You could still see decisions made under the auspices of geography if you squinted, though. These moves - and the corresponding dominos that fell as a result - wiped out one football league (the Big East), creating a Power Five, and it was clear that college football’s classic boundaries were being stretched. 3 The SEC added Texas A&M and Missouri, and the Big Ten added Nebraska, Rutgers and Maryland, venturing into a new state each time.
From 2011 to 2014, 47 Football Bowl Subdivision schools changed leagues, making that the busiest four-year period in history for realignment. Across the country, no Power Five school was even 1,000 miles away from its conference center.īut the next four years brought a flurry of conference swaps. We calculated the distance from each school to the geographic center of all schools in its conference, and every Big Ten team was within 500 miles of the conference’s center in 2010.
#GROUP OF 5 CONFERENCE REALIGNMENT SERIES#
Under the old Bowl Championship Series (BCS), for instance, there were six major football conferences (the Big Ten, SEC, Pac-12, Big 12, Big East and ACC), most of which were very close-knit - and none more so than the Big Ten. The evolution of the college sports map over the past several decades has been startling, dismantling any notion of regionality that conferences once conferred.Īs recently as the 2000s and early 2010s, college leagues still generally fit into small geographic pockets. 2 Now, they all fit into two super-leagues, and it’s possible the Big Ten isn’t done yet: Commissioner Kevin Warren said he could see expanding to 20 teams. Only one of the four has substantially changed conference opponents in the past century.
Historically, schools like those form the bedrock of conferences, as opposed to shattering them. UCLA, USC, Texas and Oklahoma rank second, third, fifth and tied for 16 th in Division I history in NCAA team national titles, respectively. 1 For the first time, a major college athletics league is going bicoastal. Not to be outdone, the Big Ten announced this summer that it was expanding to 16 teams as well by adding UCLA and USC. Last year, the Southeastern Conference announced it would add Texas and Oklahoma to form a 16-team megaconference. It’s difficult to imagine, then, how the founders of the country’s oldest athletics conference would have reacted to the recent realignment news that has shaken college sports to its core. They agreed in writing, according to an account in the next day’s Chicago Tribune, “to keep inter-collegiate athletic contests within their proper bounds.” One of those bounds was geographic: For the purposes of travel and tradition, schools largely played the regional rivals that populated their conferences. In 1896, a group of administrators from Midwestern colleges met in Chicago to settle the rules for what was then called the Western Conference, which would later be known as the Big Ten. PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY EMILY SCHERER / GETTY IMAGES
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