College athletics is undergoing a seismic shift, as traditional geographic boundaries and historic rivalries give way to decisions driven by big money.

However, amid the chaos of conference realignment, the University of Mississippi emerges in a stronger position than many traditional powerhouses. 

The saga of three California universities serves as a cautionary tale.

In 2024, the University of California Berkeley left the Pac-12 Conference, which was disintegrating around them, to become a member of the Atlantic Coast Conference, headquartered a continent away. Athletes must fly more than 2,700 miles to play games at most of the other ACC campuses on the East Coast. 

Cal’s move was precipitated by the departure of Pac-12 stalwarts USC and UCLA to the Big Ten Conference. The Big Ten now includes 18 member schools stretching from Rutgers University in New Jersey to USC and UCLA in California and Washington and Oregon in the Pacific Northwest.

Generations-old rivalries, such as UCLA vs. Cal — schools that had met every season for the past 92 years — were abandoned in the realignment.

“This all happened because of money,” UCLA Basketball Head Coach Mick Cronin said in an interview with reporters from Fox News. “That’s just the reality. It’s not all because of football. It’s because expenses and bills have grown. That’s the reality of it. And what I would tell you is this is not the end-all fix. It’s far from over.” 

While other conferences have completely remade themselves in the past few years, the Southeastern Conference — Ole Miss’ home since 1933 — has simply expanded its geographic footprint by adding traditional football blue-bloods Texas and Oklahoma this year. 

After the most recent realignments, the Big Ten and the Southeastern are widely considered the top conferences in college football. The Big Ten had $879.9 in revenue in fiscal year 2022-23, while the SEC had $852.6 million. The next closest was the ACC, which reported $706.6 million. 

And as a founding institution of the SEC, which makes sizable annual payouts to its member schools, the University of Mississippi is in an extremely advantageous position. 

“Ole Miss has a chance to be a symbol of everything major about the new era: NIL, the transfer portal and the expanded College Football Playoff,” Seth Emerson said in an August 2024 article in The Athletic. 

However, as the third-smallest SEC school, Ole Miss’ resources are limited compared to other member schools. In the 2022-2023 fiscal year, the Ole Miss athletics department, which fields teams in 18 NCAA sports, lost more than $8 million. 

But with a growing student body (the school experienced an 11% increase in enrollment between fall 2023 and fall 2024) and payouts coming from the SEC’s multi-billion dollar TV deal, the university is in a strong situation to capitalize on the movement within college athletics. 

“Having a strong conference and being the powerhouse that we are will continue to be important,” Keith Carter, vice chancellor for intercollegiate athletics at UM, said. “The SEC has traditionally been the best football conference in the country.” 

Another key to financial success is the emergence of NIL collectives, which raise money that is in turn awarded to players whose names, images and likenesses are used to promote the schools. 

The collectives enable schools to stock their team rosters with the best players. The ultimate sign of success for football teams, of course, is selection to participate in the new 12-team College Football Playoffs. The CFP TV deal is worth $1.3 billion, which generates sizable sums for participating schools.

The Grove Collective, the NIL program for Ole Miss athletes, has thrived in the modern era successfully raising more than $10 million for Ole Miss Athletics and student-athletes as of March 2024. According to the recruiting website On3, The Grove Collective is the sixth-most lucrative collective.

“At The Grove Collective, we’re business as usual. We’re not going anywhere,” collective executive director Walker Jones said in an interview with the Locked On Ole Miss podcast in May 2024. “We’re well positioned to adjust and adapt to whatever comes our way from … this evolving landscape.”

It’s all about the money

The biggest motivator behind conference realignment is money, with massive television deals driving most of the movement. Those broadcast rights are fueling the growing disparity between the so-called Power 2 conferences (SEC and Big Ten) and the rest of the FBS conferences.

The Big Ten’s newest TV deal with Fox, NBC and CBS began in 2023 and was worth $7 billion over seven years, giving the conference a payout of $1 billion per year. 

The SEC’s 10-year media deal, which started this year, extended ESPN’s commitment to the conference to $5.25 billion, potentially worth more than $7 billion after the additions of powerhouses Texas and Oklahoma. The SEC’s exact numbers have not been reported because financial statements will not be released until early 2026. However, it is projected that the conference will receive an estimated $811 million annually from its new deal. 

