On the midweek episode of his podcast, Andy Staples of The Athletic discussed what he termed the only plausible conference realignment scenario for when TV deals expire in a few years. Most episodes of the show are free despite The Athletic being a subscription site, and this was one of the free ones.
I won’t rehash everything discussed, but this is the gist. Based on some recent comments by USC’s new athletic director, it’s looking like the Pac-12 is the power conference on the shakiest ground. Staples advocates for the Big 12 reversing of what happened during the 2010 round of realignment and attempt to raid the Pac-12. If that sounds completely bananas to you, well, listen to him make the case.
I’ll add to it a little detail on why the Pac-12 is in rough shape looking forward, and it’s all about the Pac-12 Networks (yes, it’s plural).
The master plan for the P12N had two halves. First, the conference would retain a 100% ownership stake so that it could keep all revenues in the short term without having to share them with a partner like ESPN or Fox. Second, sometime down the road after the P12N was a big success, the league could sell 49% of it to a TV company like ESPN or a Silicon Valley company looking to expand its media portfolio and get a massive one-time windfall.
The catch is that ownership-sharing partners, whether Fox for the Big Ten Network or ESPN for the SEC Network, have leverage when it comes to negotiating with cable and satellite companies. West coast college sports fans may be less rabid than those in the southeast and midwest, but the P12N would have far wider carriage if it had ESPN or Fox negotiating on its behalf.
So now the Pac-12 is stuck. It appears it can’t make the P12N a big success without capitulating and selling half to a media powerhouse that could actually strike some good deals. However if it does do that, it’ll forgo much of the big payoff that Larry Scott has been promising since the beginning. Some combination of wishful thinking, organizational inertia, and the sunk cost fallacy is keeping the league paralyzed and making it unwilling to do what it has to in order to keep up with the rest of the Power 5 monetarily.
Staples contends that no other moves really make sense outside of the ACC futilely continuing its quest to have Notre Dame join as a full member, and I tend to agree. I can’t really see a reason why the SEC in particular would expand.
In 2010, the aim of realignment was clear. The Big Ten, SEC, and Pac-12 expanded with an eye on expanding the markets for their current or planned conference networks. The ACC expanded to keep up in hopes of having a network someday, and it’s finally getting one this year. The Big 12 expanded for survival’s sake.
Now, it’s less clear what the point would be.
Everyone seems to agree that expanding for the sake of conference networks won’t happen again. For one thing, the Big Ten and ACC don’t really have plausible expansion targets that would do that. The Big 12 and Pac-12 don’t either without sniping at each other, hence Staples’s scenario of the Big 12 targeting Pac-12 schools.
And then there’s the SEC. Back after the last round of realignment, I assumed that if the 16-team superconference era that so many media members seemed to think was coming began, the conference would go after NC State and Virginia Tech. Those schools would expand the league’s footprint into contiguous states, generally seemed like culture fits, and met the general pattern of past SEC expansion targets.
The conference has a core of six power football programs: Alabama, Auburn, Florida, Georgia, LSU, and Tennessee. They rise and fall over time — UF came up in the ’80s and ’90s, LSU had a rough ’90s, Tennessee has dropped off lately, etc. — but no one who’s entered the conference since 1992 looks capable of being a perennial threat to those core programs. They could have good years or even half-decade stretches, but they’ll always fall back to the middle or worse.
Arkansas, South Carolina, Missouri, and — shh, don’t say it too loudly or they’ll hear you — even Texas A&M had nothing in the decades leading up to SEC membership that suggested they would knock any of the big six down. Only Tennessee has hit a decade-plus skid in the 12 or 14-team era, and it’s largely self-inflicted. Things like Clemson’s rise hasn’t helped, but you can’t say that the Vols are suffering specifically because of anything the Razorbacks, Gamecocks, Tigers, or Aggies are doing.
NC State is quietly one of the programs with a consistently hard low ceiling, as it has won double-digit games once in its history (11 in 2002 with Philip Rivers). VT was more of a threat 15 years ago than it is now, as it’s won double digits once in the past eight seasons.
I’ve since learned that those probably aren’t viable expansion candidates anyway. There is a tight bond between the ACC schools in North Carolina even as the non-Wake ones are always sniping at each other (some in the state give Wake Forest the nickname of “Switzerland” for its neutrality in the middle of Duke-UNC-NCSU feuds). It’s also a big deal for Virginia Tech to be in the same conference — especially an academically prestigious conference like the ACC — as Virginia. Maybe the SEC’s payout will someday become so much larger than the ACC’s so as to overcome those factors, but again, what would the point be?
I can verify that the SEC Network was already on basic cable in Charlotte, NC at launch because I lived there in 2012, although it’s probably on a reduced rate for not having a member school inside the state. A brief check shows it’s not on basic cable in Virginia right now, and Virginia would be the fourth-most populous (or fifth-most, if we’re still doing NC State as a package deal) SEC state behind Texas, Florida, and Georgia. Somehow adding NC State and Virginia Tech would bring about a combined 19 million people into the league’s footprint, and the SECN would start getting a higher subscriber rate from those states’ households.
But supposedly the era of expanding for the sake of conference networks is over. Traditional pay TV appears that it will slowly bleed subscribers into the indefinite future. I guess the goal of realignment would either be to shore up power for stability’s sake (e.g. the Big 12 going after Pac-12 members) or making it so a conference’s network is a must-have on streaming services.
Well, the SEC Network is already on all the streaming TV services. It will continue to be thanks to the conference’s passionate fans and the negotiating strength of partner ESPN. What really would the conference gain by going to 16 teams by adding, say, West Virginia and some G5 team since core ACC schools are almost certainly off the table? Between its fan strength and Disney, the SEC is already about as powerful as it’s going to get.
So no, I don’t think there will be any realignment in the SEC. It might do an internal shakeup by removing its current divisions for pods, but even that seems doubtful given how rancorous it gets whenever anyone talks about scheduling.
Maybe the Big 12 will try to raid the Pac-12. Maybe USC is just bluffing to try to get a shakeup of Pac-12 leadership and nothing will come of all this. Regardless, it’s hard to see a compelling reason why SEC membership will change in the foreseeable future.