From SBnation's squawk page:
It is conceivable that by 2020 the Big 12 will be left to history. With the four slot college football playoff, I get the feeling that we are headed to four 20 team super conferences made up of four divisions of five teams. It's a way to expand post season participation without expanding the current four team national playoff. Each conference would have four division winners playing in conference semi-finals for the right to play in conference championship games.
If this becomes a reality, it could end up looking something like this:
The Big 20 - Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Kansas, Kansas State, and Iowa State leave the Big 12. One more team - ideally for the Big 10 Notre Dame, but more realistically Cincinnati - joins the conference to round its number to 20. The Big 10 would not only add some quality football programs, but basketball as well. Kansas basketball fans, can you imagine being in a conference with Izzo's Spartans, Ohio State, Michigan, Wisconsin, Indiana, Purdue and Illinois? While at the same time the Jyahwks could theoretically play in a much more regionally appropriate division of Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Kansas State and Nebraska.
The SEC - The Texas schools of Texas, Baylor, Texas Tech and TCU leave the Big 12 to swell the SEC's numbers to 18. The SEC, ever mindful of securing large television markets, could bring in Dallas by adding SMU, and Houston by adding the Cougars. Or just as realistically, Memphis, if they stay competitive. Any two of those three would make market and regional sense for the SEC. And as great as a football conference the SEC is, they do have a basketball problem with Kentucky - just like Kansas in the Big 12 - owning it due to a lack of competition for the crown. Texas, Baylor and TCU are football juggernauts fitting of SEC inclusion. Basketball wise, the addition of Texas, Baylor, Larry Brown's Mustangs and the Memphis Tigers instantly make the conference more likely to land more NCAA tournament seeds.
The ACC - The lone remnant of the Big 12, West Virginia, finally returns to a sense of regional sanity by joining. Already the best basketball conference in the land could then become stronger with the addition of the Mountaineers, and possibly UCONN and Temple - all three with decent enough football programs as to benefit inclusion in that regard. In order to round out their number to 20 teams, the ACC could then add South Florida and Central Florida to their ranks.
The PAC 20 - This one would be trickier to assemble, because the number of western competitive teams is limited, but there are enough to make a 20 team western super conference believable. The obvious addition would be BYU. Along with the Cougars the PAC could scoop up Wyoming, Colorado State, New Mexico, Boise State, Nevada, UNLV and San Diego State. Most of which are consistently competitive enough in football, and even more of them are very solid basketball programs.
This is all highly speculative of course. To me though, college football slowly, yet still deliberately, stuttering toward super conferences has left all of college athletics in a state of weird purgatory. If football wants to go for it, then they should get on with it already so that the 21st century of college sports can finally take on a coherent and lasting shape.
