Arizona State President Michael Crow recently tried to explain why there has been so much sudden instability and change at the highest levels of college football.
After 45 years in the Pac-12 Conference, his school announced last week it was joining the Big 12 in 2024, along with three other Pac-12 schools in another unsettling wave of realignment.
"There are a lot of forces at work, including the overlords of the media empire that are out there that were driving a lot of this," he said.
But who exactly and why? USA TODAY Sports came up with a short list of power brokers whose leadership and decisions facilitated this, for better or for worse, and then reached out to them to see whether they wanted to discuss it publicly.