College football insider predicts how USC, UCLA joining Big Ten could impact the CFP

ESPN college football insider Pete Thamel joined The Paul Finebaum Show Thursday afternoon in wake of all the conference realignment news to talk through the consequences of the moves by USC and UCLA. One aspect of college football that’s been sort of overlooked in all the discussion since the bombshell news broke is how realignment could affect the College Football Playoff (CFP).

Here’s how Thamel saw Thursday’s news impacting the CFP going forward:

“Everything’s interwoven, Paul. I think one of the many tributaries that comes out of this is how the Playoff is impacted. I think if you’re the ACC and you’re the Pac-12 and you sat around with a straight face — and I know the semantic gymnastics and said they weren’t against it — they were obstacles to the Playoff. Now, there’s going to be obstacles for them to be included in the Playoff in a significant way or it’s certainly going to be a lot harder. Like, is this next iteration of the Playoff, does it go towards an all-SEC, all-Big Ten in people meeting? I just think we’re going to see more moves sooner than later. The financial forces and the financial pressures are too hard.”

The SEC already gets multiple teams in the Playoff on a regular basis. Perhaps the Big Ten will begin to do the same. And with the SEC adding two more teams, there’s no reason to think these conferences won’t dominate the CFP field.

More from Thamel on realignment

Thamel also said one important part of conference realignment are leagues’ grants of rights. A grant of rights ties directly into media rights and grant those rights to the conference instead of the individual schools. The Pac-12 grant of rights is about to expire, and USC and UCLA didn’t move to extend the agreement. That, Thamel said, raised some red flags.

“This was an easy one to predict in a lot of ways,” Thamel said on The Paul Finebaum Show. “USC and UCLA are going to pay no financial penalty to leave the Pac-12. They’re going to fulfill their contract and they’re going to fulfill their grant of rights. One of the hints in the Pac-12 that this was going to happen was that the grant of rights were expiring and there had been no movement by USC or UCLA to sign onto a longer grant of rights.

“It would be easy to point to the ACC. The issue there is they have grant of rights through the length of their TV deal, which I believe is through 2036. If it’s not ‘36, it’s ‘34. But it’s well into the 2030s, and I’ve said many times publicly, it is cement shoes on the league. It is a terrible deal from the ACC perspective. It would essentially have Clemson making half as much money as South Carolina in the near future within the end of the decade in terms of TV revenue.”