How will the college football landscape change in the near future? | Yahoo Sports College Podcast

Yahoo Sports’ Dan Wetzel and Pete Thamel, and Sports Illustrated’s Pat Forde discuss the changing of the guard at the top of college sports’ most powerful conferences and how the landscape of college sports will change in the next few years.

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DAN WETZEL: I want to get to this though. Pete, you had a story recently about change is coming. And we're now looking at-- we've had a fairly new Big Ten and SEC AD. There's a new ACC, Pac-12. There's a lot of turnover at the top.

And we're entering this thing where we have conference realignment possibly. You have playoff expansion. There's five years left on this deal. Are we gonna see a change in that? But we're entering a huge time of change in college sports, and we're gonna get a new generation, basically, running this thing, right? Pete?

PETE THAMEL: So, yes, college sports is getting younger. It's changing dynamically. It was interesting that Larry Scott told me last night on the phone he wasn't really a huge fan of where things were going with college athletics just in general. He was unsure what guardrails would be in place of the name, image, and likeness and just was pretty blunt about not being a big fan about where things were headed.

So we are going to see more change in college athletics in the next 18 months than we saw in the last 10 years. I really think there is just gonna be insane amounts of change, massive amounts of seismic change. I think it's coming, it's coming quickly, and it's gonna be frenetic.

PAT FORDE: OK, I do not disagree with you at all, but what are going to be the driving purposes then behind if there's conference realignment and/or expansion? If it's not cable boxes, what is it? What's driving them to say let's go get Boise or let's move from conference A to conference B?

PETE THAMEL: It's a good question. The fun rumor is that the SEC will go after Texas and Oklahoma and just try to do the world takeover. Now remember last time, Texas Tech and Oklahoma State had to come as tagalongs, which ultimately, I think, really gummed up the Pac-12 deal. That was probably Larry Scott's boldest thing.

PAT FORDE: Right.

PETE THAMEL: He had Texas and Oklahoma pretty much in the bag, and then they ended up backing out. And how the world may be different if--

DAN WETZEL: Much different discussion if that had happened.

PETE THAMEL: Correct. Here's the thing. Is a place like Notre Dame, for example, which has a TV deal up, I think, in '24 coming up, can they go to a straight streaming play? Do you start courting individual customers in that way? What would you pay to see a Notre Dame-USC game when they're both ranked in the top 10? I don't think I'd hesitate to throw down $25 to do that, right? Now that's easy to say. It's more complicated.

But now does a place like Texas see that-- they already have their own network in place. The same amount of people watch it as watch the Pac-12 Network. But when you have the infrastructure in place, do you say, hey, maybe we go independent and run our own ship and control our own rights?

I just think we have to start thinking differently. Now, ultimately, market is important and population size is important. I'm not gonna dismiss that. But I do think that the factors and just the media dynamics are drastically different.

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