Over the past several years and months, college football has seen a wave in conference realignment that has led to massive changes in the sport, stretching the Big Ten from coast to coast, adding two new brand names to the SEC, and leaving the Pac-12 with four teams and on the brink of collapse. But Nebraska athletic director Trev Alberts thinks the most disruptive moves are still to come.
Not only does the former ESPN analyst turned college administrator think more college football realignment is on the horizon, but he thinks the next round will be “far more disruptive” than what we’re currently experiencing.
“I don’t believe it’s done,” Alberts told the Lincoln Journal-Star in a recent interview. “It’s never been done. It’s more likely than not that there will be continued periods of angst. I believe that the next go-around — that’s my basic conclusion — will be far more disruptive than anything we’re currently engaged in. We need to prepare ourselves mentally for that.”
Alberts predicts that at some point in the future, football will be considered independent from all the other collegiate sports. The Nebraska AD describes an eventual league of “35 to 40 top brands” in college football, much like the Champions League in soccer.
“This is my own personal opinion, but I think the future has to contemplate football being taken out of the mix,” Alberts said. “We’re moving to a 35 to 40 top brands being part of something. If you just look at football in isolation, eventually conferences will matter less in a sense. If we can find a way to take football and have that be this entity here, I think then you can get back to doing some much more intelligent thinking around the rest of the sports, which should be regionally based.”
So far, all of the conference realignment moves have included all sports. But Alberts points out that at some point in the near future, it likely won’t make sense to include every Olympic sport in these moves due to the very different travel schedules and logistics compared to football. Plus, the realignment is being driven by football, anyway.
“All of these moves are driven by one sport. That’s football. And the football schedule is much different than a tennis schedule or a golf schedule. So these Olympic sports, the travel looks a little bit different. … We’re not there today, but I would think in the next 10 years, that reality makes more and more sense.”
It’s obvious that the future of college football is not settled just yet, but if Alberts’ predictions are correct then we’ve just seen the very start of how college football will change in the coming years.
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