ACC, Big Ten and Pac-12 to announce alliance
Yahoo Sports Senior College Football Reporter Pete Thamel explains the soon-to-be-announced alliance between the ACC, Big Ten and the Pac-12, and what it could potentially mean for the SEC, the CFP, and scheduling in the future.
Video Transcript
PETE THAMEL: The alliance is coming to college football. Now we just have to figure out what that actually means. This is Pete Thamel with Yahoo Sports.
My colleague, Dan Wetzel, and I broke the story last night of the alliance between the Pac-12, Big Ten, and ACC conferences being announced on Tuesday. The actual reverberations from the announcement of that alliance, other than a lot of long quotes from chancellors and pats on the back in conference offices, remains to be seen.
The one part about the alliance we know is that it gives three like-minded leagues similar governance ideals. Say the SEC wants to raise scholarship limits from 85 to 100, or say there's something within the College Football Playoff that those leagues don't agree with. The alliance is a symbolic linking of arms for these three leagues to work together.
The most interesting parts of the alliance, which we got into in our article on Yahoo Sports late Monday night, won't come for a long time. Those are ways to potentially shape the College Football Playoff. It's not a coincidence that the ACC, Big Ten, and Pac-12 didn't have any representation on writing the plan for the College Football Playoff that's been proposed. Will there be more than one media partner? Very likely, because these three leagues, banded together, will have a bigger voice.
The scheduling component or potential scheduling component of this alliance is the most intriguing part. Right now, it's hard to take the alliance particularly seriously without a monetary aspect to back up the rhetoric. Some type of scheduling agreement, which wouldn't be agreed on for a while, is the best way to legitimize this alliance as a way to bolster these leagues.
It's easy to see one between the Big Ten and the Pac-12. They've long bonded through the Rose Bowl, and both have TV deals that expire within the next five years. The ACC's part of the scheduling alliance is trickier. The ACC's rights are all owned by ESPN until 2036. That makes creating some kind of new revenue model trickier in the ACC. It will be more linear in the Big Ten and the Pac-12.
So for now, the alliance is symbolic. When that solidifies to something more tangible remains to be seen. This is Pete Thamel for Yahoo Sports.