The next most valuable conference is the Big 12, which receives approximately $380 million per year from its TV deal. 

The newest College Football Playoff TV deal, worth $1.3 billion, pays the Big Ten and the SEC each 29% of the total contract. The ACC will receive 17% and the Big 12 will receive 15% of the total deal, proof of the growing disparity among major conferences. 

While Ole Miss may be in a good spot during conference realignment, this is not the case for many other schools. At least 32 FBS universities nationwide have changed primary athletic conferences since 2022. The main catalyst for this movement was the dissolution of the former Pac-12 conference, which resulted in 10 members moving to the Big Ten, Big 12 and the ACC. 

The University of Oregon received approximately $20.8 million per year as a member of the Pac-12, but now, after switching conferences, will receive over $70 million each year from the Big Ten. 

The Pac-12 dissolution has left schools scrambling, especially the two conference members left standing — Oregon State and Washington State. The Pac-2 recently added five Mountain West Conference schools (Boise State, Colorado State, Fresno State, San Diego State and Utah State) to reform the Pac. 

Sophomore track and field athlete Ryan Forson, a Washington State student, is unsure whether this was a good move. 

“I think the quality of competition will go down a little bit,” Forson said. 

Schools that traditionally have been in the middle-tier of college athletics are increasingly faced with the challenge of attempting to move up to the “big leagues” or risk being left behind in their current conferences. For schools such as BYU, which was an independent, and SMU, which was in the American Athletic Conference, their moves to the Big 12 and ACC, respectively, are a step up in competition and revenue. Cincinnati and Houston also jumped from the American to the Big 12, one of the current power conferences, in the past few years.

SMU even opted to forego earning TV revenue from the conference for nine years to gain membership in the ACC.

In the interim, David Miller, the chairman of the SMU’s board of trustees, and other boosters pledged $200 million to the school’s athletics, according to Yahoo Sports.

“It’s a couple hundred million dollars. I’m not losing sleep over it,” Miller responded when asked by ACC commissioner Jim Phillips about the financial commitment, according to Yahoo Sports.

Florida State University has considered leaving the ACC for either the SEC or the Big Ten, going so far as suing the ACC in 2023 to get out of its contract. The conference’s media rights are locked in at approximately $372 million per year until 2036, and FSU believes it can get better payouts elsewhere. 

However, the ACC threatened to punish FSU (one of its most recognizable brands) to the fullest extent, which could have meant the school owed more than $500 million to the ACC if it left the conference.

The flip side of conference hopping

For the University of Memphis, a 90-minute drive north of the Ole Miss campus, the issue of realignment has been much more challenging to navigate. Currently a member of the American Athletic Conference, Memphis has for years aggressively pursued membership in one of the power conferences. 

Daily Memphian columnist Geoff Calkins says the school is on “a quest to try to … get in a better conference.”

When the school’s Director of Intercollegiate Athletics Ed Scott was hired in early 2024 from the University of Virginia, it was clear that conference change was a primary goal. A clause in Scott’s contract offers a financial incentive for joining a power conference.

With the Pac-12 desperate to add schools to stay alive, many thought Memphis would try to take advantage. However, in late September, Memphis surprised many fans by announcing the school would remain in the AAC. 

As with all realignment decisions, this was about money, but with a twist. It would have cost the university $20 million to exit the AAC, according to several reports, with the Pac-12 covering only $2.5 million of that cost. 

Calkins said a switch to the Pac-12 would not have been “prudent financially.” 

Gary Parrish, sports columnist for CBS, argued that a move to the Pac-12 would have been “a move in the right direction,” but not the final move. It would have simply been step one in a process of constantly trying to make it into the exclusive club of power schools.

But that may be a long time coming.

“The truth of the matter is that Memphis doesn’t drive a lot of TV eyeballs, and that’s what this is all about in the end,” Calkins said. 

While the decision to stay put may have been the correct one financially for the Memphis athletic department, staying in the AAC could hurt the school’s core sports teams. 

The Memphis men’s basketball team is a source of great pride for the university, appearing in the NCAA tournament in 2022 and 2023. However, the Tigers lack high-caliber in-conference competition, which could count against the team come NCAA tournament selection time. Moving to the Pac-12 would have allowed the Tigers to play consistently high-ranking teams such as San Diego State and Gonzaga. 

On top of that, playing lackluster AAC opponents does not generate much enthusiasm among Memphis fans. 

