Joel Klatt: Conference realignment is never ending

College football continues to be in flux, even if things seem relatively quiet for now following a couple weeks of headlines out of the ACC about potential moves or conference realignment to shore up the league’s standing.

The most recent round of major conference realignment will begin to take place in just a year, when Oklahoma and Texas head to the SEC and UCLA and USC head to the Big Ten. Already the Big 12 has welcomed some new members.

FOX Sports analyst Joel Klatt says any idea of conference realignment ending there is silly, tthough.

“The instability in college football surrounding conferences is not stopping,” Klatt said in a video on Monday. “As much as people want to say that, ‘OK, let’s just get through this round of realignment, let’s get Oklahoma and Texas to the SEC and let’s get USC and UCLA to the Big Ten and then everyone can just take a deep breath and everything will be better.’

“But that’s a lie. That’s a lie. This is never going to stop. It’s never going to stop and I want to talk about the reasons why. And I know that some of them are obvious, but I want to be more specific with you and let you peek under the hood a little bit about what goes on in college football and what’s wrong with the business model. Because I do think the overall structure and overall business model in college football is somewhat broken.”

Whether programs and conferences can continue to make the numbers work is a key question.

Financially the Big Ten and SEC are set to soar past some of their peers as new TV rights deals kick in. That was the source of much of the angst in the ACC in recent weeks.

To Klatt, that key concern will linger.

“You have to understand that it’s not going to stop because there’s not an unlimited source of money,” Klatt said. “These networks that basically fund all of sports but certainly college football, there’s not a blank check. And I think the Pac-12 is realizing right now, and maybe even some other people, even the NFL to a certain degree, there was this sense a few years ago that, ‘Hey, the streamers are going to come in and bump us up exponentially as far as value and revenue.’

“But that’s not the case. That’s not the case, because their business model is changing. And it’s changing faster, by the way, than the linear model has ever changed.”

While sports rights remain a major target for some of the streaming companies due to the stickiness they provide with subscribers, progress has not been lightning quick on that front.

Moreover, Klatt pointed out that there’s been a dynamic shift in how major executives look at things when it comes to conference realignment.

“There’s not an unlimited source of money. So because of that, the money has to get smarter,” Klatt said. “Ten years ago, when a lot of these deals were signed, when the Big 12 signed their deal and the Pac-12 signed their deal, Colorado moved and Nebraska moved and Maryland and Rutgers moved, our last iteration of conference realignment was really borne out of volume.

“Conferences needed more teams, they needed more markets, and that’s because the business model was born out of linear television and, more specifically, cable television. And cable television was about subscriber fees. So you just needed bigger, better, more. And you needed those markets to get more subscriber fees in order to drive your value up. It wasn’t necessarily about the quality as it was about the quantity.”

That has changed in 2023, which might fundamentally alter how conference realignment takes shape going forward.

“Now what’s going on is it’s not about quantity and it’s all about quality, because the haves are really separating themselves out as far as the number of eyeballs you have,” Klatt said. “So as a conference no one cares how many subscribers you have, they care how many eyeballs you have. Those are two different things, very different things.

“It’s not about the bundle anymore, it’s about who can you get to your game and how long can you keep them there. When you look at it through that lens you start to see exactly why this disparity in terms of value is starting to approach in college football, where we’ve got the haves, Big Ten and the SEC, and the have nots, everybody else.”

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