![]() ![]() And then there was the BCS, which - while its formula would eventually be cracked by Boise State’s 2007 Fiesta Bowl bid - did the long-term work of walling off the Have-Nots. ![]() The Bowl Alliance of 1995 was even more nefarious that system managed to leave out BYU, which in 1996 was 13-1 and ranked 5th in the AP Poll, because their conference, the WAC, was not a part of it. As late as 1990, the Fiesta Bowl had invited Louisville (then a plucky independent more known for basketball) for a New Year’s Day bowl matchup with Alabama under the new system, the Cardinals would have no shot at any major bowl game unless they were good enough to play for a national title. The five Bowl Coalition conferences (the SEC, SWC, Big 8, ACC, and Big East) effectively made an agreement with four major bowl games (the Orange, Cotton, Sugar, and Fiesta) that only teams from those five conferences (and Notre Dame) would get invited. But there was another, more nefarious element to it. ![]() Ostensibly, all three were about guaranteeing that the top two teams would play one another in a bowl game. That begat the Bowl Alliance in 1995, and the Bowl Championship Series in 1998. The long arc of realignment has been about walling off college football’s Haves from its Have-Nots, and related to that has been the sport’s long push to have One True National Champion, which originally started with the Bowl Coalition in 1992. And then, the SEC added Texas and Oklahoma. The additions of Texas A&M and Missouri were warning shots, plays designed to get the SEC Network on basic cable in Texas and Missouri. do I really need to go on here? The league’s disadvantage suddenly became a massive advantage in negotiating television contracts, which meant that the league could command a premium.Īnd then the SEC expanded. Where a television contract with the other leagues got a network the rights to broadcast a handful of premium games along with a much larger number of beatdowns by the conference’s elite and a whole lot of nationally irrelevant content, a television contract with the SEC got you Alabama-Auburn, Alabama-Tennessee, Tennessee-Florida, Alabama-LSU, Auburn-LSU, Georgia-Auburn, Florida-Georgia. The SEC’s concentration of brand-name programs became the league’s ace in the hole. When the sport placed a great premium on not losing games, it was harder to contend for national titles when you were in the meat grinder of the SEC.īut starting around the 2000s, the math changed. Where Nebraska often had a one-game season - between 19, the Huskers lost a grand total of ten games to Big 8 teams not named Oklahoma (including zero to the trio of Kansas, Kansas State, and Oklahoma State) - Alabama had to navigate Auburn, Tennessee, Georgia, LSU, and Florida. In the days of bowl and poll, and the early BCS era, the SEC had a distinct disadvantage vis-a-vis the other conferences. The SEC won a grand total of four recognized national titles between 19: Alabama’s in 1992, Florida’s in 1996, Tennessee’s in 1998, and LSU’s (split) national title in 2003. It’s long been forgotten, but the SEC didn’t always dominate college football. Thus the initial moves of realignment were for the last remaining independents to join conferences: Florida State to the ACC, Miami to the Big East, South Carolina to the SEC, Penn State to the Big Ten. A network might not pay for the rights to Oklahoma, but they’d certainly pay for the rights to Oklahoma, Nebraska, and Colorado, along with getting Kansas, Kansas State, Missouri, Iowa State, and Oklahoma State to fill the Saturday schedule. ![]() Schools not named Notre Dame found that they didn’t have enough pull by themselves to negotiate television contracts, so the solution was for conferences to negotiate them and split the money. After Oklahoma (and a few other schools) sued the NCAA for limiting the number of cable television appearances and won before the Supreme Court, suddenly a vast market of cable television dollars opened up to the sport. In those early days of conference realignment, the big driver was television. The conference championship game was a cash grab, just like everything related to realignment. That was back in the quaint days when the big domino of realignment was of his own Razorbacks moving from the old Southwest Conference, of which they’d been a member for basically their entire football-playing history, into the Southeastern Conference, which wanted to expand to 12 teams to take advantage of a then-little-known NCAA provision which allowed a 12-team conference to split into two divisions and play a conference championship game. Back in the early 1990s, former Arkansas head football coach and Athletic Director Frank Broyles famously claimed that the long arc of college football realignment was going to be toward four 16-team super conferences. ![]()
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