Tag: alliance

Big Ten and SEC announce joint advisory group to in essence take control of college football

There is a new ‘Alliance’ — and it can’t possible end up worse than the old one

The Big Ten and SEC are coming together to form a joint advisory committee “to address the significant challenges facing college athletics,” according to numerous reports.

I would refer to this new structure as a true ‘Alliance,’ for those who remember the time before realignment shook the college football world — when former Big Ten Commissioner Kevin Warren formed the famous ‘Alliance’ with the Pac 12 and ACC before adding USC, UCLA, Oregon and Washington to the Big Ten, forcing the Pac 12 to disband forever.

This proposed structure with the Big Ten and SEC actually makes some sense. It will be a joint advisory group of university presidents and athletic directors with the same purpose: steering college football into a sustainable future. The Big Ten and the SEC are the two clear powers in the sport, so their input and actions should carry more weight than what the NCAA tries to do to remedy the disaster it created.

This is a big step towards a true governance structure of college football, not of college sports as a whole. As we’ve seen over the past few decades, but especially over the last few years, college football needs clear rules, direction and leadership. This news doesn’t bring that, but at least it’s an initiative toward that goal.

Given the last ‘Alliance’ resulted in one conference pillaging another, I don’t see how this can end up any worse.

Mac Lain excited for future matchups for Tigers in ‘Alliance’

This past week commissioners from the ACC, Big Ten and Pac-12 announced the formation of a historic alliance between the three conferences. The formal announcement did not include specific terms of the alliance but featured talk of future …

This past week commissioners from the ACC, Big Ten and Pac-12 announced the formation of a historic alliance between the three conferences.

The formal announcement did not include specific terms of the alliance but featured talk of future scheduling.

“Τhe football scheduling alliance will feature additional attractive matchups across the three conferences while continuing to honor historic rivalries and the best traditions of college football,” the statement released on Tuesday said.

Former Clemson offensive lineman Eric Mac Lain hopped into the conversation on the alliance Thursday after the Tigers’ practice at the fields behind the Allen Reeves Football Complex.

The ACC Network analyst visited practice in conjunction with the networks ACC Football Road Show and shared the matchups he wants for Clemson with schools in the Pac-12.

“Oregon was really good in my career so that would have been fun to go there and host them here,” Mac Lain said. “I think when you think of big name brands it would be fun to play USC and to see over there in LA and what they’ve got going on.”

Mac Lain played on the offensive line for the Tigers from 2011-15 and served as a captain on the first team to reach the College Football Playoff National Championship Game in 2015. He’s excited to see how the alliance contributes to the evolving nature of college football with Clemson at the center.

“It’s going to be really fun to see which way college football goes, it’s an ever changing landscape,” he said. “The only thing that’s important for this area is that Clemson is going to be square in the middle of all of it, there’s no question.”

Football season has finally arrived. Time to represent your Tigers and show your stripes!

Is the alliance aligned when it comes to CFP expansion?

Not only do the Atlantic Coast, Big Ten and Pac-12 conferences want a seat at the table, they want a rather large one. Big Ten Commissioner Kevin Warren made that clear. “We’re still unpacking this information, but I do think whenever a decision is …

Not only do the Atlantic Coast, Big Ten and Pac-12 conferences want a seat at the table, they want a rather large one. Big Ten Commissioner Kevin Warren made that clear.

“We’re still unpacking this information, but I do think whenever a decision is made, we need to make sure we have an inclusive voice,” Warren said.

Warren’s comments came after the trio of Power Five conferences came together to officially announce their alliance, a collaboration, the commissioners said, that was supported by presidents, chancellors and athletic directors at all 41 schools. Among the goals for the alliance is to have that voice when it comes to the potential expansion of the College Football Playoff, which is what Warren’s comments were referencing.

The playoff has been at four teams since its creation in 2014, but with five power conferences and the Group of Five leagues getting left out year after year, expansion has always seemed like a formality. A working group recently proposed a 12-team playoff that still has to be reviewed by the CFP board of managers, which is scheduled to happen Sept. 28, with a final decision coming at a later time.

That working group consists of SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey, Big 12 Commissioner Bob Bowlsby, Mountain West Commissioner Craig Thompson and Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick. In other words, the ACC, Big Ten and Pac-12 weren’t involved in those expansion discussions.

Are Warren, ACC Commissioner Jim Phillips and Pac-12 boss George Kliavkoff all in favor of the proposed expansion?

“We haven’t made a final decision about where we will fall,” Phillips said.

