The one-day-long Era of Good Feelings in the ACC after it released its 2023-2026 scheduling format came to an abrupt end with yesterday’s bombshell news that USC and UCLA are decamping the PAC-12 to join the Big Ten in 2024.
This move is sure to set off another round of massive realignment, and places the ACC and PAC-12 in a perilous position of falling even further behind the SEC and Big Ten, which already outpace them in revenue.
There are frankly too many angles to this to cover on one article and it’s too early to know what all the ramifications will be, but I’ll try to share some scattered thoughts:
This is an escalation of trends that were already happening:
Obvious point here, but the USC/UCLA news speeds up college football heading in a direction that it already seemed to be moving toward — a few truly mega-conferences that lord over the sport, capped at around 40 or so teams total, and that fully separate themselves from the other leagues via an exclusive playoff format.