Abstract
FBS conference realignment is usually analyzed as a sequence of discrete raids. It is better understood as a system with a known fuse length. The binding instruments that hold conferences together — grants of rights and exit penalties — are contracts with expiration dates, and those dates cluster. The Big Ten’s media package expires after 2029–30, the Big 12’s in 2030, the current College Football Playoff agreement in 2031, and the Atlantic Coast Conference’s negotiated exit fee reaches its floor of roughly $75 million in 2030–31 before the grant of rights itself lapses in 2036. That clustering defines a detonation window, and everything a conference does between now and then is best read as an attempt to survive it.
This paper argues four things. First, the near-term picture is deceptively calm: the 2026 realignment cycle touched no Power Four league, and the movement was confined to a rebuilt Pac-12 and a chain reaction beneath it. Second, the calm is a function of contract terms rather than institutional strength, and the terms run out on a schedule anyone can read. Third, the existential threat is real but misdescribed: what is endangered is not the conference as a named entity but the conference as the sport’s unit of governance, a role already being transferred to two commissioners, a court settlement, a national enforcement body, and possibly Congress. Fourth, fan response is a weak constraint that has been effective exactly once, and not because fans acted — the effective resistance has come from university governing boards, which is a materially different thing and a more promising one.
This paper takes the domino-dynamics and consequences angle. Candidate alignment models and the affirmative conditions a stable configuration would require are treated in the companion paper and are not reproduced here.
1. The Question Properly Posed
“Is realignment an existential threat to the conferences?” is three questions wearing one coat.
The first is whether particular conferences will cease to exist. The second is whether the conference as an institutional form will cease to matter. The third is whether the things conferences currently produce — schedules, revenue distribution, championships, eligibility enforcement, and a shared identity that fans attach to — will still be produced by anyone, and by whom.
These come apart. The Pac-12 answered the first question in the affirmative and then partially reversed it: the conference lost ten of twelve members and has now rebuilt to eight. It exists. Whether it is the same institution in anything but name is a question the law answers one way and every fan of the league answers another. That gap between legal persistence and functional death is where most of the analytical work in this paper is done.
2. Where Things Stand: July 2026
The 2026 cycle took effect on July 1 and was, by recent standards, quiet at the top. The ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, and SEC all kept their 2025 lineups; every move involved the Pac-12 and the Group of Five. The Pac-12 became an eight-member league consisting of Boise State, Colorado State, Fresno State, Oregon State, San Diego State, Texas State, Utah State, and Washington State. The Mountain West lost five members to that rebuild and replaced them with Northern Illinois from the MAC, UTEP from Conference USA, and North Dakota State from the FCS; Louisiana Tech left Conference USA for the Sun Belt, leaving C-USA at ten; and Sacramento State moved up from the FCS to the MAC. North Dakota State and Sacramento State bring the FBS to 138 teams.
Two features of that cycle matter more than the roster changes themselves.
First, the failed raid. The Pac-12 targeted UTSA, Tulane, Memphis, and USF from the American, and those four presented a united front and committed publicly to staying. That is the only recent instance of a targeted group holding. It is worth studying precisely because it is anomalous.
Second, the backfill mechanism. North Dakota State’s arrival — a program with ten FCS national titles, eight of them in a nine-season stretch — is the clearest signal that the bottom of the FBS is now replenished by upward reclassification. This changes the character of the cascade: each raid no longer subtracts from the total but reshuffles it, drawing new entrants from below on terms that favor the conferences doing the drawing.
Meanwhile the top of the sport is defined by a governance arrangement rather than a membership map. Under the agreement signed in 2024 during the last ESPN negotiations, the Big Ten and SEC commissioners hold the bulk of control over the playoff’s format for 2026 and beyond, with the other commissioners and Notre Dame having signed off. When those two could not agree before the January 2026 deadline, the playoff stayed at twelve for a third season — the Big Ten preferring a 24-team field with multiple automatic qualifiers per conference, the SEC preferring a sixteen-team model with five conference champions and eleven at-large places, backed by the ACC and Big 12. The deadline for changes to the 2027 format is December 1, 2026.
Note what that stalemate reveals. The sport’s most consequential structural decision was made by two people failing to agree, and the result was the status quo by default. That is not stability. That is a coin balanced on its edge.
3. The Mechanics of a Domino
A realignment cascade requires four things in sequence, and understanding them explains why the next one is predictable in timing if not in detail.
