Domino theories

 They don't always tumble neatly, the dominoes. Seismic events are messy, and it's another seismic event that's set the dominoes to tumbling once again in big-boy college football.

In other words: Your guess is as good as mine about what the landscape is going to look like three or four or five years down the pike.

This is because no one yet knows how this ACC/Big Ten/Pac-12 alliance is going to work, and that includes the people who are putting it together. That was your A-list takeaway from the Zoom conference announcing it yesterday, which included the commissioners of all three conferences. 

All they know for sure -- and they were quite candid about this -- is there will likely be some cross-scheduling deals in the future, and then there'll be some other stuff that will address the latest new realities they're facing. Aside from that, the dominoes will fall however they fall.

So what do we know -- or at least can strongly suspect?

Well, even if Big Ten commissioner Kevin Warren was the only one to kinda-sorta address it, it seems clear the elephant in the room here is the SEC and its partner in crime, ESPN. When Texas and Oklahoma announced they were jumping to the SEC earlier this summer, essentially gutting the Big 12, the realignment train was rolling again. The whole NIL thing may factor into it, too, but let's face it: without the SEC's raiding party the ACC, Big Ten and Pac-12 aren't conducting a joint news conference yesterday.

Truth is, the announced alliance is more or less a prevent defense against further marauding by the SEC and its hired guns at ESPN. It's a way to keep Clemson in the fold and Ohio State and Penn State and Michigan and Wisconsin, and maybe even Notre Dame -- which likes to pretend it's a football independent, but is as much an ACC school in the fall as it is in the winter.

In any event, it's now the SEC Inc. vs. All Them Others Inc., and if you let your imagination off the leash you can see where this is headed. Eventually Big Football will form its own Inc., operating by a set of bylaws that will codify what Big Football already is. 

Which is to say, an unofficial semipro league/NFL farm system. Big Football Inc. would simply remove the "unofficial" from the equation.

Ultimately this could be a good thing, because the current model isn't sustainable. It's absurd, after all, to imagine Alabama and, say, Ball State exist in the same universe, football-wise. Alabama is a multimillion-dollar corporation; Ball State is a MAC school that must depend on wealthy alums and student fees to keep football afloat. 'Bama goes to high-end bowls that pay out millions; Ball State goes to Radial Tire/Chicken Sandwich bowls whose payouts are hardly worth the time and expenditure. 

Two different worlds, in other words. Two different sets of priorities.

And maybe one more set of dominoes, ready to tumble.