In new playoff landscape, conferences should think smaller

Oklahoma and Texas look to the SEC for salvation — but in an expanded College Football Playoff conferences should look to get smaller, not bigger.

The college football world was rocked by the latest round of realignment news as Oklahoma and Texas announced their intentions to bolt the Big 12 for the SEC. This announcement set off a whirlwind of speculation about conferences across the country.

What would happen to the Big 12 after the departure of its two biggest programs? Would other conferences like the Big Ten, ACC, Pac-12, and even the American Athletic Conference swoop in to pick the carcass of the dying league? Would the Big 12 go on the offensive and look to get back to a dozen teams?

All of the talk has been about getting bigger. Strength has been categorically assumed to exist in numbers, leaving conferences to vacuum up as many powerhouses as possible to ensure their continued existence.

But what if we have this all wrong? What if, in a rapidly evolving national landscape, the power move is to contract, consolidate, and lock in loci of regional power that can ensure annual participation in the College Football Playoff?

Texas and Oklahoma will largely be lauded for looking out for their own self-interest. The SEC will be celebrated for its forward-thinking expansion. The pools of money will get bigger. But what this discourse ignores is the disconnection between profits and glory, and assumes that adding two more ego-fueled programs to a league of bloated egos will be workable in the long term.

The folly of conferences getting bigger from a College Football Playoff standpoint

The move by the Sooners and Longhorns is calculated explicitly to maximize profitability in a college football landscape where padding the athletic department budget with as much television revenue as possible is the paramount concern. It is also a move that diminishes, rather than enhances, both schools’ chances of winning the mythical national championship.

One of the key stipulations baked into the College Football Playoff proposal to expand to a 12-team bracket is the automatic entry of the top six conference champions into the tournament. Championships aren’t prerequisites, but they are the most coherent path into an expanded playoff structure — and the path that provides the greatest benefits to those deemed among the top four conference champs.

What Oklahoma and Texas have done by asserting their intentions to move to the SEC is abdicate the opportunity to gain one of those prime invitations in most seasons and relegate themselves to scrapping for an at-large bid with other SEC programs and schools from other conferences.

In an expanding playoff situation, the goal for any program with national championship aspirations should be landing a place in a conference where league crowns can be secured on an annual basis.

Joining a new conference where hegemonic forces already maintain a stranglehold on the title might fill up the coffers. Such a move also ensures that reaching a playoff becomes harder, not easier.

Oklahoma already has an optimal situation in the Big 12, with six straight conference championships and no signs of slowing down against their rivals. Texas has suffered a recent downturn since dismissing Mack Brown after the 2013 season, but they are still in a far better position to gain one of those prime qualifying spots in the Big 12 than they will be in the SEC.

The folly of conferences expanding to 16 (or even bigger) from a workability standpoint

No matter how the SEC ultimately opts to organize its divisions, Texas and Oklahoma should be seriously concerned about their future chances of reaching the College Football Playoff. At the same time, though, the SEC should also look at its own history to understand why getting too big can be dangerous to long-term conference health.

The SEC’s roots go back a decade earlier than the league’s formation when the Southern Conference was formed by 13 schools in 1921. A year after its birth, the Southern Conference added six more teams to its ranks. Maryland and Sewanee joined the ranks in 1923. Duke was in the mix by 1928.

With more than 20 schools in the conference, there were simply too many voices clamoring for their own interests. By 1932, the situation was untenable and a group of defectors left the Southern Conference to form the SEC.

At its heart, the issue became one of powerhouses versus minnows. Texas and Oklahoma bring institutional cachet to match the SEC’s premier programs, but their inclusion automatically makes other members look less appealing by comparison.

The more teams that get added to the equation, the harder it is to keep everything copacetic in the long term.

The SEC remained compact for decades thereafter, more likely to lose programs (adios Tulane, Sewanee, and Georgia Tech) than to gain them. When the SEC brought in Arkansas from the fading Southwest Conference and added independent South Carolina in 1991 to initiate a conference championship game, that number became the new standard for leagues.

Few conferences have been able to turn their championship game into a profitable enterprise, though, and altered NCAA rules don’t even require leagues to field a minimum of 12 teams anymore to host a championship.

To grow bigger as a conference is to walk a fine line between maximizing the available product to sell to television executives without upsetting a delicate balance between programs whose interests do not always align. The more teams that get added to the equation, the harder it is to keep everything copacetic in the long term.

Texas and Oklahoma decided that they were willing to leave a league with eight junior partners, where future Playoff appearances were a reasonable expectation, in favor of a new affiliation where they are now aligned with 14 programs that are either their equal or their superior.

The money will be better as SEC members than it ever was as the lords of the Big 12 — but how long can the tenuous bonds of a contrived relationship be held together by lucre?

Other conferences would be wise to look at how and why the SEC was born, rather than why it is expanding now. In a rapidly evolving college football world, bigger might not always be better.