2022 conference realignment (7/6 rumors: Big 12 to add 4-6 Pac-12 teams?)

[RINO Tom]

The ACC is tough to break since it’s (terrible) media contract guarantees all revenue from its current schools stays with the conference until 2036. Whoever took an ACC program would be committing itself to a fiscal deadweight until then.

There's always a way out of everything. I believe it takes 10 (?) votes to change the ACC financial rules, so the Big 10 and SEC could offer slots to 5 teams each.

I don't know that they will or they should, but something like this seems possible:
Big 10 - Virginia, North Carolina, Duke, Syracuse, Georgia Tech (would the SEC agree to let the Big 10 into Atlanta? Maybe Miami instead)
SEC - Florida State, Clemson, Virginia Tech, NC State, Miami (or Georgia Tech)

You could also see Pitt going to either, Louisville to the SEC, and obviously either would crawl over broken glass to take Notre Dame.

Doesn't the Big 10 have some education/research qualifications?  Can Miami meet those?

Not sure exactly on research, but in the USNWR (which are not the only rankings, nor are they gospel) has Miami as the #55 university in America, which is a little bit worse than Purdue and Ohio State and a little bit better than Maryland, Penn State, and Rutgers.

Nice.  I'm probably just holding on to biases of "the U" in the 80s-90s.

Browsing through the list, I see Nebraska is far below all of them, embarrassingly enough.  Even Missouri is higher.

The “official” or “unofficial” (not sure of the technicalities) policy was always that the Big Ten wanted only AAU members for the insane research funds, and Nebraska actually WAS AAU when we took them.  They lost that status after the fact.

[RINO Tom]

^ There’s a reason I’m not in the decision rooms, but I think the Big Ten only expands again if ND bites, and I think they’ll add ONE more to get to 18.  No sense in adding more mouths to feed unless they increase the size of the pie … 20 isn’t inherently better than 18, and it’s not like the AL was at a disadvantage all of those years that they had two fewer teams than the NL - and that’s how I see this ending with the Big Ten and SEC effectively being two “leagues” rather than “conferences.”