Joel Klatt predicts future realignment will involve conferences looking at teams to drop

Conference realignment in college sports has been about conferences deciding to expand with new members. FOX’s Joel Klatt predicts that future realignment will involve teams being kicked out of their current conference over a lack of financial value.

Klatt’s comments come from a recent episode of his show.

“You know what’s next for us in college football? I told you this is never going to stop, right? I wasn’t lying. This is never going to stop. Because it’s been about who can we add to increase value so that we all make more money,” Klatt said, per Heartland College Sports.

“Well pretty soon it’s going to start being about who can we drop? I know people think I’m crazy and look at me kind of sideways. That’s absolutely coming. Because again there’s not an unlimited source of money and the money then has to get smarter.”

Klatt compared the economics of conference revenue distribution to taxpayer-funded projects.

“You know, only a certain number of taxpayers actually pay all the taxes while only a certain number or a number of teams in every one of these conferences are actually driving the valuation for the entire conference.

“Well, pretty soon, those teams are going to be like, ‘Hey, we can’t handle the dead weight at this point. Having X, Yor Z school in our conference is just diluting the conference.’

“It’s diluting it in two ways. One, we’ve got to chop up the pie in more pieces. And then the other is we’ve got to enter them into the schedule so we don’t even get all the big boys facing each other as often as they should, because we’ve got to dilute the schedule with that other team that really doesn’t derive any value.”

We’ve seen many programs change conferences in search of greater revenue opportunities, with Texas and Oklahoma’s move to the SEC starting the most recent wave of realignment. In the ACC, Florida State and other programs have pushed for changes to the revenue-sharing model. Time will tell if teams decide to push for changes to their current conference’s membership instead of switching conferences.

Andrew Olson

Andrew writes about sports to fund his love of live music and collection of concert posters. He strongly endorses the Hall of Fame campaign of Fred Taylor.