College football realignment is moving fast and not stopping

Prior to the season, the big news around college football has been the possible expansion of the Big Ten and SEC. Now, it looks like the Group Five conferences as well as the Big 12 are the conferences actually making the moves in terms of realignment.

The realignment of college football has a history of conferences being dissolved and various schools switching alliances.

Three months ago, news broke that Texas and Oklahoma were going to accept invitations to join the SEC and leave the Big 12 in a couple of years. Then, not long after, there were rumors of Big Ten expansion but the Big Ten, Pac-12, and ACC announced an alliance, ending any possibilities of either of the three conferences realigning in 2021.

Then one conference made a major announcement about expansion.

The Big 12 made a major announcement when they had invitations accepted by AAC members Cincinnati, Houston, and UCF as well as BYU. The AAC just recently decided to add six members from Conference USA in Charlotte, FAU, North Texas, Rice, UAB, and UTSA.

Lastly, it appears Southern Miss will leave Conference USA to join the Sun Belt by 2023.

Let’s take a look at the schools that are changing conferences in the next few years.

SEC: Texas, Oklahoma
Big 12: BYU, Cincinnati, Houston, UCF
AAC: Charlotte, FAU, North Texas, Rice, UAB, UTSA
Sun Belt: Southern Miss

It looks like the Big 12 and AAC are set with conference expansion moving forward and they both appear to not be losing any further members to other leagues this year. However, Conference USA and the Sun Belt are definitely looking at conference expansion and the Mountain West and MAC could look at conference expansion soon.

There are also six FBS schools that are currently Independent that have not accepted any full-time invitations to join a league in football. Also, there are a handful of FCS schools looking to jump to the FBS who could be added to a conference once they are admitted as an FBS school for football.

First, as we did last time when looking at conference expansion, let’s look at the financial standings of various Group Five schools.

There’s not much financial information about group five schools but the Wall Street Journal came up with a college football value ranking in 2019. Unlike the Power Five conferences and their main methods of criteria for expansion, the Group of Five does not nearly put as much emphasis on the financial benefits of adding a team to their conference.

Let’s look at each conference and the teams within each of the Group of Five conferences and where they rank financially.