Who owns college football? Who owns the NFL? Some of you may be old enough to remember football before television. Radio stations would broadcast games. There was this professional football league called the NFL. Then came television. It changed everything. For college football we all became familiar with television contracts to broadcast games and the incredible power and money it represented. Survival of conferences was almost tied to an ability to generate television revenue. Streaming is allowing some availability, but ESPN controls a huge share of the broadcast product and marketplace. So, again, who owns college football? Many of the colleges make very little and without television money might not even exist. Whereas others make huge money and part of it is from very lucrative tv contracts. Money, money, money. Where does the money come from? Advertising. TV commercials. And long ago, the NFL figured out that a game televised was a three hour commercial for their own product. Point is, money owns football and it comes from tv commercials. It is tied to customers for the product packages put together. There are the product bundlers and the product marketing end or the televised games. They are closely tied and their profits depend on their combined efforts. As a matter of fact, I think that ESPN is so powerfully involved that they can control much of how realignment happens. Especially the lower on the totem pole the teams are. This all brings me to this. The teams in 2023 Conference USA are a market for commercials. They have a certain value. To ESPN. I think that as this shakes out, ESPN will put some pressure on how it happens. I don't think CUSA can long exist. WKU and MTU are already gone to the Mac in their minds. The conference can't really add any more teams, hardly.
The cartels are probably going to go to four 16 team conferences-or perhaps one 32 team conference with four divisions. Money, money, money. The 64 teams would allow them to bring in half of their teams to championships and bowl games.
This map shows the PAC 12 Big10 ACC and SEC shaded. The MWC CUSA and Big12 are outlined. All of the are very sketched in. I believe that ESPN knows that a stratification is coming and in order to keep lower level markets alive, thriving, and served will convince the MWC to add the two teams just south of Duke City, Las Cruces and El Paso to their conference as it would represent a million viewers. That is more than Wyoming and Idaho combined, or probably damned close. Maybe even creep on over to Sam for the Huntsville Houston market. It is so logical to add UTEP and NMSU. For their own survival. Money, money, money. A Sun Bowl game thrown in to sweeten the deal might make it irresistible.
