Joel Klatt believes next step in conference realignment is teams getting dropped
Fox Sports’ Joel Klatt believes the next step in conference realignment is teams potentially getting dropped along the way.
The big conferences want to add teams along the way to increase the value and brand recognition. See the Big Ten and SEC with their respective expansion moves coming.
But it could lead to teams being left out of those conferences as the Power Five changes.
“You know what’s next for us in college football? I told you this is never going to stop, right? I wasn’t lying. This is never going to stop. Because it’s been about who can we add to increase value so that we all make more money,” Klatt said of conference realignment. “Well pretty soon it’s going to start being about who can we drop? I know people think I’m crazy and look at me kind of sideways. That’s absolutely coming. Because again there’s not an unlimited source of money and the money then has to get smarter.”
That’s where the panic amid smaller schools could set in regarding realignment.
“And I know a lot of college football fans don’t like this conversation because I’ve said the word money too much,” Klatt said. “But the bottom line is like that’s irrelevant in this model. And I’m going to get to a place where I think that there are some fixes that will make the sport better, but for right now you have to understand that what is going to be entering into college football is really poor economies of scale. Think about it. Now you’ve got all these members, only a few of them are actually driving the overarching value. Almost like taxpayers, right?
“You know, only a certain number of taxpayers actually pay all the taxes while only a certain number or a number of teams in every one of these conferences are actually driving the valuation for the entire conference. Well, pretty soon, those teams are going to be like, ‘Hey, we can’t handle the dead weight at this point. Having X, Yor Z school in our conference is just diluting the conference. It’s diluting it in two ways. One, we’ve got to chop up the pie in more pieces. And then the other is we’ve got to enter them into the schedule so we don’t even get all the big boys facing each other as often as they should, because we’ve got to dilute the schedule with that other team that really doesn’t derive any value.”
Klatt then pointed to a doomsday type scenario for the smaller Power Five schools amid potential realignment.
“So at some point in the next 10 years, you’re gonna hear a conversation about like, ‘hey, is this a good fit for this school or this program within this conference,’” Klatt said. “That feels like Game of Thrones, but you think we’re not in Game of Thrones, college football is Game of Thrones. Look at it, because of USC and UCLA’s move and they had no other choice. They had no other choice because they have to get in line with the smart money that I was talking about a little bit before.
“So it begs the question ‘What do we do? If you’re telling me it’s all doom and gloom all this stuff? What do we do?’ Well, you know what, there are some things that we can do. I get crossway looks if that’s how you even say it, cross-eyed looks, from people in college football when I bring this up. But there’s a reason that this isn’t a problem in the NFL.”
Realignment is very different at the pro level. It’s not about an arm’s race. It’s about steering the ship in the best direction for the league as a whole.
“And the reason that this is not a problem in the NFL is because everybody is rowing in the same direction,” Klatt said. “Everyone’s pulling in the same direction in the NFL. broadcast partners, programs, divisions, the NFL, everybody, everybody involved is pulling in the same direction. We’re in college football. That’s not the case.”