Coach Mack Brown Concerned About College Football Realignment
UCLA and USC will leave the Pac-12 and join the Big Ten in 2024, and this upcoming college football realignment has got Hall of Fame North Carolina coach Mack Brown concerned. The move will end the two teams’ century-old West Coast league affiliation.
Speaking at the ACC Kickoff preseason event in July, Brown said he would have bet his life that a realignment like this would never have happened. The news of the upcoming move followed the surprising Big 12 exit of Texas and Oklahoma for the SEC.
Brown coached Texas for 16 years, in between his two stints as Tar Heels coach. Those two stints combined cover 14 years and more (1988-97 and 2019-present). Two of the many highlights in his six decades as a football coach include a 2005 national championship with the Longhorns and a 2018 induction into the College Football Hall of Fame.
Elaborating on his concerns, Brown said that if such moves ultimately result in a two mega-conference situation with a 16-team playoff, it would be more like the NFL than college football. Brown’s prediction may well come to pass, given that the Big Ten and SEC will become 16-member conferences by 2025 as the Power Five appears to be moving toward the formation of two 20-team super leagues.
The veteran coach added that he was worried that the trickle-down effects of these moves could change the identity of college football. Brown said he likes the sport as it is, even through he understands that the sport must grow, and that changes must come with that growth. However, some of the changes that have happened were not well thought out, and this is having various consequences for the sport. This is not unlike online Blackjack real money games, in which players should carefully think about the moves they make.
Huge Exit Fee
The ACC’s television contact with ESPN still has 14 seasons to go. The contract was extended in 2016, and it’s due to come to an end in 2036. If even one school leaves the ACC and joins another conference, the move would break the league’s grant of rights deal – and this would require paying an exit fee that could be as high as $120 million.
The growing revenue gap faced by the league, compared to the SEC and Big Ten, is highlighted by estimates of the ACC’s payouts per team under the TV deal. The ACC should pay out an estimated $40 million per team in the coming years. However, the SEC and Big Ten are expected to pay out more than $70 million per team, thanks to their upcoming deals.
Brown Remembered Florida State
To further illustrate his concerns, Brown recalled Florida State’s joining the ACC in 1992, a move that grew the league to nine members when it happened. He explained that, before Florida State joined the ACC, the team was thought of as independent, and the question was whether the team would join the ACC or the SEC.
As it happened, Florida State chose the ACC, and that was all there was to it. However, nowadays teams talk about rights, poaching players from other leagues, losing players from their own league, and whether there are enough rights for payments from TV channels. In Brown’s view, college football is becoming more complicated than it ever was before.