A revenue gap that is visible and rising. The ACC’s unrest originated in a per-school gap of roughly $6 million against the SEC and $15 million against the Big Ten in 2022–23 tax filings. The Big Ten’s average distribution has since reached roughly $63 million per school. Gaps of this size do not merely annoy; they compound into competitive deficits that are legible to donors, trustees, and recruits.
A binding instrument whose price is known. This is the crucial variable, and it is the one that changed in 2025. Before the settlement, an ACC school leaving before June 2036 owed three times the conference operating budget — roughly $120 million — plus the surrender of its media rights through the end of the grant of rights. Florida State’s attorneys had put the total exposure as high as $700 million. An unknowable and possibly ruinous price is a far better deterrent than a high one, because no board can approve a departure it cannot cost out.
A price schedule that declines. The settlement set exit fees at $165 million for 2026, declining by $18 million per year until leveling at $75 million from 2030–31 through 2036, with departing schools retaining their media rights at that point. Nathan’s companion work on barriers to stability treats this at length; the point to register here is narrower and sharper. The settlement bought peace by converting an unquantifiable deterrent into a payment schedule. A payment schedule is a plan. Once a departure has a number attached, the question stops being “can we leave?” and becomes “when does leaving become affordable?” — and the answer is now printed.
A calendar that lines up. The timing of the reduction is the point: television deals for the Big Ten (2029–30) and Big 12 (2030) and the next iteration of the College Football Playoff (2031) all come up for renewal just as the fee reaches $75 million. Nothing in that alignment is accidental. It was negotiated by parties who understood exactly what they were building.
4. The 2030–31 Detonation Window
Set the dates side by side.
- 2029–30: Big Ten media rights expire. The conference will be pricing its inventory and will know precisely which additions raise the price and which dilute it.
- 2030: Big 12 media rights expire. The Big 12’s position is weaker; it will be both a buyer and a potential seller of members.
- 2030–31: ACC exit fee bottoms at roughly $75 million, and departing schools keep their media rights.
- 2031: The current CFP agreement ends. The present six-year deal beginning in 2026 is reportedly worth about $1.3 billion annually. Whoever controls format in 2031 controls the access rules that determine what conference membership is worth.
- 2036: ACC grant of rights lapses entirely.
Between 2029 and 2031, then, every major restraint releases at once while every major asset is repriced at once. A conference weighing whether to add two ACC brands will be doing so at the exact moment it must demonstrate growth to a network, and an ACC school weighing departure will be doing so at the exact moment the penalty reaches its floor and its media rights come home. This is not a forecast of doom. It is an observation that the system’s designers have scheduled a simultaneous test of every joint in the structure.
The one serious attempt to defuse the window failed. The Big Ten pursued a plan to spin off a new entity, Big Ten Enterprises, housing all league-wide media rights and sponsorships, with a University of California pension fund taking a 10 percent stake for a cash infusion of more than $2 billion, and — critically — an extension of the grant of rights to 2046. The $2.4 billion would have been distributed on a tiered basis, with every program receiving at least something in the $100 million range and larger programs receiving more. A grant-of-rights extension on those terms would have been a direct blow to entities attempting to assemble super leagues.
It did not happen. Michigan and USC opposed it, and UC Investments paused the plan in November 2025 pending “unity” among the eighteen members. One university board member framed the objection concisely: the world changes too fast to lock into a twenty-year grant of rights. USC’s athletic director cast the decision in fiduciary terms, noting that the money would be unevenly distributed and would create a tiered distribution system going forward. The league went so far as to socialize a November 21 vote to proceed without Michigan and USC, offering them a grace period to join later — an extraordinary step, since it would have meant Ohio State extending a grant of rights to 2046 without its chief rival. A member of Congress wrote to the commissioner in opposition, arguing that broadcasters’ pursuit of market share had already produced realignment that destroyed the regional character of college sports and imposed cross-country travel on athletes in revenue and non-revenue sports alike.
The episode is the single most informative event of the last two years, and its lesson runs against the usual reading. The usual reading is that Michigan and USC defended university values against private capital. That may be true as to motive. As to effect, they declined to be bound — and a conference whose two most valuable western and northern brands will not extend their grant of rights past 2036 is a conference that has told the market exactly when it becomes available.
5. What “Existential” Actually Means Here
Four distinct fates should be kept apart.