Calkins believes that staying in the AAC could damage the program.

“It’s a disaster for Memphis basketball,” Calkins said. 

The Memphis Basketball team is saddled with the unenviable job of desperately trying to keep fans involved and winning out during their conference schedule while also attempting to prove their worth with grueling matchups during their early season non-conference schedule. 

A Southern Miss success story

The University of Southern Mississippi’s recent switch to another athletic conference proved to be a positive choice.

In 2023, Southern Miss departed Conference USA in favor of the Sun Belt, one of nine teams that left Conference USA in favor of another conference between 2022 and 2023. Southern Miss had a smaller exit fee to pay than many other schools, approximately $3 million. And the new destination provided a more lucrative TV deal. The full value of the payout has not been revealed by ESPN or the Sun Belt.

Hattiesburg TV sports reporter Taylor Curet says that the national exposure the Sun Belt provides by broadcasting games during the week has made the conference switch a great move. USM fan response was overwhelmingly positive as well, invigorating new excitement for programs that had not experienced great success in past years. 

Curet believes that fans were “over Conference USA” and the lack of recognition that came with it. Even as the debate around switching conferences continues at some schools, Southern Miss vouches for the payoff.

The costs of realignment
For some schools that have switched conferences, increased TV revenue is counterbalanced by increased costs, primarily team travel. 

Since West Coast schools Stanford University and Cal left the Pac-12 to join the ACC, their football programs will combine to travel more than 44,000 miles this season to accommodate games at East Coast schools. 

According to Stanford Senior Associate Athletic Director Matt Doyle, who spoke in an interview with ESPN in July 2024, the school’s travel budget was estimated to double. It will be even higher in 2025 when Stanford adds another charter flight to the football schedule. 

Stanford already faced financial deficits and planned to cut 11 varsity sports in 2020 before eventually reversing course. The specter of eliminating smaller sports such as women’s field hockey and men’s volleyball could resurface if financial strains associated with travel intensify. 

The Big Ten faces similar travel concerns as West Coast teams USC, UCLA, Oregon, and Washington join the league. Even landmark Big Ten schools such as Ohio State have been affected by the changes.

 “Our travel budget, just so everyone knows, went up over $2 million to adjust for this,” OSU athletic director Ross Bjork said during his halftime appearance on Ohio State’s radio network during OSU’s 35-7 win over Iowa on Oct. 5.

College athletics’ uncertain future

As changes within football, such as new NIL and transfer rules, continue to drive movement in college athletics, the SEC and Big Ten have risen in status to pseudo-governing bodies. The NCAA, which for generations has been the governing body for hundreds of schools small and large, is further shrinking into the background. The pending landmark decision to pay $2.78 billion to former student-athletes and introduce a revenue-sharing program with current student-athletes, negotiated in the proposed House v. NCAA settlement, was essentially dictated by the Power 5 football conferences. 

As the gap continues to widen between traditional blue-blood football programs and those on a lower tier, there have been discussions about college football breaking away from the NCAA and creating its own governing body. Two proposals are the Super League and Project Rudy. 

The Super League proposal includes 72 top teams competing in 12 region-based, six-team conferences (Power 12), with the 64 remaining teams competing in a Group of 8 conference. The top Group of 8 teams would be eligible for promotion to the Power 12 at the end of the year similar to the European professional football model. 

Project Rudy, a proposal that came out of the SEC-Big Ten meeting this fall, would include a 70-team structure backed by private equity firm Smash Capital and exclude lower-tier programs. The 70 schools would be sold as one media entity, and games versus current Group of 5 and FCS opponents would be eliminated. 

It is unclear what this reshuffling would mean for the lower tier of college football as well as other college sports that are governed by the NCAA. However, the landscape of college sports continues to change, and how we see college sports is evolving. 

Throughout the upheaval, the University of Mississippi is well-positioned to thrive in a new era of college athletics. As a founding member of the SEC, Ole Miss is firmly entrenched in the conference and should benefit greatly from larger revenue and exposure from the conference’s revenue deals. 

Additionally, Ole Miss teams will not have to travel nearly as far to compete within the conference as universities in the ACC, Big 12 and Big Ten must now, which helps limit travel expenses and eases equipment logistics. And Ole Miss’ highly regarded NIL collective and marketing strategies bring more eyes to the athletics department than ever before.