One of the biggest discussions in college football for the past year or so has centered around conference realignment.
Texas and Oklahoma got the party started when they announced a move to the SEC, and USC and UCLA kept it rolling with their move to the Big Ten. A move that has since led to geography being tossed out the window and conferences all just figuring out ways to either capitalize on others’ departures or in some cases, stay afloat.
While realignment is far from over, The Athletic’s David Ubben released what he believes conference realignment should actually look like. The college football insider expressed that realignment should be predicated on common sense and equality throughout college football.
In a world where realignment has gone wild, let’s lay out a vision for a college football landscape driven by common sense. In short: It’s time to take some modern sensibility, hop into our time machine and head back toward 1970s geography, turning the Power 5 into a Power 8.
It’s better for everyone. The only loss is Big Ten and SEC fans no longer being able to brag about how much more money their schools are getting (that fans never see) than everyone else. We can live with that.
In reconstructing the Power Five conferences and making them a Power Eight, Ubben broke up conferences like the Pac-12, Big 12, Big Ten, SEC, and ACC.
He split up familiar foes like Texas and Oklahoma, and even brought back some iterations of conferences that once existed like the Pac-8. Here is who Texas was paired up with, and what happened to other Big 12 programs.