Are you excited about the upcoming college football season and what unfolds on the field? Well too damn bad, sit down and read about more conference realignment talk. Today on the latest edition of Five Wide Fullbacks it’s all conference moving speculation.

1) If there is a breaking point for college sports–and college football fans and media specifically–regarding conference realignment it may have come this past week. Have we finally reached a tipping point as consumers?

Yes and no. Remember when Rutgers accepted an invitation to the Big Ten in late 2012 to begin membership in 2014? It was such a big deal! Funny, confusing, slightly dumb, maybe a lot dumb, but that was something massive for the sport (along with Maryland’s move) that we could chew on for a long time. Now, we are days away from like 70% of the country (seemingly!) having moved conferences over the last decade.

Many of these moves are obvious (if we look solely at money which drives this train) but it’s all done in this herky-jerky manner and sometimes without warning.

It’s all been way too haphazard and no one has the attention span to keep up with the drama anymore. Or, maybe no one wants to be tasked with keeping up with it anymore. As I write this, as many as five Power 5 programs are drying ink on new contracts in a different league. It sucks as now is the time to focus on actual football and our Patrician Slack has been dominated by conference realignment news for several days with many of us lamenting how tiresome it is now.

As Notre Dame fans, it feels like watching some of your core friends and their friends constantly dating new people and having to endlessly hear stories about whether or not this new couple is going to get married. Maybe we need transfer portal windows for conferences? Go ahead and do this in April and not August, thanks guys.

2) Has the Big Ten always been the bad guy in all of this?

Whoever the people were who invented the television are to be blamed. Or just humanity’s need for greed. Notre Dame was being televised in the late 1940’s and we can really trace things back to the CFA coalition in the 1970’s that began the process of pooling teams’ television power together. We may have gone about it differently, but a little old team in South Bend then showed the way with the NBC deal in 1991.

I really think the expansion of FBS isn’t talked about enough in this discussion. Back in 1960, there were 113 teams in the top-flight of college football and 31 of those programs are no longer playing at this level. Things might be better if this sport was reduced in size but somehow we’ve added 51 additional teams to FBS across 7 decades. They just keep coming and everyone wants more money, even the tiny schools, who really are no less guilty than the Oregon’s and Arizona’s of the world chasing multi-millions.

You could argue FBS should really be around 60 to 70 teams, and maybe even 40-50 teams. In the world of have’s and have not’s we are just seeing this process play out in a staggered, then accelerated and bizarre fashion.

3) What the heck is going to become of the Pac-12 Conference?

The winningest athletic department in modern history, your Stanford Cardinal, are now left in the dark along with California, Oregon State, and Washington State. They could be absorbed into the ACC, but that does virtually nothing for the ACC except add unnecessary costs. Surely, no one in the ACC is excited by this plan. These remaining Pac-4 (!) programs could try to go independent in football (and maybe some other sports) while latching on to the West Coast Conference or something.

He knew. 

They’ll have about 15 to 18 months to figure something out!

Becoming a part of the Mountain West truly isn’t the worst outcome, I have to admit. I bet these schools will eventually make peace with that reality. Stanford cares less about men’s basketball and football and might still attract elite athletes who are looking for a west coast-centric experience. I’m not sure they’ll be that too broken up about things–and they have the cache to probably go independent in many areas anyway. Sadly, the Beavers, Golden Bears, and Cougars are destined to be second-tier programs now officially. It sucks for them but can we say it’s bad for the rest of the country?

4) There’s been an awful lot of saber rattling by Florida State in recent years/months/weeks/days about their desire to leave the ACC. Can this conference actually stick together?

I get the sense that Notre Dame feels comfortable that the ACC is going to last in its current form. We’re at the point now where the Big Ten and SEC would really have to covet the likes of Florida State, Clemson, Miami, North Carolina, or a couple others in the league and thus far it doesn’t seem like either conference are too bothered keeping them away. I really don’t think the SEC needs any of those schools. At some point, maybe the Big Ten would want to reach into the southeast of the country, we’ll see.

FSU wants out to…somewhere else.

Florida State is just being Florida State right now and getting frustrated at not being invited to these bigger parties. UNC athletic director Bubba Cunningham said this week:

“I don’t think it’s good for our league for them to be out there barking like that. I’d rather see them be a good member of the league, support the league and if they have to make a decision, then so be it. Pay for the exit fee, wait for your grant of rights that you’ve given and then in 2036, when those rights return to you, do whatever you want.”

FSU just needs to calm down. They keep saying that the grant of rights won’t keep them from moving and are even exploring the options of becoming the first collegiate athletics program in the country to attract private equity investment like a European soccer club. It’ll take two to tango and who wants the Seminoles right now?

5) Suddenly, people around the country are coming around to this whole independent Notre Dame football thing. Will the Irish be safe in the near to medium-term future?

It’s weird because we haven’t really heard a ton coming out of Notre Dame, or Jack Swarbrick, specifically about the ACC in any detail. I would imagine that is intentional as any comments either very pro or very negative aren’t going to be helpful. Think of it as being the anti-Florida State in this sense. Notre Dame traditionally prefers to move in silence. Still Swarbrick has been adamant that a split is coming in how schools treat their athletes but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll be broken up like this via conference.

Playoff access was this bogeyman until very recently when the 12-team system alleviated a lot of those problems for Notre Dame. We’re really down to 3 separate but also very connected issues remaining for the Irish:

  1. The pending new deal with NBC (we won’t pretend it will be with anyone else)
  2. Secured home for Olympic sports
  3. Competitive (enough) schedules for true playoff access and relevance

I think Notre Dame will have a lot of patience in all 3 areas. Meaning, they will put up with a revenue deficit compared to their peers, they will put up with a sub-par league for basketball, lacrosse, or baseball, and they will grit their teeth with weaker schedules for several years in football. I don’t see a scenario where Notre Dame proactively leaves the current setup without going through a lot of “pain” in these 3 areas, especially if we consider that if it gets bad enough, either the Big Ten or SEC would still welcome the Irish if we picked up the phone. Something that perhaps Florida State cannot bank on today.

The scheduling for football is going to be really interesting. How sure are we that USC will want to continue the annual series? I think as time passes they will be less inclined. The Navy game is still out there but does nothing but fill a slot for a weaker program which now it’s looking like Stanford is going to be filling, too. Stanford very much needs Notre Dame but not the other way around, necessarily.

The one thing Notre Dame also has going for it (in terms of football scheduling) is that the larger these conferences grow the less cohesive they become, they less they’ll all play each other, which keeps the door open to many of them seeing the strengths of putting a high profile game against the Irish on their schedule. We would hope that is how things shake out with USC.