Dissolution. The conference stops operating. Almost no one experiences this, because conference charters, staffs, and revenue streams are durable and someone always wants the shell.
Hollowing. The name survives; the brands leave. This is the Pac-12’s actual fate, and its rebuild demonstrates both the possibility of recovery and its limits. The rebuilt league is an immediate contender to represent the Group of Six in the playoff. That is a real institution doing real work. It is not the conference that existed in 2020, and pretending otherwise confuses continuity of registration with continuity of institution.
Demotion. The conference persists intact but at a lower tier, functioning as a supplier of opponents and occasional playoff qualifiers. This is the likeliest fate of most of the current Group of Six and, in the harder scenarios, of at least one current Power Four league.
Supersession. The conference persists and even prospers financially while its governing functions migrate elsewhere. This is the fate least discussed and most advanced.
Consider what conferences no longer decide. They do not decide playoff format — two commissioners do, by prior agreement of the rest. They do not set athlete compensation — a court-approved settlement does, capping revenue sharing at $20.5 million per institution for 2025–26 with projected growth toward roughly $33 million by 2035, rising to $21.3 million for the fiscal year ending June 2027. They increasingly do not police third-party payments; a national commission does. And they may soon not decide their own membership rules: the Big Ten and SEC have asked Congress to forbid any new entity from assembling dozens of teams into a super league while simultaneously preserving schools’ freedom to move between conferences, to keep media-rights pooling voluntary rather than mandatory, and to keep scheduling out of the statute’s reach.
Read that request carefully. It is a bid to outlaw the competitor’s business model while preserving one’s own acquisition rights. It is also an admission that the conference form cannot defend itself by contract alone and has gone looking for a statute.
So the honest answer to the existential question is this: individual conferences face graduated risks, mostly of hollowing and demotion rather than dissolution; but the conference as the sport’s governing unit is already being superseded, and the process is well advanced whether or not another school ever changes leagues.
6. Risk by League
SEC and Big Ten. Not at risk of loss. At risk of internal fracture, which the Big Ten has now demonstrated. Their exposure is that unequal internal distribution, adopted to retain the biggest brands, formalizes a hierarchy and thereby makes the top of that hierarchy conscious of its own separability. The mechanism that prevents departure this decade teaches the lesson that motivates departure next decade.
ACC. Highest risk, and uniquely well-documented. The revised distribution sends 40 percent of media revenue equally to legacy members and allocates 60 percent by media exposure on a five-year rolling average of television ratings, alongside a success initiative tied largely to playoff performance that could be worth roughly $25 million to a school in a given year. The predictable corollary is that members low in viewership and results will see payments fall. The settlement is a stabilizer through roughly 2029 and a destabilizer thereafter, because it simultaneously funds the strong members’ patience and dates the price of their impatience.
Big 12. The residual claimant. It has no brand with unilateral departure value comparable to Florida State or Clemson, which is a form of protection, and a 2030 rights expiration that arrives before it has consolidated a national identity, which is a form of exposure. Its most likely path is neither death nor ascent but a long tenure as the third league, periodically raided at the margin.
Pac-12 (rebuilt). Structurally the same league that was destroyed, in a weaker market position, with the compensating advantages of a coherent geography and a playoff access point. Its risk is a repeat, and its defense is that it now has less to steal.
Group of Six generally. The cascade is now routinized: a rebuild at one level pulls from the level below, which pulls from the level below that, which pulls from the FCS. Conference USA’s position illustrates the endpoint — a league sustained by absorbing strong FCS programs, with only Middle Tennessee and New Mexico State having been at the FBS level since before 2018. Institutional continuity at this tier is nearly gone; what persists is the conference office and the postseason access it can negotiate.
Notre Dame. The remaining swing variable, and the only actor whose single decision can reprice two leagues at once.
7. Effects on Institutions
The financial reality is that realignment is no longer the primary cost driver; it is the response to one.
The settlement provides $2.8 billion in back damages over ten years to roughly 184,000 former Division I athletes and creates a revenue-sharing system permitting direct payments up to 22 percent of average revenue from media rights, ticket sales, and sponsorships across the power leagues. Participation is optional, and 327 of 364 Division I schools have elected in; scholarship limits have been replaced with roster limits, so participating schools can now effectively fund every athlete. For fully funded departments, the combined cost of revenue sharing plus the NCAA’s distribution reduction runs toward roughly $30 million per year, exceeding 20 percent of many Power Four athletic budgets. Total athlete-directed spending, counting scholarships, travel, and food, now approaches half of revenues.
