Josh Pate has long lobbied to become College Football's first official commissioner. While his choice of podcast guests has soured many on him being in the public eye at all, his latest conference realignment proposal might win some of those fans back. Just none of them will be coming from the SEC.
Pate's proposal would be to shrink the SEC to 10 teams: the Alabama Crimson Tide, Auburn Tigers, Florida Gators, Georgia Bulldogs, Kentucky Wildcats, LSU Tigers, Mississippi State Bulldogs, Ole Miss Rebels, South Carolina Gamecocks, and Tennessee Volunteers.
That'd take the Arkansas Razorbacks, Missouri Tigers, Oklahoma Sooners, Texas A&M Aggies, Texas Longhorns, and Vanderbilt Commodores and scatter them across several conferences. Texas, Texas A&M, and Arkansas would join a rebuilt Southwest Conference. Oklahoma and Missouri would join a rebuilt Big 8 Conference. Vanderbilt would become a College Football independent.
Pate's proposal would redistribute an obscene amount of revenue from the "It Just Means More" conference. Losing the Longhorns, Aggies, and Sooners alone would be devastating, but Razorbacks basketball is a major asset on the hardwood.
As Stormin Norman's Dekota Gregory noted, Oklahoma is better off in the SEC. Per Gregory, "No matter what, though, Pate will likely never live his dream as commissioner of college football to make all this happen, and those in charge of the sport will never value rivalries and geography over money. That has actually worked in the Sooners' favor, too, because even without rivals like OSU and Nebraska on the schedule, OU has replaced those matchups with even better ones in the SEC."
The only way this proposal comes to fruition is if Texas Tech University superbooster Cody Campbell's "Saving College Sports" push works. Right now, the SEC and Big Ten are pushing back hard against it.
If college sports are "saved" by the Fort Worth oilman and his constituents and the NCAA negotiates media rights as a collective of all Division I/FBS/Power 4 schools, then and only then would the SEC let these revenue giants go.
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