Said Warren, “I’m a big believer in expanding the College Football Playoff.”

“The Pac is 100% in favor of expansion of the College Football Playoff,” Kliavkoff answered.

As aligned as the three conferences are supposed to be, it’s not surprising that Phillips, Warren and Kliavkoff would look out for their best interests here. The ACC and Big Ten have been represented in the CFP each year — for the ACC, it’s been Clemson each of the last six — but if you’re Phillips and Warren, why wouldn’t you want to expand the field with the possibility of getting even more of your teams in?

Meanwhile, the Pac-12 has only been part of the playoff once — Washington in 2016 — so Kliavkoff doesn’t have much choice other than to advocate for more teams if his league wants to have a better chance of participating more often in the future.

So why isn’t Phillips yet singing the same tune as his colleagues?

“I think as we all got together in Dallas in June, it was that we were going to spend the rest of the summer until the third week of September when we reconvened about resocializing the playoff. What did we like about it? Did we have issues with it? did it make sense? Too many games? What did it do to the bowl structure and the bowls system itself? 

“We want to take the whole entire period in order to really vet it thoroughly.”

So it’s not that the ACC is necessarily against expanding the field. The league, as Phillips put it, simply wants to “collect as many data points as possible” before making a decision as to what that might look like alongside the Pac-12 and Big Ten, whose bosses share the same sentiment.

The commissioners said they’ve been talking to athletic directors, coaches and student-athletes at institutions in their respective conferences to get their input. After spending Monday at the University of Colorado in Boulder, Kliavkoff said he was in eastern Washington on Tuesday visiting another Pac-12 school.

“We’re all doing this work so that by Sept. 28 we have very good feedback to provide back for the broader committee,” Kliavkoff said.

Expansion could take on other forms. If not 12 teams, it could be eight or six. Or perhaps it stays at four, though, at this point, that’s the least likely outcome.

But whatever decision the alliance ultimately makes, Warren said, needs to have the well-being of the student-athletes at the forefront.

“We need to think through the length of the season,” Warren said. “Health and wellness issues, not only physical but mental. Primarily the academics. How does this impact final exams? In the Midwest, we’re in cold-weather climates. We need to make sure our stadiums are winterized. How does this impact our network partners? All these different issues need to be reviewed, analyzed and assimilated. We’re working on that now.”

Time to get the latest Clemson apparel to show your Tiger pride. Order your officially licensed Clemson gear right here!

Swinney gives his take on ACC, Big Ten, Pac-12 alliance

Clemson head coach Dabo Swinney joined Mark Packer and Wes Durham as a guest on the Packer and Durham show on the ACC Network on Wednesday. Packer asked Swinney for his take on the ACC, Big Ten and Pac-12 alliance, which was officially announced …

Clemson head coach Dabo Swinney joined Mark Packer and Wes Durham as a guest on the Packer and Durham show on the ACC Network on Wednesday.

Packer asked Swinney for his take on the ACC, Big Ten and Pac-12 alliance, which was officially announced Tuesday as an “alliance that will bring 41 world-class institutions together on a collaborative approach surrounding the future evolution of college athletics and scheduling.”

“I mean, it’s 2021, man. I have no idea,” Swinney told Packer and Durham. “It seems like a great thing. It sounds like, I guess it’s 41 teams. That’s a lot of people collaborating together for hopefully the good of college football. So, that to me is a big positive, any time you get a group of people like that, that are communicating and collaborating together on critical factors that impact this game, impact the collegiate experience and so forth. But other than that, it’s just kind of another day in 2021.”

Time to get the latest Clemson apparel to show your Tiger pride. Order your officially licensed Clemson gear right here!

SEC commish gives statement on ACC, Big Ten, Pac-12 alliance

On Tuesday, the ACC, Big Ten and Pac-12 officially announced an alliance that will work together on a “collaborative approach surrounding the future evolution of college athletics and scheduling.” The move comes in response to the SEC, which of …

On Tuesday, the ACC, Big Ten and Pac-12 officially announced an alliance that will work together on a “collaborative approach surrounding the future evolution of college athletics and scheduling.”

The move comes in response to the SEC, which of course added Texas and Oklahoma. Both schools will officially join the SEC on July 1, 2025.

Following the announcement of the alliance, SEC commissioner Greg Sankey gave a statement to The Action Network college football insider Brett McMurphy:

Time to get the latest Clemson apparel to show your Tiger pride. Order your officially licensed Clemson gear right here!

What’s the primary motivation behind alliance among ACC, Big Ten and Pac-12?