The consequences for institutions follow mechanically.
Budget substitution. Departments are reconfiguring budgets, intensifying fundraising, and raising student fees, with some contemplating eliminating varsity sports or moving them to club status — and these pressures arrive alongside declining enrollment, reduced government funding, and restrictions affecting international students. This is the point at which athletic decisions become general-institution decisions. A university that raises a mandatory student fee to fund revenue sharing has made every enrolled student a compulsory investor in a football program.
Debt service and the stadium overhang. A significant motive for the Big Ten capital deal was that numerous schools carry heavy debt on stadium construction and renovation on top of rising operational costs and athlete payments. Facilities debt was underwritten against assumptions about conference revenue that predate both the settlement and the current rights market. That is a structural vulnerability distributed unevenly across the membership of every league.
Governance conflict. The private capital episode surfaced a question that had been dormant: who decides? Administrators and conference executives told board members that the decision rested only with presidents and chancellors. Michigan’s publicly elected eight-member board asserted a fiduciary duty against that framing, with one regent stating flatly that they would not be rushed by false deadlines or by parties without their fiduciary responsibilities. Whatever one makes of the merits, this is the reappearance of an accountability channel that realignment had bypassed for fifteen years.
Academic and athlete effects. The congressional objection identified the concrete costs: cross-country travel schedules that raise injury risk and interfere with academic work, in non-revenue sports as much as revenue ones, and that make away-game travel impractical for fans while reducing the frequency of formerly annual rivalries. These costs fall on the athletes in sports that generate none of the money, which is the most defensible criticism of the entire arrangement and the one least likely to alter it.
Upward reclassification as arbitrage. For an FCS program, the desperation of a raided FBS league is an opportunity. North Dakota State and Sacramento State moved up because seats opened. Institutions making that move are betting institutional resources on a tier whose economics are being rewritten mid-bet.
8. Effects on the Conferences Themselves
The conference is a firm, and it is worth asking what it sells.
Historically it sold four things: a schedule, a pooled media product, a championship, and a shared identity that generated attachment. The pooled media product is now the only one that clearly pays, and pooling is precisely what the largest members are learning to question — the SEC has asked that any federal framework make media-rights pooling voluntary rather than mandatory. Once pooling is voluntary, equal distribution is a policy choice rather than a structural fact, and once it is a policy choice, it is negotiable at every renewal.
Both major stabilization attempts of the past eighteen months work by abandoning equality. The ACC now allocates 60 percent of media revenue by viewership share. The Big Ten’s paused plan would have distributed $2.4 billion on a tier basis with larger programs receiving more and would have created a tiered distribution system going forward. This is the central irony of the current moment, and I state it as the paper’s main analytical claim: conferences are purchasing cohesion with instruments that dissolve the basis of cohesion. Equal sharing was never merely an accounting convention. It was the thing that made a conference a conference rather than a joint venture among unequal partners. Replace it with a ratings-weighted formula and you have told every member exactly what it is worth on the open market, updated annually, in a document its trustees can read.
The rebuttal from conference offices is that unequal sharing is simply realism — that the alternative is departure and the loss of everything. That rebuttal is correct in the short run and is the reason the settlements were signed. It is also the reason the 2030–31 window is dangerous, because by then every member will have five years of data on precisely how much less it is receiving than the brands, and no illusion left to protect.
This connects to the broader thesis that college athletics governance principally manufactures insulation for its member institutions rather than the competitive outcomes it nominally regulates. Realignment strips that insulation. A conference that pays by viewership cannot insulate a member from its own irrelevance; a settlement that dates the exit fee cannot insulate a league from its members’ arithmetic; and a Congress drafting membership rules cannot be lobbied into insulating anyone permanently.
9. Fan Response: What Actually Happens
Fan response is the part of this subject most often asserted and least often specified. The record supports four claims.
Fans do not leave, but they were already leaving for other reasons. Attendance decline substantially predates the current realignment wave. National FBS attendance fell for seven consecutive seasons through 2021 to the lowest average since 1981, with ACC attendance down nearly a quarter from its 2004 peak. Student attendance was already down 7.1 percent between 2009 and 2013, attributed to ticket prices, uncompetitive games, fewer traditional rivals owing to realignment, and the proliferation of televised games. Realignment is therefore an accelerant on a fire that was lit by television, pricing, and the substitution of a cheaper home experience. Anyone attributing the whole decline to conference movement is overreading; anyone denying its contribution is underreading.
