conferences Page 2 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

3 SEC teams in the College Football Playoff? Here’s how that could happen
I heard your collective sighs when reading the headline and kicker to this story. Great, the most dominant conference in the country only hoards a bigger portion of the most exclusive quartet in college football. How could that be good for the sport? Calm down, Tommy. (what I’m choosing to call the ...

Don’t celebrate just yet, SEC fans, there’s another independent who could claim a CFP bid
For the segment of college football fans who blackout with anger every time Notre Dame makes the College Football Playoff, this season could not have started better. Marcus Freeman’s team came up short against Ohio State and then stumbled trying to get back up against Marshall, and there’s really no...

Here comes The Sun...Belt
There’s a lot of uncertainty around college football right now as it looks like the landscape of the sport is forever changing. Texas and Oklahoma are joining the SEC. USC and UCLA are joining the Big 10. It looks like we’re headed toward two super conferences that will be the top tier, and then the...

Predicting college football’s New Year’s Six teams
College football starts in a little more than two weeks. And for 135 days, the jostling to become a national champion will be ongoing. Obviously, only four teams will compete in the College Football Playoff but a dozen teams will be selected to the most lucrative bowls, otherwise known as the New Ye...

BIG Conference needs to ask itself some BIG questions before proceeding
College football is changing faster than it can handle. There are no playbooks or 100-level courses for what’s next in the sport. It feels like when I took a journalism business class after the Recession, and the professor was asking the students for suggestions. ...

Our Conference Mock Draft: ACC Edition
This new ACC is all about the show. We kept a couple of rivalries but our main goal is to entertain you. There are Hurricanes, Badgers, three different Tigers, and some of the most annoying people on the planet wearing their stupid scarlet. So lean back in your drop top, and turn on the 8 Ball & MJG...

We fixed the college conferences... you're welcome
The irony of all the bellyaching about constant player movement and the free market from the NCAA and its institutions is that they aren’t even loyal to their conference partners. Those same athletic programs get a buck dangled in front of them and dive into a national conference transfer portal of ...

The real winner in college conferences realignments might be… the airlines?
The smart ones are making sure that the staff at their schools have their frequent flier numbers on file. The geniuses are trying to secure NIL deals with the airlines....

The Notre Dame Question
In the midst of the largest upheaval in college sports since, well, the invention of the forward pass, there’s one question looming large on everyone’s minds: what is Notre Dame going to do?...

The SEC is still better
There’s a confident nature among the collective of Southeastern Conference fan bases, and what their conglomerate represents. Having covered the league as a hometown beat writer for one of the oddball geographic teams in the league, Mizzou, and therefore having traveled to many of the other cities a...

Predicting the future NCAA landscape
As we approach an era where USC kicking off at 9 a.m. Pacific time in freezing November East Lansing temperatures is a very realistic and potentially biennial situation, let’s look at the options for college athletics going forward....

USC and UCLA joining the Big Ten
Here’s the end of regional conferences as we know it. USC and UCLA, two staples of the West Coast-heavy Pac-12 Conference, are reportedly leaving for the Big Ten Conference. The move was first reported Thursday afternoon, signaling an even-greater power shift from the Power Five Conference model, wh...

College football anarchy is creating more have nots than haves
The road to the College Football Playoff got more direct Wednesday with an announcement from the NCAA that conferences with at least 12 members were no longer required to decide their football champions by splitting its league into two divisions and the winners compete in a conference championship g...

There's no party in Conference USA as three teams leave
I know, I know — college football is far from our collective minds at the moment, what with Super Bowl Sunday this past week and March Madness fast approaching. But the best kind of drama is CFB drama, and the best kind of CFB drama is Group of 5 drama....

IDIOT OF THE YEAR #9: Ted Cruz, captain of the anti-vax Dream Team
Welcome to Deadspin’s IDIOT OF THE YEAR festivities! Nos. 50 through 11 are available for your enjoyment here. And our top 10 thus far:...

Where will we see Ohio State and the rest in this week’s round of CFP rankings?
Last week, it was Oklahoma....

James Madison gets its moment in the Sun (Belt)
Conference realignment trickle-down has officially reached the Football Championship Series, as the Sun Belt Conference officially announced the addition of James Madison University Saturday by a unanimous vote of its members’ CEOs....

The Big Ten rightfully takes center stage in Week 6
College football has been real wacky in 2021. Who would’ve thought Clemson would immediately fall apart without Trevor Lawrence? Who would’ve thought Spencer Rattler would look so inconsistent? Who would’ve thought that USC would collapse the way they did? Okay, a lot of people probably predicted th...

For the sake of Group of Five teams, Cincy needs to win today
Depending on who you ask, college football may or may not have a problem. If you ask a fan of any Power 5 conference, I’m sure most of them would tell you there is nothing wrong with the current college football landscape. However, most fans of Group of Five teams would probably tell you there is an...

The Big 12 is feeling awfully small lately
What happened to the Big 12? They were once a dominant force in the college football world. They were feared by opponents, loved by fans, hated by others, and everything a college football powerhouse conference should be. Now, with Texas and Oklahoma having left the conference for greener pastures, ...