Will the pandemic spark a new round of conference realignment?

Probably not, but ESPN's Ivan Maisel explores how the coronavirus pandemic has exposed the geographic absurdity of college football's conference alignments:

Hey, here's a great idea during a pandemic: Let's have West Virginia fly 1,400 miles to play a Big 12 game at Texas Tech on Oct. 24, but let's not allow West Virginia to play Pittsburgh. After all, the Panthers, 75 miles away, are in the ACC. 

Before the Pac-12 broke the emergency glass on its 2020 season, the conference approved of Colorado flying 1,300 miles to play at Washington but thought it too risky for the Buffaloes to drive 100 miles to play at Colorado State. 

And there's Nebraska, which a decade ago sued for divorce from the Big 12 (née Big Eight), dissolving a marriage consummated in 1928 to grab the money and security and money and money offered by the Big Ten. Last week the Big Ten told Nebraska it couldn't play football this fall, which went over in the Cornhusker State like, oh, I don't know, stalk rot.

For much of the sport's existence, college football was highly geographic in nature, with major conferences adhering to specific regions of the nation: the midwest (Big 10), the great plains (Big 8), the southeast (SEC), the south central (SWC), and the east (ACC) and west (PAC-10) coasts.

Over the last few decades, with air travel becoming cheaper and television money becoming the dominant factor in making such decisions, conferences have merged, split and realigned such that geography is no longer a major consideration. Conferences have become far-flung and messy, and in the process many of the natural regional rivalries that make college football so great - Oklahoma-Nebraska, Texas-Texas A&M, Pittsburgh-West Virginia, Kansas-Missouri - have been abandoned.

We have become numb to the consequences of the periodic spasms of conference realignment in intercollegiate athletics over the past three decades. It's about a regional sport turning national, about the conferences increasing their geographic footprint to grab more television market share (including ESPN). 

In other words, about money.

I appreciate Maisel acknowledging the role his employer and its money has played in the current state of the sport. I would appreciate it even more if he also acknowledged the role his employer and its money has played in the ever-increasing disparity between the "have" conferences (i.e. the Power Five) and the "have-not" conferences (i.e. the Group of Five), but that's a post for a different day.

It has been several years since West Virginia leapt to the Big 12, and Missouri and Texas A&M to the SEC, and Colorado and Utah to the Pac-12. Colorado is about as close to the Pacific Coast as Morgantown, West Virginia, is to Lubbock, Texas, and Missouri set aside a 120-year Border War rivalry against Kansas to play in a division with Georgia and Florida. 

You want to send your student-athletes halfway across the country for a conference game? It's your money. Only now it's about more than your money. It's about their health. During this coronavirus pandemic, when the epidemiologists are saying don't leave home without a mask, it's time to reconsider conference realignment. The geographic inanity of Utah booting its annual rivalry against BYU worked out well in the best of times. We are no longer in the best of times.

Maisel thinks that college football's solution to the COVID-19 pandemic is to reduce cross-country interaction (and cross-contamination) between players by staying close to home. The sport should return to its regional roots, if only for the 2020 season, and play schools in close proximity to one another. He even suggests that all 12 Texas FBS schools play each other this season.

Football should be no different from the rest of America. The pandemic has given us the power to reconsider the basic architecture of our day-to-day lives. Maybe we don't have to go to the office in order to do our jobs. Maybe we shouldn't move for our work. Maybe our work should move for us. Maybe our lives would be better served by living where we wanted to be all along.

Sports Illustrated's Pat Forde agrees. He even takes this concept further, by imagining what these regional conferences might look like.

Ten years ago this month, the last great spasm of realignment began shaking the college sports world. When it finally subsided in 2014, the landscape had changed dramatically. For the richer, but not necessarily for the better. 

The Big Ten wound up with 14 teams, stretching from Nebraska to New Jersey. The Southeastern Conference expanded into Texas and Missouri. The Atlantic Coast Conference wandered nearly 1,000 miles inland. The Pac-12 annexed the Rocky Mountains. The Big 12, pushed to the brink of collapse, steadied itself by adding a school 1,200 miles to the northeast of the league office. Lesser conferences followed suit, scrambling for financial viability. 

A decade later, it’s time to blow up what was done and start over. The COVID-19 pandemic’s effects have been profoundly felt in a realm where, for 10 years, money was no object and the map made no sense. Slapped in the face by a new fiscal reality, maybe we’re due to both rein in and reach out—to contract geographically into more regional conferences, while expanding the scope of the revenue gusher that is the College Football Playoff.

Forde pares the Football Bowl Subdivision down to 120 members and creates ten 12-team regionally-focused conferences where every school plays each other in a round-robin schedule, with a twelfth game against a semi-permanent out-of-conference rival. All ten conference champions, plus a pair of at-large teams, would advance to a 12-team, four-weekend-long College Football Playoff. Here are his ten conferences:

Pat Forde/Sports Illustrated

In Forde's scheme, all the Texas and Oklahoma schools (except for UTEP, UTSA and Texas State, which Forde relegates to FCS) are grouped into a new Southwest Conference. With the exception of Arkansas, Houston would face all its old SWC rivals once again.

Forde explains the benefits of his scheme:

What college football would gain from this realignment: uniformity; conference championships that truly matter; increased access to a more lucrative playoff; a more level playing field for the little guys; renewed regional identity; cherished rivalries preserved, restored—and, in some cases, forced into permanent existence. The advantages are abundant. 

The complaints about conference schedules would disappear. Everyone would play 11 league games, taking on every opponent within the conference every season. There would be no unbalanced scheduling, beyond six home games vs. five, and that would be flipped every season. Without divisions, there is no luck of the draw in cross-divisional opponents. And the endless carping from conferences that play more league games than others would be silenced. 

Having automatic playoff bids tied to conference championships—and having enough room in the playoff for every conference champion—would remove another chronic complaint. Win your league, get a shot at the national title. It’s just that simple. It works for the NCAA basketball tournament, and it would work for the new FBS.

In addition to expanding playoff access and encouraging competitive equality between "have" and "have-not" schools, Forde's scheme would return college football to is geographic roots:

As for regional identity: This isn’t solely about making travel easier and safer for athletes and more affordable for athletic directors, although both factors are more significant now than at any time this century. It’s also an opportunity to rebuild a neighborhood with sensible boundaries that create common ground among people who already live and work together. There is not a lot of office or barber shop banter in, say, Orlando between Florida and Missouri fans when the Gators and Tigers play; there sure would be when the Gators play Central Florida. And the fans can pretty easily drive to many of these games.

Is any of this going to happen? Of course not. Power Five schools would never deign to consider their Group of Five brethren to be their equals, to share revenue and exposure, to risk being upset by schools they've always considered inferior or unworthy. Television networks would be unlikely to be happy with this hyper-regional conference structure, as well, because it limits matchups of truly national interest. But then again, maybe that's the whole point of Forde's exercise: college football is in this mess precisely because they've put so much focus on expanding television exposure.

The coronavirus pandemic is devastating college football just as it has devastated every other aspect of American life; I still don't expect many, if any, games to actually be played this fall. But the pandemic does expose the absurdity that is college football in 2020, not just with respect to geography but also the economic disparity between its participants. I'm glad sportswriters such as Maisel and Forde are acknowledging that there is a problem.