The grievance is specific, not general. Fans do not mourn “realignment.” They mourn a named game. Oregon–Oregon State — a series played more often than all but three FBS rivalries — was maintained in 2024 and 2025 but will not be played in 2026 or 2027, with nothing scheduled beyond. Notre Dame–USC is the largest casualty; Bedlam is on hiatus. The Lone Star Showdown was severed in 2012 and restored in 2024. This specificity has a practical implication: rivalry restoration is a far cheaper reconciliation than any revenue measure, and conferences know it.
Rivalry has measurable commercial value, which is the strongest lever fans hold. Short of hosting a national power, the most reliable way to sell out a stadium is a familiar opponent with whom the fan base has a deep emotional connection — Utah and BYU’s first Holy War in three years drew the largest crowd in the history of Rice-Eccles Stadium. Fans lack a vote, but their attachment is an asset on someone’s balance sheet, and it is the only asset they own.
Anticipated response is predictable and can be planned for. Across cases, the sequence runs: disbelief; anger directed at the departing institution rather than at the structure; a period in which attendance holds because season tickets are already bought; a lagged decline concentrated among students and marginal attenders; adaptation, in which the new opponents acquire their own history; and a durable nostalgia market in which the severed rivalry is commemorated and occasionally revived as a non-conference event. Nothing in this sequence threatens a conference. Institutions that expect otherwise should not.
The one genuinely effective resistance in this period did not come from fans at all. The Big Ten’s capital plan was stopped by two universities. A congressional letter framed the objection in terms fans would recognize — the destruction of regionality, athlete travel, harm to local tourism economies, and lost annual rivalries — but it was written to a commissioner by an officeholder, and the decision-makers were regents with fiduciary duties. That is the shape of any future check on realignment: not supporter pressure, but public university boards, state legislatures, and federal statute. Fans who want influence should be attending regents’ meetings rather than composing petitions.
10. Four Scenarios, 2026–2036
Scenario A — Consolidated Equilibrium (most likely, roughly 40 percent). The Big Ten and SEC each expand modestly in the 2029–31 window, taking two to four ACC brands between them. The ACC persists as a hollowed league in the Big 12’s tier or merges portions of itself with it. The playoff expands to sixteen or twenty-four with weighted automatic qualifiers, formalizing a two-tier sport. Nothing dissolves; everything is demoted one step.
Scenario B — The Managed Plateau (roughly 25 percent). Federal legislation freezes the map, media rights renew at values that disappoint the raiders, and the exit-fee floor proves psychologically higher than its nominal figure. The Power Four persists to 2036. Instability migrates inward, expressed as distribution fights rather than departures.
Scenario C — The Detached Top (roughly 20 percent). Playoff format and revenue consolidate into an entity that operates independently of conference structure. Conferences survive as scheduling co-operatives and non-revenue sport administrators while football’s governance sits elsewhere. Reporting as of July 2026 indicates continued exploration of alternatives to NCAA governance by SEC and Big Ten leaders without any formal breakaway plan, and the SEC commissioner’s own framing is that outside proposals of any size — twenty schools, thirty, seventy, or all of them — amount to a super league. The relevant observation is that this scenario does not require anyone to announce it.
Scenario D — Cost-Driven Regionalization (roughly 15 percent). Athlete compensation costs, travel expense, litigation, and enrollment pressure combine to make the current geography unaffordable for all but the top twenty programs. A meaningful number of institutions reduce their commitment or drop down. The map contracts toward regionality not by choice but by exhaustion.
11. Leading Indicators
Six things to watch, each of which resolves earlier than the outcome it signals.
- The December 1, 2026 playoff format deadline. Automatic qualifiers weighted toward two leagues would convert Scenario A into the base case immediately.
- Any revival of a grant-of-rights extension in the Big Ten. Whether tied to capital or not, a 2046 grant of rights would take the sport’s largest single risk off the table for a generation.
- The federal statute’s treatment of two clauses: the super-league prohibition and the freedom-of-movement guarantee. The Big Ten and SEC want both, and have asked that the ACC and Big 12 be included among leagues that could not expand into a super league. Whether Congress grants the pair together, separately, or not at all determines which actors can move in 2030.
