MAILBAG: Realignment Updates, Gas Station Food, and more:

Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.

Greetings from Edinburg, Texas, where I’m in town for the first ever UTRGV football game. I’ll be talking to coaches, administrators, politicians, fans and more over the next few days, and am excited to share my dispatches next week.

But that’s next week. While I’m traveling, I thought today would be a good day to open the ol’ mailbag. These are your questions, submitted via social media. I accept these on a rolling basis on Twitter and Bluesky.

It’s funny, I got a very similar question on a sports radio hit yesterday as well.

What I’d say about “Super Leagues” or consolidation proposals or almost anything else you’d want to throw at the wall is that I think they’re possible. Historically, we haven’t had mad breakaways from the NCAA, established power conferences or anything else because the money doesn’t make sense yet. For as much as SEC administrators might complain about Hofstra and Wright State sharing revenue and postseason access with them, it also means they share legal liability with them.

When you’re constantly at risk of being sued over antitrust, CTE, labor law violations and a bunch of other stuff, well, you’d rather spread those expenses around a little bit. That’s just as true between the Big Ten and the Big Sky as it is between Ohio State and Rutgers.

But will that always be the case? If I could tell the future, I’d charge more money for this newsletter. In another five years, when the major conference TV rights all expire around the same time, could legislation have changed that makes a breakaway more possible? Sure. Could the potential revenues finally outweigh the political and legal negatives? Sure, it’s possible.

So I don’t know if we’ll have an 18, 20 or 22-team Big Ten by 2030. To be honest with you, I’m not even completely convinced we’ll have a Big Ten.

I’m not a huge candy guy, to be honest. But as you can probably tell from looking at my picture, I am a mad that enjoys both rigorous exercise and garbage food. Even though a 38-year-old man with a 38-year-old metabolism shouldn’t be doing this, I’ll absolutely crush a gas station roller or a slice of pizza that’s been under the lights for 19 consecutive hours. My road trip gas station snack of choice is typically Combos.

But if I have to go candy? Pass the Skittles. They don’t melt, and they’re easy to eat with one hand.

It’s a good question, and the answer, of course, is it depends. At the P4 level, it’s pretty common for a new football coach to have some sort of buyout attached to his hire, which generally the new school picks up. That’s often a couple million bucks right there, If you have to hire an entirely new staff, that’s at least nine position coaches, plus a GM, director of player personnel, strength coach, chief of staff, and any buyouts you might have for the old assistants.

That could stretch into more than $10 million. You typically don’t need to replace every single person during a staff transition…and that’s why. You guys ever look at a P4 football staff directory? There are a gazillion people in the building now.

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I don’t think it’s ever really at a close.

Just last week, I wrote a quick update about what I had been hearing about the ASUN, UAC, SoCon and OVC. All four of those leagues, as I understand it, are very much looking for new members, and may be fishing in similar ponds.

Several readers have asked about this, but my current understanding is that any D-II “call-ups” in the immediate future would be limited to the three schools that filed formal paperwork with the NCAA prior to the reclassification moratorium. That makes other D-II schools much less attractive as potential expansion options, since they wouldn’t be allowed to accept a conference invitation until either a) the moratorium ends, or b) they sue and win.

So I’m not hearing, or expecting to hear, anything about any schools from say, the NE-10, GLIAC, GAC or elsewhere.

Not quite related to the FCS, but I’m also hearing there could be some mid-major college basketball realignment announced in the very near future…but not from a school that sponsors a football team.

Similar to my first question, I think anything is possible. There are plenty of ACC schools (like UNC, UVA, Miami, Georgia Tech, etc. fit the historical institutional definition of a Big Ten school.

The math is complicated, because the TV numbers shared with me during the last round of Big Ten expansion showed that Oregon and Washington were barely additive to the league’s TV valuation, and other schools that get mentioned as potential expansion targets (like Cal and Stanford), weren’t additive at all. When the league is already so dang big, it’s harder for me to understand how adding another team that isn’t Notre Dame or or,ke, the Chicago Bears, doesn’t take money away from other programs.

But I’m also analyzing that scenario using 2025 assumptions. I have no idea what the regulatory framework around TV and college sports will be in 2030. Like I said, I think it’s entirely possible that we don’t even have a Big Ten then, let alone one with 20 teams.

My last thought on this: I had a few people in the room during the last Big Ten round of expansion who told me that a few of the league ADs found out about the Western expansion only a little before all of us did. These type of conversations are kept in a very, very small circle, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the AD at Maryland wouldn’t actually be the first to know.

A few other things we wrote this week that you’d probably enjoy

• Here are a few of the big off-the-field storylines I’m watching for this football season, from what happens with the White House, to what we can all learn about best practices in roster management. Is it time to update the Blue-Chip Theory?

• A recent study from the University of South Carolina suggests that states with very restrictive abortion laws are actually penalized when it comes to recruiting elite women’s basketball players. I have plenty of follow-up questions about this study, but looking into how state legislation can impact student (and athlete) labor choice is fascinating, in my humble opinion.

• Athletic department budgets keep going up, and it isn’t just because of coach and player salaries. There’s an organization problem here that doesn’t have an easy or direct solution.

• We’ve added another hundred+ documents to the Extra Points Library. That includes itemized athletic department budgets at Northern Colorado, AD contracts across the country, coach data from over a dozen more D1 schools, and much, much more.

And with that, my friends, I think I have a date with some breakfast burritos. Have a great holiday weekend, and enjoy Week 1! I’ll catch up with you next week.