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Bill Connelly, ESPN staff writer
We focus on the fall of 2024 with college football in a state of epic transition. Thanks to conference realignment — and a complete lack of centralized leadership — most of the sport’s biggest brands now reside in just two conferences, the Big Ten and the SEC. They threw their weight around to guarantee a dramatic share of future College Football Playoff money, and they convinced smaller conferences to accept a disproportionate share of settlement-related back payments, assuring that they would carry forward an even larger percentage of the money (when they were already maxed out). The other two power conferences, the ACC and the Big 12, are in an odd position, clearly ahead of the rest of the pack but well behind the Power 2 in terms of revenue. The “rich get richer” vibes are hard to ignore.
Here’s a dirty little secret, though: A large portion of the SEC and Big Ten fan bases are going to be downright sad moving forward. Making more money won’t suddenly make Illinois’ football program better than Clemson’s, and with a stronger program in your conference comes more loss opportunities. We’ve seen increasingly absurd head coach buyouts over the years, but we just did start To see how absurd a program and its boosters can be. As fans of Chelsea or Manchester United in the English Premier League can attest, sometimes having more money makes you worse, not better.
Meanwhile, the Big 12 continues to be the most entertaining conference on the planet.
Actually, it already was.
Conference games decided by one score, 2018–23
Big 12: 46.5%
MAC: 44.6%
Pac-12: 41.3%
Sun Belt: 41.0%
ACC: 39.3%
AAC: 39.1%
Conference USA: 37.5%
Big Ten: 36.3%
Mountain West: 36.2%
SEC: 33.0%
Nearly half of the Big 12’s conference games have ended within one score over the past six seasons, and that was with Two fence-post programs, Oklahoma and Texas, dominated the field financially. The Big 12 traded two of its heavyweights for four programs — Arizona, Arizona State, Colorado and Utah officially joined the conference Aug. 2 — that are much closer than the rest of the pack in terms of spending and prospects. This trade hasn’t made the conference relatively better or richer, obviously, but it all but ensures that a conference already known for close games and an abundance of chaos will become even more chaotic moving forward.
You can have your blowouts and huge buyouts (and, yes, national title aspirations). The Big 12 is going to have all the fun.
In the great wide open
In every conference preview this summer, I’ve included conference title odds based on SP+ projections. They are quite revealing when it comes to inter-conference parity.
