Realignment Endgame

The chapter we told you was coming in Chapter 4 — the SEC's internal push toward a premium-membership tier that would reward Alabama, Georgia, Texas, and three or four others differently from the rest of the conference — died in a Birmingham conference room sometime in late May. It died quietly. There was no announcement. Greg Sankey did not hold a press conference to say the plan was shelved. What happened instead was a Pete Thamel report on June 3 that described "a structured internal review process that concluded there was insufficient member consensus to proceed," which is the way commissioners describe a proposal that got killed in the room by the people it was supposed to benefit. The irony, sourced to two separate beat writers by mid-June, is that Alabama and Georgia — the programs most likely to have gained from a tiered revenue structure — were the ones who killed it. Their calculation, as Bruce Feldman reported on June 9, was straightforward: "The programs that have won under the existing structure see no reason to change the governance model that produced those wins. A premium tier is an idea that benefits the programs that aren't winning yet."

The SEC has, as of this writing, returned to formal stillness. Sankey announced at the spring meetings that the conference is "not in active expansion discussions and does not expect to be in active expansion discussions in 2026." That is a sentence he has not said in public in approximately four years. Its meaning is roughly what it appears to be: the conference is 16 teams, it has absorbed Texas and Oklahoma, and it is going to run this configuration for a while. The implicit acknowledgment underneath the stillness is that 16 teams is near the structural ceiling for a football conference that plays a round-robin schedule in meaningful matchups. Adding a seventeenth would require restructuring the conference game almost completely. Sankey is not ready to do that, and his members are not asking him to.

“The Big 12 has not solved the structural problem of being the third conference in a sport governed by two. But it has delayed that problem by approximately one generation. One generation is enough time for something else to change.”

— Pete Thamel, ESPN (SEC premium-tier review)

The Big Ten, for its part, said nothing at all this spring. Tony Petitti has adopted a posture of active muteness on expansion questions that reads, at this point, as policy. The conference is 18 teams. It is digesting. The digest process is not finished — the scheduling friction we tracked in Chapter 2 remains unresolved, and the 18-school conference is still producing matchup matrices that require ADs to apologize to their fans every August — but it is also not producing the kind of crisis that would force a move. The Big Ten's silence on expansion is probably the single most consequential thing happening in college football right now, because silence from the Big Ten is the condition under which the other conferences get to exist without constant existential pressure.

Which brings us to the story that nobody in Birmingham or Chicago had written into their scenario plans: the rebuilt Pac-12 is working.

Boise State played its first home conference game as a Pac-12 member on September 6, 2025 — officially in the conference's inaugural revived season, one week after a road opener at Washington State. The game drew 35,441 to Albertsons Stadium, which is the third-largest attendance figure in the stadium's history for a conference opener. The energy in the building, as captured by the Idaho Statesman's Rocky Woodward, was not the energy of a program that had just joined the fifth-best conference in college football. It was the energy of a program that had been told for two decades it was not at the table and had now been given a chair. Jeramiah Dickey, the AD who told the Statesman in January 2025 that "the first three years are going to be hard and going to be ours," was right on both counts.

Teresa Gould, who took over the Pac-12 office in late 2023 specifically to manage what most people assumed would be a wind-down, has instead managed an eight-school rebuild: Washington State, Oregon State, Boise State, San Diego State, Colorado State, Fresno State, Nevada, and San Jose State. The conference's media deal, announced in February 2026 with a streaming-first package that includes Apple TV+ as a primary rights holder and CBS Sports Network as a secondary, is not the Pac-12's old deal in dollar terms. It is, per-school, within 12% of what the Mountain West schools were earning in their final season. It is structured to escalate. And it is the first college football media deal where a streaming platform holds primary rights rather than secondary rights. "We were not going to win a bidding war against the Big Ten or SEC footprint," Gould told Sports Business Journal in April. "We were going to win a different war. The streaming-primary bet is that war."

The surprise — the one-per-chapter surprise we have been delivering since Chapter 1 — is not that the rebuilt Pac-12 exists. We telegraphed that in Chapter 3. The surprise is that Boise State said no to the Big 12 to join it.

Brett Yormark spent the first quarter of 2026 in extended conversations with Jeramiah Dickey about a Boise State move to the Big 12 that would have brought the program a per-school distribution roughly 40% higher than the revived Pac-12's baseline. The conversations were serious. Yormark's pitch, according to Jon Wilner's reporting in the Mercury News on May 21, was "a fully constructed offer with a defined invitation timeline and a specific revenue guarantee." Dickey said no. His stated reason, delivered in a prepared statement in early June, was that "Boise State's identity is built around the West, our fanbase is built around the West, and we believe the revived Pac-12 gives us the best competitive and geographic home for what this program is trying to build over the next decade." The unstated reason, which Wilner reported alongside the official statement, is that Dickey's calculation was: a smaller conference in your geography, with a streaming-primary deal that escalates and where your program is unambiguously the brand, beats a larger conference where you are a permanent mid-table program with no shot at the conference championship game.

It is the most honest program-positioning decision a mid-major AD has made in this realignment cycle. It may not be the right one in ten years. It is the right one right now.

Brett Yormark absorbed the Boise State no without visible consequence. The Big 12's CVC Capital PE money, which closed in February, is performing against projections in its first quarter. The per-school distributions for 2026 are tracking to beat the 8%-below-ACC figure Yormark projected, landing instead at roughly 5% below. The difference is real but not the gap it was. Sam Khan Jr. at The Athletic has been writing the quarterly check-in on the PE deal since it closed, and his most recent column — June 11 — had a line that will stick: "The Big 12 has not solved the structural problem of being the third conference in a sport governed by two. But it has delayed that problem by approximately one generation. One generation is enough time for something else to change."

Notre Dame remains independent. The 2032 NBC extension, signed in January, has not produced a single public statement from the university about conference membership. Marcus Freeman went to the College Football Playoff last December — Notre Dame beat Ohio State in a semifinal before losing to Georgia in the final — and the result strengthened independence's internal case rather than weakening it. The program made the final under its existing model. The pressure to change the model has, at least temporarily, declined. Locked On Notre Dame's Pete Sampson put it plainly in his June 10 episode: "The CFP run cost the conference-membership argument two or three years of momentum. Notre Dame just showed it can compete at the highest level without a conference affiliation. That is a hard argument to walk back."

What remains of the lesser-tier conferences — the Sun Belt, the MAC, the Mountain West programs that did not join the Pac-12 revival — is the story this thread has not been telling because it has not been dramatic. It is important. The revenue gap between the SEC and Big Ten distributions and the Group of Five distributions has widened to a factor of roughly 11-to-1. Not grown. Not expanded. A factor of eleven. The MAC's per-school distribution in 2026 is approximately $4.2 million. The SEC's is approximately $49 million. Those programs are not in the same economic sport as the Power Two, and the gap is permanent in any scenario anyone is currently modeling. The athletic director at a MAC school — Ohio's Heather Lyke has been the most public voice on this — has said plainly that "we are not competing for the same things anymore, and we need to stop pretending the tournament bracket is the primary venue where that matters." She is right. She is also describing a condition that the sport's governance has not yet formally acknowledged.

That acknowledgment is probably the next chapter. The endgame is no longer coming. It is here. It has been here for about eighteen months, and the institutions that are living inside it are slowly, differently, learning to describe what living inside it actually means.