The landscape of College Football is changing.
Both Texas and Oklahoma officially accepted invitations to join the SEC on Friday and most College Football analysts believe that might be just the first domino to fall in a bigger realm of conference realignment.
There are plenty of storylines that we are watching such as:
- What the remaining eight members of the Big 12 will do
- How the ACC, Big Ten and Pac-12 will respond to the SEC
- How these moves might affect the expected expansion of the College Football Playoff
- If the SEC will be content with 16 teams or if it will want to expand even further
So, what about the idea ESPN analyst Jay Bilas brought up last week pertaining to a potential ACC-SEC merger?
If the ultimate goal is College Football super conference, an ACC-SEC merger could make a lot of sense. Here’s how it would look
If the ACC and SEC were to perform a merger, we would be looking at a 30-team conference assuming that Notre Dame didn’t jump in.
Because of the amount of teams, I’d like to see a 10-game conference schedule and each team would be grouped into a pod. For this exercise, I’ve got five pods determined by geographic regions with six teams apiece:
Pod 1: Syracuse, Pittsburgh, Boston College, Virginia, Virginia Tech, Wake Forest
Pod 2: Vanderbilt, Missouri, North Carolina, Duke, Louisville, Kentucky
Pod 3: Clemson, South Carolina, Georgia, Georgia Tech, NC State, Tennessee
Pod 4: Florida, Florida State, Miami, Alabama, Auburn, Arkansas
Pod 5: Texas, Oklahoma, Texas A&M, LSU, Ole Miss, Mississippi State
You could change some teams in-and-out as you’re setting up the pods as I’m not particularly happy with Arkansas in the Pod 4 geographically speaking and I’d like to keep the natural rivalries between Clemson-Florida State and Florida-Georgia, but this is just an example of what you might could see.
Teams would play five games each season- based loosely on geographic location- against the teams in their pods and then they would play five games against teams outside of their pods with a game against one opponent each from a different pod and then a ‘wildcard’ type game that would change each season.
Maybe to keep natural rivalries like the ones we listed above, you could have a designated ‘wild-card’ rival game to play each year for the schools who elected so that Georgia and Florida could still play each season, for example.
That would guarantee a fresh schedule each year in terms of opponents and matchups and would allow every team in the conference to play each other at least every four years– which is more often than we see teams in opposite divisions play each other many teams in both the ACC and SEC now.
The type of exposure and television ratings a league of this nature would get would be off-the-charts. It’s just fantasy right now, but there’s now doubt a merger like this would be fun and supply us with a ton of great matchups year-in and year-out.