conferences Page 1 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

RIP the 12-team College Football Playoff
Hours after it was announced that the College Football Playoff would adopt a 5+7 format, the conference commissioners leaked that 14- and 16-team formats have been discussed. Jim Phillips, ACC commissioner and captain of a drowning vessel, said “At the end of the day, it’s about the right model.” Th...

College Football Playoff committee approves 12-team postseason format
The College Football Playoff is officially expanded. ...

College Football Playoff Board voting on 5+7 postseason model
The College Football Playoffs are finally opening up the potential for expansion. The College Football Playoff board of managers is set to vote on a new model for a 12-team playoff that would include the five highest-ranked conference champions and the next seven highest-ranked teams. ...

Pac-12 might be dead, but its former teams still might have to play in Pac-12 bowls
The Pac-12 might be gone, but it won’t be forgotten during bowl season. According to Action Network’s Brett McMurphy, the 10 schools that left the Pac-12 this season will still play in Pac-12 affiliated bowl games instead of their new conference’s bowl tie-in. ...

A soft, out-of-conference schedule is the way to go for major college football programs
The oddsmakers got it right with Washington on Monday night. The underdog Huskies ran out of magic wishes in the National Championship Game and for once did not beat the point spread against them. Their lack of girth was exposed all night on Monday in a 34-13 loss to Michigan. Neither team faced str...

If Florida State’s goal is to never get snubbed again, leaving the ACC is a terrible idea
Florida State’s rush to leave the ACC is reactionary in every way. After getting snubbed from the College Football Playoff, the school tried to use the courts and Gov. Ron DeSantis to overturn the committee’s decision. Those methods predictably failed and now the Seminole brass is onto the next dumb...

If Florida State leaves the ACC, where does it go?
Updated Dec. 21: Florida State University’s Board of Trustees will meet Friday, with the Seminoles’ conference affiliation as the meeting’s central focus. According to a report from Yahoo Sports, the school may seek a declaratory judgment action in an attempt to argue that it is not bound to its con...

Farewell to college football divisions, the nostalgic blight we all loved to hate
With next year’s conference realignment just around the corner, the PAC-12 isn’t the only college football institution that we’re losing. The SEC and Big 10 will do away with their East and West division format of deciding the participants in their conference championship games. ...

This year’s College Football Playoff controversy is the sport at its best
Amidst all the outrage and taunting on Sunday, I hope everyone took the time to enjoy the rush. A reminder about college sports: the athletes are not as good as the pros. The game is not nearly as polished. What makes up for the majority of participants having no chance at becoming well-paid profess...

Washington is giving Pac-12 football a beautiful swan song
The finality of the Pac-12 is depressing. The Washington Huskies beat the Oregon Ducks, 34-31, on Friday night, and looked like a title contender doing it. Michael Penix had his full array of receivers, with Jalen McMillan returning to grab nine balls for 131 yards. Husky running back Dillon Johnson...

Welcome to the Pac-12 funeral procession
Stating “we’ve never seen something like this before” in sports is usually overused. ...

The ACC is the least powerful Power 4 Conference — even with Cal, Stanford, SMU
It’s better to be proactive than reactive, right? Unless you consider what the Atlantic Coast Conference is already doing to be reactive, scraping up the leftovers from the Pac-12 Conference instead of having enough power in the college athletics landscape to attract more lucrative schools of their ...

Don’t be cowards, Notre Dame. Save the Pac-12
Amid various upheavals and tectonic conference shifts, one of the nation’s most prominent college football brands has maintained its neutrality. Notre Dame is the Joel Osteen of college athletics as a football megachurch without a conference denomination. Notre Dame basketball is the garnish, but fo...

Stanford is the most vulnerable school in college athletics because of conference realignment
The domino effect of Oklahoma and Texas leaving the Big 12 for the SEC (leading to the dismantling of the Pac-12 two years later) is a turn of events that would’ve been nearly impossible to predict. The catalyst for the Power Five’s west coast entry point being almost no more wasn’t UCLA and USC tra...

Colorado’s impending Big 12 reunion signals chaos for the Pac-12
Last week at the Pac-12 Conference’s annual football media days, Colorado was considered by far the league’s biggest flight risk. It’s USC and UCLA’s last season affiliated with the West Coasters before, let’s be honest, being promoted to the Big Ten. The Power Five is truly a supreme duo, with the ...

The SEC nailed its 8-game schedule for 2024
One of the biggest offseason topics in college football was how the Southeastern Conference would handle the maiden voyage for Oklahoma and Texas into America’s premier league. Wednesday night’s announcement that everyone in the SEC would play either the Sooners or Longhorns once, alongside the cont...

The SEC gaining Texas and Oklahoma a year early only makes it stronger
The 14-team Southeastern Conference has one more year on the open circuit. The baker’s dozen plus one number of full-time members lasted 12 years, when Texas A&M and Missouri departed the Big 12 for the SEC. Old habits are hard to break and instead of poaching schools that already felt like outsider...

After TCU, who is the next longshot to make the College Football Playoff?
To show how unlikely TCU’s run to the College Football Playoff was, at 200-1 odds to begin the season, it’s worth a look at which teams currently have those same chances to be 60 minutes from lifting a national championship a year from now. According to BetOnline.ag, six teams have +20000 chances to...

It’s still a terrible idea to expand the College Football Playoff to 12 teams
With the Rose Bowl officially signing along the dotted line, the expansion to a 12-team College Football Playoff is official. So, starting in 2024-25, there will be a dozen schools vying for the title, and anywhere from six to 10(?) fanbases screaming about being snubbed....

First-look CFP rankings: Rocky Top on top while Big Blue is singing the blues
The initial College Football Playoff rankings were released Tuesday, and as usual, a few fanbases came away upset. However, one long-struggling group of orange-clad supporters walked away ecstatic. The Tennessee Volunteers saw their name atop the heap, and in the history of the CFP, only one team ra...