College football realignment absolutely sucks, and the suckiest part of all is that there’s no end to it on the horizon. The process is hoovering the soul out of the sport, warping a regional product rich with history and rivalry into a quasi-national game increasingly devoid of both. The further college football goes in that direction, the less it becomes anything but a glorified farm system for a pro league that everyone could just turn on 24 hours later each weekend to see dramatically better football. The collateral damage will be athletes in other sports, who will be forced into extra travel without much of a shot at earning any name, image, and likeness (NIL) money.
Nevertheless, schools have decided that the only thing worse than being party to all of this is being left without an invitation. And absolutely nobody is more desperate to score one than SMU.
We know this thanks to a report from The Action Network’s Brett McMurphy, who has a source claiming that the Mustangs are so eager to join the ACC that they are willing to forego any media rights revenue for the first five to seven years. For reference, Oregon and Washington are catching hell for joining the Big Ten for half a share of the maximum revenue over the life of its current deal, which will start them at $30 million annually. Their former conference, the all-but-extinct Pac-12, crumbled because its member schools were staring down a deal that may only guarantee them around $23 million.
Yet here are the Mustangs, sending very loud signals that they’d be super down to get zero dollars and zero cents for a not-inconsiderable amount of time in exchange for the privilege of slapping a bigger brand on their athletic department letterhead and their athletes spending half of each season playing on the East Coast.
Is this thirsty? Oh, buddy, is it.
Is it smart? Yeah, probably.
The Mustangs haven’t enjoyed a seat in a power conference since the Southwest Conference dissolved, in 1996, and anyone paying attention has noticed the lack of gravitas that’s accompanied them in forays to the Western Athletic Conference, Conference USA, and the American Athletic Conference.
That had SMU playing a pretty brazen game of footsy with the Pac-12 earlier this year, and it’s now apparently led it to conclude—as more people should in this world—that there’s a lot of power in delayed gratification.
Because the likely endgame of this interminable reshuffling is a gigantic two-conference conglomerate in line with what we see in professional sports. The schools that make the cut will earn a whole lot more money than those that don’t, and the winners will likely be culled from the remaining four power conferences.
Which means it behooves the Mustangs to get a spot by any means necessary, then play the long game, since the size of the local media market should give the university a fighting chance at being selected if—and probably only if—football (and perhaps men’s basketball) is competitive in a brand-name conference. If SMU’s boosters can do some of the heavy lifting to make up the short-term revenue gap between the university and its prospective conference-mates, as McMurphy’s report suggests they are, then the Mustangs are back in the hunt to make up for it several times over in the long run.
So, yes, SMU is doing what it must to survive in the increasingly dystopian college athletics landscape. It’s not terribly dignified. But what is dignified about college athletics anymore, anyhow?
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