- ACC brand-initiative disclosures. The first two years of ratings-weighted distributions will show which members are being paid to stay and which are being paid to consider leaving.
- Facilities debt maturities at second-tier Power Four schools. These will identify the institutions with the least freedom to say no.
- Whether any raided-league coalition holds a second time. The American’s four targets held in 2026. One instance is an anecdote; two would be evidence that collective resistance is available at that tier.
12. Conclusion
Realignment is not a series of surprises. It is a schedule. The parties who negotiated the ACC settlement, the CFP agreement, and the current media contracts knew when each restraint would release, and they aligned those dates deliberately. The next several years will therefore be quiet in the way the period before a known deadline is always quiet.
The existential question resolves into an uncomfortable answer. Conferences will not die. Most will persist as legal entities, several will persist as recognizable institutions, and the two largest will grow. But the function that made a conference worth belonging to — pooled revenue, shared governance, and an identity that a supporter could inherit and pass on — is being disassembled from the inside, and it is being disassembled by the very settlements adopted to preserve it. Equality of distribution was the load-bearing wall. Both major leagues have now agreed to remove it.
For institutions, the consequence is that athletic decisions have become general-fund decisions, made under time pressure, with governing boards belatedly discovering they have standing. For fans, the consequence is that the thing they are attached to will retain its name and lose its content, gradually enough that no single year supplies an occasion for refusal. The response most likely to matter is not the response of supporters. It is the response of regents, legislatures, and courts — the parties who, unlike fans, can say no and make it stick.
Notes
1. The dating in §4 assumes that reported contract terms hold. Media agreements are routinely renegotiated early when a party has leverage, and an early Big Ten renewal at a high number would pull the entire window forward by a year or two. The direction of that error is asymmetric: early renewal accelerates; delay does not much postpone, because the exit-fee schedule is fixed by settlement and runs on its own clock.
2. The probabilities attached to the scenarios in §10 are ordinal judgments, not calculations, and are offered to force explicitness rather than to convey precision. A reader who disagrees is invited to reallocate the weights; the useful discipline is to hold them to a hundred.
3. The characterization of the Pac-12’s rebuild as functional discontinuity is contestable and would be contested by the conference. Legal continuity, staff continuity, and two original members are not nothing. The counter-argument is that an institution whose entire competitive peer set, geography of interest, and revenue tier have been replaced has undergone a change of kind. I hold the second view but note that nothing in the paper’s other arguments depends on it.
4. I have deliberately not addressed the merits of athlete compensation. The settlement is treated here strictly as a cost shock that changes institutional incentives, which it does regardless of whether one regards it as overdue justice or as a mistake. Both readings produce the same budget line.
5. The claim in §8 that unequal distribution dissolves what it was adopted to preserve deserves a test rather than assertion. The test is available: if the claim is right, the ACC’s low-viewership members should show measurably increased interest in departure or in conference reconfiguration by roughly 2029, after three cycles of the brand initiative. If they show reduced interest, the claim is wrong and equal sharing was less load-bearing than I have argued.
6. On the fan-response section: I have relied on attendance data that is national and lagging, and on rivalry cases that are individually well documented. What is missing from the public record — and what would improve this analysis considerably — is longitudinal survey data on donor behavior among alumni of relocated programs. Donations are the fan behavior that actually reaches the decision-makers, and they are the least studied.
7. The candidate alignment models, the conditions a durable configuration would have to satisfy, and the taxonomy of barriers to stability are treated in the companion paper and are assumed rather than restated here. A reader coming to this paper first will find §§5–6 thinner than they would otherwise be.
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Wetzel, D. (2025, November 17). Opposition from Michigan, USC pauses $2.4B Big Ten deal. ESPN. https://www.espn.com/college-sports/story/_/id/47003108/opposition-michigan-usc-pauses-24b-big-ten-deal
Wilner, J. (2025, November 18). The Big Ten’s private capital deal is on pause. Here’s what it means. Yakima Herald-Republic. https://www.yakimaherald.com/sports/college_sports/uw_sports/the-big-ten-s-private-capital-deal-is-on-pause-here-s-what-it-means/article_e1db648d-d20f-5f0a-b339-9ebf37f5e9e7.html
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Yahoo Sports. (2026, January 23). College Football Playoff to remain at 12 teams for 2026 season. https://sports.yahoo.com/college-football/breaking-news/article/sources-college-football-playoff-to-remain-at-12-teams-for-2026-season-145023537.html
