The SEC and Big Ten are better -- and richer -- but no one will have more fun than the Big 12 (2024)

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The SEC and Big Ten are better -- and richer -- but no one will have more fun than the Big 12

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Bill Connelly, ESPN Staff WriterAug 2, 2024, 07:00 AM ET
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We careen toward the fall of 2024 with college football in a state of epic transition. Thanks to conference realignment -- and a total lack of centralized leadership -- most of the sport's big brands now reside in just two conferences, the Big Ten and SEC. They threw their weight around to assure a dramatic share of future College Football Playoff money, and they convinced smaller conferences to take on a disproportionate share of settlement-related back payments, assuring they will hog an even larger percentage of money moving forward (when they already had the most). Two other power conferences, the ACC and Big 12, are in an odd state, clearly ahead of the rest of the pack but far behind the Power 2 from a revenue standpoint. The "rich get richer" vibes are hard to ignore.

Here's a dirty little secret, though: A large portion of SEC and Big Ten fan bases are going to be absolutely miserable moving forward. Making more money isn't going to suddenly make Illinois' football program better than Clemson's, and with more strong programs in your conference come more loss opportunities. We've seen increasingly irrational head coach buyouts through the years, but we've only begun to see how irrational a program and its boosters can get. As fans of Chelsea or Manchester United in the English Premier League can attest, sometimes having more money just makes you sillier, not better.

Meanwhile, the Big 12 is set to become the most entertaining conference on the planet.

Actually, it already was.

Conference games decided by one score, 2018-23
Big 12: 46.5%
MAC: 44.6%
Pac-12: 41.3%
Sun Belt: 41.0%
ACC: 39.3%
AAC: 39.1%
Conference USA: 37.5%
Big Ten: 36.3%
Mountain West: 36.2%
SEC: 33.0%

Nearly half of the Big 12's conference games finished within one score over the last six seasons, and that was with two fence-post programs, Oklahoma and Texas, that dominated the field financially. The Big 12 traded its two heavyweights for four programs -- Arizona, Arizona State, Colorado and Utah officially became conference members Aug. 2 -- that are far closer to the rest of the pack in terms of spending and potential. This trade didn't make the conference comparatively better or richer, obviously, but it all but assured that a conference already known for an abundance of close games and chaos will only become more chaotic moving forward.

You can have your blowouts and huge buyouts (and, yes, national title aspirations). The Big 12 is going to have all the fun.

The SEC and Big Ten are better -- and richer -- but no one will have more fun than the Big 12 (4)

Into the great wide open

In each of this summer's conference previews, I included conference title odds based on SP+ projections. They were pretty revealing when it came to intra-conference parity.