USC, UCLA joining Big 10; Rest of Pac-12 Could Collapse

Breaking News: Alabama and Ohio State have announced they are jumping to the NFL.

Players complain they would have to take a pay cut.

NFL mulling whether to drop Lions and Jaguars in response.

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Originally Posted by Buff

College football is a joke if you aren't one of like 10 teams. Product has been in decline for 20 years. Conferences don't make any sense - bowl games don't make any sense - the playoff system is fatally flawed. Have almost zero use for it.

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I love college football. I grew up with LSU. I’d rather watch a college game than NFL, or I use to. In all my 48.9 yrs of life, I remember following college football at least 46 yrs. With this said, I have to agree. It’s not the same collegiate football I’m use to watching. I’m sure transfers and NIL are the future.

When I was a kid, I loved listening to Keith Jackson commentating a Pac 10 game. It was usually USC.

The PAC-10 (as they are now) are desperate to stay together but it may not work. Oregon and Washington want to go to the Big 10 but the money-counters say the two schools don't bring in enough revenue to split the pie the Big 10 is expecting with their next contract. The Big 10 is keeping a seat warm for Notre Dame but says otherwise they are done expanding. If they do manage to reel in the Irish, Stanford may be invited due to their rivalry with Notre Dame and their geographic location providing a third California stop for road trips. Utah also thinks they can get into the Big 10 but that seems very unlikely.

The Big 12, meanwhile, has sent out feelers to Arizona, Arizona, St., Colorado and Utah but say that there's been no official invites extended. If they leave, the remaining PAC schools would either disband or poach some schools from the Mountain West to stay afloat. One issue is that the PAC leaders insist on schools with high academic credentials which is not as true of the Big 12 and the Mountain West.

In August, representatives of ESPN, Fox and others are said to begin talking television rights contracts for 2025 and beyond with both the PAC and Big 12 conferences. Unofficial projections of the PAC - minus USC and UCLA - would generate roughly $20-30 mil/yr per school. Estimates for the Big 12 schools - minus Texas and Oklahoma -are $40-50 mil/yr per school. If those estimates are close to accurate, that's when you'll begin to see some defections with the two Arizona schools likely leading the way.

I have been done with college sports for a while (since the Penn State scandal), but I hope this really hurts college sports in the long run.

Brian Tuohy (author of The Fix Is In: Showbiz Manipulations of NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL, and NASCAR) is right: College sports should be destroyed.