For the last month, ACC Commissioner Jim Phillips said, the leaders of college athletics’ newly formed alliance – Phillips, Big Ten Commissioner Kevin Warren and Pac-12 Commissioner George Kliavkoff – have spent just as much time conversing with …

For the last month, ACC Commissioner Jim Phillips said, the leaders of college athletics’ newly formed alliance — Phillips, Big Ten Commissioner Kevin Warren and Pac-12 Commissioner George Kliavkoff — have spent just as much time conversing with each other as they have their own family, including their spouses.

“We’ve literally been married to one another,” Phillips said.

Of course, that timeline isn’t a coincidence. In late July, Texas and Oklahoma  announced they will be leaving their post as Big 12 members in 2025 (if not sooner) to join the SEC. Phillips admitted it raised the collective antenna of college athletics across the country.

“I think what that did is that it allowed all of us in college athletics to maybe take a step back and step forward and really start evaluating what the next one, three, five, seven, 10, 15 years look like in college athletics?” Phillips said during a conference call Tuesday. “Quite naturally, because we’re in this business, we’re always aware of conference realignment.”

But Warren stopped short of calling the Big Ten, ACC and Pac-12’s alliance a reaction to the SEC’s move, particularly when it comes to money. While all three commissioners agreed their formation has the potential to increase revenue for the schools in their leagues, particularly when it comes to future media rights deals centered around football scheduling, they were adamant that finances weren’t the primary motivation for their union, which became official Tuesday.

First and foremost, Kliavkoff said, the alliance, which will include a scheduling partnership for football, men’s and women’s basketball and Olympic sports, was a chance for the three leagues to try to protect the collegiate model and give student-athletes the chance to maximize their college experience.

Phillips also said the three conferences saw an opportunity to stabilize a “volatile environment” that they believe exist in college athletics, adding it’s “too important to too many athletes across the country.”

“Sometimes it can’t be driven by money,” he said.

Time to get the latest Clemson apparel to show your Tiger pride. Order your officially licensed Clemson gear right here!

 

Alliance Social Media reactions: ‘These people must be new to college athletics’

Twitter explodes after the announcement of the “Alliance” between the ACC, Big Ten, and Pac-12 Conferences.

The SEC and commissioner Greg Sankey rocked the college football landscape when they brought in two of the biggest brands in the sport. Both the Oklahoma Sooners and Texas Longhorns rank among the most valuable football programs.

This left the remaining eight schools in the Big 12 and commissioner Bob Bowlsby trying to figure out the next move. The “other” eight don’t really bring much in terms of value if they wanted to join another conference. It appears that the Big 12 is all but dead at this point.

The focus shifted to the ACC, Big Ten, and Pac-12 Conferences as they were set to announce a three-conference alliance in response to the SEC’s power play. If their hope was to put the SEC on notice, it appears that they have failed miserably. At least in the eyes of the social media reactions that transpired shortly after the commissioners spoke to the media.

We have collected some of the top reactions from today’s news of the alliance.

Pages: Page 1, Page 2

Report: Big Ten, ACC and Pac 12 expected to announce alliance as early as next week

Report: Big Ten, ACC and Pac 12 expected to announce alliance as early as next week

The Big Ten, ACC and Pac 12 are expected to announce an alliance as early as next week, according to a report from The Athletic’s Nicole Auerbach.

The move comes in light of the recent shakeup in the south with Oklahoma and Texas expected to join the SEC sometime in the near future.

“Schools within the three conferences believe they are like-minded,” Auerbach writes. “that they want to continue to prioritize broad-based sports offerings and that the academic profile of their institutions matters — as does graduating athletes.”

With the Big 12 and SEC at war and two of the Big 12’s biggest money-makers Oklahoma and Texas, set to leave the conference, the language behind the alliance makes sense. In short: the Big Ten, ACC and Pac 12 want to continue the great traditions of college sports while the Big 12 and SEC battle over money and television deals.

Auerbach continues to note that “There are many administrators in the Big Ten, Pac-12 and ACC who believe in the collegiate model and want it to continue; even those who have enthusiastically embraced name, image and likeness reform don’t want to see college football become an actual minor league system for the NFL with a draft, player salaries and the like. They worry that the SEC’s aggression could lead to something like that.”

A potential alliance between the three conferences would likely include scheduling and more, focusing on building some sort of structure with the NCAA becoming increasingly fragmented.

What this means for Wisconsin is not yet clear. Though it does point towards the Big Ten conference maintaining the same structure and avoiding the conference realignment we’re seeing in the south.

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