Bullet point summary by AI
- College football faces renewed rumors of major conference shifts just as the 2026 season begins its new alignment.
- The rapid turnover since the Pac-12 breakup has left fans and programs scrambling to build stability and rivalries.
- A temporary pause on realignment could allow current conferences to cement investments and give teams time to grow without constant upheaval.
Oregon State to the Big 12? BYU to the Big Ten? Those are just a couple of rumored shakeups in college football that could be in the works for the future. If your head is still spinning from the last batch of conference realignment, you’re not alone.
The 2026 season will be the first in which the dust has metaphorically settled after the Pac-12 was raided by the Big Ten, SEC, Big 12 and ACC, leaving it just a two-member conference until it regenerated. This year marks the debut of the new-look Pac-12 with five former Mountain West schools, Texas State, Gonzaga (basketball only) and survivors Oregon State and Washington State participating.
But with the Beavers looking to potentially jump ship after rebuilding their old home and BYU apparently looking to be poached by the Big Ten with just three years of experience in a Power Four conference, fans have had very little time to adjust to the ever-changing environment. There is such a thing as too much change.
College football needs a national moratorium on conference realignment
It’s widely understood schools that find newly sustained success in football will look to advance into higher earning brackets, just as a worker gains new skills and looks to earn more with bigger titles. However, speedy elevation can be negative for development and stagnate a program into near-permanent mediocrity.
For example, the Maryland Terrapins and Rutgers Scarlet Knights bit off way more than they could chew when they jumped to the Big Ten in 2014. Ever since joining the premier conference in the sport, both programs have only reached a bowl game four times each in 12 seasons. Neither has sniffed a conference championship game.
College football needs to implement a moratorium on conference realignment — temporarily — until programs and fans can settle into the new environment and build upon the success that landed them a promotion to a higher league. It would be similar to how the NCAA used to require schools that jumped from FCS into the FBS to wait multiple seasons before becoming bowl eligible. The transition period makes better sense in a realignment sense than a postseason participation context.
You could easily point to a program like Indiana that pulled itself out of the Big Ten basement and won a national championship after just two seasons under new management, but that’s a unique case. The school had already been in the same conference for decades and took advantage of the transfer portal to bring together a super team of misfit toys.
There’s a lot of money that goes into conference building too. The Pac-12 invested heavily in Oregon State and Washington State for remaining after the rest of the conference departed. To see one of them leave would shatter the confidence of the investment and potentially bring the league down on itself.
The same can’t be said for BYU and the Big 12, but it would be another point for the proponents (or an additional warning bulletin for opponents) of the Big Ten-SEC super league idea that’s been tossed around for years. If enough teams continue to push for inclusion at the upper echelon, and those leagues open the doors wider, it may become a matter of when and not if.
Just a temporary pause, that’s all we’re asking for. Just let the fans enjoy their school playing in the conference it currently plays in before things start shifting again. The sport is designed to facilitate rivalries and breed excellence. It’s hard to do the former when teams are temporary tenants in their competitive neighborhoods.
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