A few days ago, Utah football head coach Kyle Whittingham made some newsworthy remarks in a conversation with Utah-based radio host and podcaster Spence Checketts.

Whittingham was discussing the future of the BYU-Utah football rivalry, but what he said about that game also flowed into the larger discussion of college sports conference realignment.

It’s a much longer conversation, so you will want to listen to the full show to get the complete context. That said, this one paragraph is impossible to ignore. It reasonably caused a stir:

“Well, first of all, you use the word permanently, and I can say it’s far from that,” Whittingham said. “I think in two-to-three, maybe five years at the outside, everything is gonna change again. And so this may be just a quick couple years of the game (BYU-Utah) returning, and then everything is blown up again and people go their separate ways.”

Since BYU-Utah will be a conference game in the Big 12, people will obviously wonder what Whittingham thinks about the structure of conference realignment in several years. It is reasonable to think that a lot of changes (Florida State and Clemson to the SEC, for example) will occur. How far these changes spread is obviously something we’ll all wonder about.

Let’s gather some reactions to Whittingham’s comments and then make a few extra points at the very end:

VERY INTERESTING REMARKS

NOT REALLY THE POINT OF THIS

NOT SURE UTAH TO THE BIG TEN IS THE POINT OF THIS, EITHER

NOT REALLY

MEME TIME

POLL VOTE!

EMBRACE DEBATE

LEGAL STUFF

SPECULATION

SALTY

OUR ANALYSIS

Florida State definitely wants out of the ACC. It seems the Seminoles are going to leave. It’s a question of when, not if. It might take four years, it might take six, it might take eight, but this domino will eventually fall. How much this triggers other actions will be one of the central questions of the future of realignment.

ACC STRATEGY

The ACC, if it does choose to add Stanford, Cal, and SMU, would be doing so precisely to guard against Florida State and Clemson (maybe other schools) leaving. The conference would have other schools in high-profile media markets to cushion the blow of schools leaving. This is the “volume” play the Pac-12 failed to make by adding San Diego State and SMU.

BIG PICTURE

No matter which school you root for, you know realignment is not a particularly logical thing. Arizona State at West Virginia will be a conference game in the Big 12. Oregon at Rutgers will be a conference game in the Big Ten. Stanford at North Carolina could soon become a conference game in the ACC. All this travel for athletes just doesn’t seem right to a lot of people.

Whittingham seems to be pleading for sanity and a redrawing of the whole map. If that’s one of the underlying points of emphasis in his remarks, he wouldn’t be wrong or misguided.

This is less about Utah versus BYU in football, more about trying to bring some sanity back to college sports. (Good luck, Kyle.)

Story originally appeared on Trojans Wire