Breaking down this new alliance from a Michigan football perspective plus what it means for the Big Ten.
After Oklahoma and Texas spurned the Big-12 for the SEC, it left all of the other Power Five conferences scrambling to catch up.
Unfortunately for the other conferences (and especially the Big Ten), there weren’t really too many options to remedy the SEC situation.
Part of this blame can be placed on the Big Ten because of its strict academic standards. If the standards weren’t so high, a few other teams would have been able to join the conference by now, like Oklahoma or Texas.
Everybody in the Big Ten wants Notre Dame, but they are independent and have a number of suitors, so prying them away from other conferences would’ve been (and still is) a really tall task.
That’s why the Big Ten needed to have a backup plan just in case, and that’s where Oklahoma and Texas would come into the picture. But that didn’t happen, and now the SEC has only gotten even stronger.
A tri-conference alliance between the Big 10, ACC, and PAC-12 had been in the works for months, but exact details have been scarce, with only rumors popping up here and there, until Tuesday.
What this means for Michigan football, Big Ten
Overall, the alliance doesn’t really tell us a ton. It is kind of vague in certain areas (probably on purpose) to not give away too much information and/or the finer details will be ironed out at a later time.
Basically, without saying it word for word, the alliance is a truce between the three conferences and their teams that none of the other conferences will try to add other teams from those three conferences to gain star power and/or a competitive advantage. It is also an alliance in academics, innovation, ideas, etc as well, obviously.
None of these conferences can afford one of their most critical and recognizable schools to leave their respective conference.
The cool thing about this alliance though, is that it allows Michigan and the other schools to schedule a variety of opponents much more consistently in non-conference matchups than before.
The alliance mentioned football, and men’s and women’s basketball as the criteria that the scheduling can occur.
Now, here’s where Michigan football comes in. This alliance will give U-M a much more diverse set of schools to choose from to play each year in high-profile non-conference matchups. This is really exciting.
We might start to see regular or every-few-years Clemson-Michigan matchups, Miami-Michigan matchups. North Carolina is also an intriguing option now that they are getting better. Florida State is recruiting extremely well right now, so they might be good again soon. That’s just in the ACC.
If we look to the PAC-12, Michigan football could play teams they’ve barely played like Stanford, Washington State, California, Oregon, etc in really good non-conference games. There are all sorts of possibilities now with this alliance.
Looking at Michigan’s schedule this year, the Wolverines play three non-conference games at the beginning of the year. Week 1 is vs. Western Michigan. Week 2 is vs. Washington. Lastly, Week 3 is vs. Northern Illinois.
For future years (when this alliance applies), Michigan football can schedule one opponent from both conferences, like at home against PAC-12 Oregon and ACC Louisville, and still have one non-conference game left to choose whoever they like (probably a cupcake game).
Or the Wolverines could put a home cupcake in the middle of the three-game slate of non-conference games (because traveling from the west side of the country to the south side of the country in one week is too much travel if the away games are back to back and one is at a PAC-12 opponent and another is at an ACC opponent or vice versa).
Overall, a lot of positives came out of this alliance.
Michigan (and the Big 10 as a whole) have to be really happy. Michigan football fans might see more marquee matchups (with unorthodox but fun opponents) in the near future because of this alliance.
Whether Jim Harbaugh is still around at that point is another story, but no matter what, Michigan football should get a good opponent (if it wants one) each year from this alliance.
Also, let’s cross our fingers that these AD’s, chancellors, and commissioners hold up their end of the bargain and don’t try to sabotage the alliance. The future looks bright! (in terms of scheduling)
