The SEC and Big 10 are better

• Costs Connelly, ESPN Staff WriterAug 2, 2024, 07:00 AM ET Close Costs Connelly is a staff writer for ESPN.com.We careen towards the fall

of 2024 with college football in a state of epic shift. Thanks to conference adjustment– and an overall absence of centralized leadership– most of the sport’s huge brands now live in just two conferences, the Big Ten and SEC. They threw their weight around to guarantee a remarkable share of future College Football Playoff money, and they encouraged smaller sized conferences to take on an out of proportion share of settlement-related back payments, assuring they will hog an even bigger percentage of money moving forward( when they already had the most). 2 other power conferences, the ACC and Huge 12, are in an odd state, plainly ahead of the rest of the pack however far behind the Power 2 from a revenue standpoint. The “abundant get richer”vibes are tough to ignore.Here’s an unclean little secret, though: A large portion of SEC and Big 10 fan bases are going to be absolutely miserable moving forward. Making more money isn’t going to unexpectedly make Illinois’football program better than Clemson’s, and with more strong programs in your conference come more loss chances. We have actually seen increasingly irrational head coach buyouts through the years, but we’ve just started to see how illogical a program and its boosters can get. As fans of Chelsea or Manchester United in the English Premier League can testify, in some cases having more cash simply makes you sillier, not better.Meanwhile, the Big 12 is set to become the most entertaining conference on the planet.Actually, it currently was.Conference games decided by one score, 2018-23 Big 12: 46.5 %MAC: 44.6 %Pac-12: 41.3%Sun Belt: 41.0%ACC: 39.3%

AAC: 39.1%Conference USA: 37.5% Huge 10: 36.3%Mountain West: 36.2%SEC: 33.0%Almost half of the Huge 12’s conference games ended up within one rating over the last 6 seasons, and that was with 2 fence-post programs, Oklahoma and
Texas, that
controlled the field financially. The Huge 12 traded its 2 heavyweights for four programs– Arizona, Arizona State, Colorado and Utah officially became conference members Aug. 2–

that are far closer to the remainder of the pack in terms of spending and potential. This trade didn’t make the conference comparatively better or richer, clearly, however all of it however guaranteed that a conference already known for an abundance of close games and turmoil will just end up being more chaotic moving forward.You can have your blowouts and huge buyouts(and, yes, national title goals). The Big 12 is going to have all the enjoyable. Into the excellent large open In each of this summer season’s conference previews, I included conference title chances based on SP+ forecasts. They were pretty revealing when it concerned intra-conference parity.