilt, Rutgers, and Northwestern would probably be on the wrong side of it. I suspect more current B1G schools would be on that wrong side than SEC schools, but I can’t say for sure.
FSU can send all the love letters it wants to the SEC, but I just don’t think the conference wants to add anyone new in the next couple of years. If the Big Ten proves that something bigger than 18 can work, then all bets are off. If it turns out to be unwieldy or unworkable for reasons other than time zones — Tallahassee doesn’t sit close to the Pacific after all — then the SEC will stand pat where it is for a while.
A lot of folks thought the Big 12 wasn’t long for this world in 2013 and 2014, but it limped along for a while despite the evident instability there. It eventually bought new life with additions and then capitalized on the Pac-12 falling apart.
The ACC may also limp along as-is for a while despite its evident instability. The Big Ten went west first before south, and the SEC doesn’t have a pressing need to add more members within its current footprint.
That’s not to predict that Florida State will still be in the ACC in 2050, or even that there will be a recognizable ACC in 2050. However, don’t place too many bets on FSU announcing a new conference move inside of the next 12 months. It takes two to tango, and it may not actually have a dance partner for a while.