Dan From OR

There’s a reason USC is the biggest brand in all of college football. We are the Evil Empire. You either want to play for USC or play against USC. And most are choosing for in 2026 ✌🏻 USC is building something scary and all of college football is noticing 👀 #FightOn✌🏻

Projected Governance/Realignment timeline. With discussion now happening within the D1 governance apparatus for creating the new A4 subdivision, I figured its time I put together a potential timeline projection. This will be more of a chain reaction projection than a date and time projection. We can now see that the first step in this chain reaction will be the creating of the new subdivision. After that I would expect The Cabinet to also pass some other rules that create the environment for movement to happen. I have recently illustrated for you how this happened in 1987 when they created the football conference championship games. When they created that, they also created the 12 team and 2 division requirement for being able to hold them. At the time of that creation there was no such thing as a 12 team major conference divided into two divisions. This rule's creation was intended entice expansion. The same will be the case for the rules that The Cabinet creates to go along with the new Subdivision's creation. What other created rules should you watch for? The main two are rule changes that allow for an extended conference post season and then a change to the rule that limits conferences to only having two divisions. They will return to divisions but they will want to have more than just two. With these new rules in place, there will then need to be decisions on how to execute them in a way to increase value enough for expansion to happen. In my opinion, the noise will at this point come from the CFP. We will see some major changes happening within the CFP. With the new subdivision being created, the CFP will have Member Conferences in two different subdivisions in the future. That means the CFP will have to run two different tournaments. So that will start to come up, whether its via the usual sports media or from the CFP itself, could be both. In my opinion, when that comes up, that will be the signal. Moving to two tournaments instead of just one, that is the revenue generation increase signal. This is when realignment in earnest begins, in my opinion. So who first? Well, initially my thoughts on this haven't changed much at all. I still think this begins with UNC and Clemson moving to the SEC. That gets quickly followed up by The B1G taking FSU and GT. After that we hit a period of heavy noise in the media about the SEC being at 18 and whether they follow the B1G to 20. In the end, after all the noise, I do still believe this ends up with NC State and VT moving to the SEC. It might mean lesser payments for them, a first for the SEC, but it might not. We shall see. At this moment, everything is up in the air and it will be clearly evident to everyone just how different this future of CFB will be. At this point, after seeing all those publics leaving the ACC, this is when I think Louisville makes a fateful decision. I think they see the writing on the wall with the ACC and where it is going. They will see how the new ACC payout policy could help them but it also could hurt them. The ACC will have shifted to being heavily controlled by private universities. They make the move to the Big 12. This is where I think The Big 12 puts the ultimatum to Pitt to join with Louisville. I could be wrong about this one but I think Pitt chooses to stay and play by the rules of those Privates. The Big 12 likely wont feel they have much time to be idle at this point. Soon after the Louisville announcement, they reach out to USF and come to terms for an invitation to the Big 12. That puts the Big 12 at 18 and the ACC at 11. All of this is subject to change of course but it is at this point when the biggest surprise might happen. This is when I think BYU might shock the world and jump over into the ACC at the behest of Notre Dame and their friends. I also think this could be when Notre Dame announces that they will be joining the ACC as a full member. Part of the creation of the new subdivision is that I do believe it will be for the autonomous conferences only. There wont be Autonomous Independents. With that momentum of adding BYU fully and ND in football, I think then the ACC quickly follows that up with announced invites for Tulane and Rice. All eyes are on the Big 12 and ACC at this point, Big 12 at 17 and ACC at 14. With the new divisional rules that I brought up earlier, it would seem pretty clear that both conferences would be looking to get to at least 16 or 20 teams. Now with only four in the West, it would look like the Big 12 would have to add at least one in the West. A solution for them would be to plan for Colorado to actually move into the midwest division made up of old Big 8 members. That leaves two spots out East. So the Big 12 brings in OSU and WSU. It brings in the rivalry and it brings in their ties to B1G teams Oregon and Washington. In the future the A4 conferences will have early season cross conference play so with everything taken into account, those two teams likely have the highest value for the Big 12 to get to 19. So everyone is wondering at this point, who the Big 12 will add to round it out at 20? Well the ACC wouldn't have been just sitting back at this point when looking for who the next two would be. Will they reach out to the Army and Navy? With the ACC becoming Private controlled, that may interest those two Academies but jumping up to that level of competition across the board, that may be too much for them. At that point, there might be some SMU folks travelling across town to talk to folks over at TCU. These last additions, that is where I think the fight really will be because this is true realignment. Members could go in either direction between these two, it truly becomes about fit at this point. I do think that the ACC will want to stop at 16 with whatever they decide for #15 and #16. We still dont have the answer for the Big 12's final spot. If they want to have an all Texas division then I think we need to watch what is going on between Texas State and UTSA at that point. That gives a San Antonio location for the conference. My lean at this point, which is going to sound crazy, would be towards Texas State. Now if they dont care about that division being all Texas then they could perhaps throw a Memphis in there or Memphis could go with the Big 8 member division should OSU decide to roll with the Texans. Very difficult to project. This is just for the Majors. I would expect a whole lot of action down in the FBS and FCS as the news of the A4 leaving the FBS and the new FBS having its own tournament, that should lead to a whole lot of interest from FCS members. We should also see plenty of movement up from D2 to the FCS when more FCS powers have moved up. We are talking about a whole new age of realignment and of CFB when this is all over.

Scott Barnes to step down as athletic director at Oregon State oregonlive.com/beavers/2026/0…