College football realignment has taken over the summer, with eight Pac-12 teams committed to leaving the conference. That can only be the start of realignment out west, since the four remaining teams in the Pac-12 still have to decide upon their futures.
Fans and analysts have openly expressed their displeasure with all the change, but it seems like it’s not going anywhere. Nebraska AD Trev Alberts explained that the most impactful parts of realignment haven’t even happened yet.
“I don’t believe it’s done. It’s never been done,” Alberts said, via the Lincoln Journal Star’s Amie Just. “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.”
According to Alberts, this is all a cause of the changing nature of TV deals, as cable bundles are dying in favor of streaming options. Therefore, he explained that the business model is “falling apart” which requires conferences to change their motivations.
Still, Alberts was in favor of adding Oregon and Washington football to the Big Ten, even though he acknowledges the issues that arise from non-revenue sports switching conferences.
“I think those concerns are valid and they’re real and they need to be addressed,” he said. “I don’t think it’s sustainable. I will say, I think there’s some short-term strategies that we’re already working on with the Big Ten in ways that we can alleviate some of those concerns.”
As a result, Alberts believes that the future of college football may need to be separated from the rest of the sports, since football drives all of college athletics despite it having different needs.
“If you just look at football in isolation, eventually conferences will matter less in a sense,” Alberts said. “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.”
