Like you, I'm sorely disappointed in the ill-conceived, piece-meal, botched process that was used to "realign" four of the five major athletic conferences. Since the existing NCAA is completely helpless, I think it would take a meeting of all the Power Five Athletic Directors to create an NCAA with the structure and the authority required to establish order and fairness among the Power Five colleges and universities.
First of all, the answer would have to make geographic sense. It's stupid to have Stanford and Cal in the Atlantic Coast Conference. Or UCLA and USC in the Big Ten. And there's no good reason the SEC and the BIG 10 get all those billions and everyone else gets so much less.
So what needs to happen?
We need to create a national conference (The NCAA) that negotiates TV contracts for all the Power Five colleges and universities. I know, ESPN would have to agree to let loose of the ACC members they tied up until 2035. In fact, the five existing conferences would all be disbanded, so the SEC and BIG 10 would have to tear up those bogus unfair contracts and agree to an NCAA Power Five contract that is fair for everyone.
Then, we would create regional conferences like the Northeastern, MidAtlantic, Southeastern, the Deep South, the Great Plains, Great Lakes, the Rockies, the Southwestern, the Western Desert, MidPacific, the Northwest. (We'd need one more to have a twelve team football national championship.)
Anyway, let's get rid of as much of the inequality as we can, the geographic senselessness, and the exhausted away game athletes who got snowed in all night in Chicago or Denver trying to get through a blizzard to Boston from San Francisco.
America is a Can Do nation. Americans are fair and reasonable - not a bunch of wimps held captive by a feckless institution like the existing NCAA - or at the mercy of the TV networks who have no interest in making anything work for the athletes, their schools, or their fans. To the executives at ABC nothing makes sense, but ratings. We should all watch the movie "Network" again to see what we're up against.
I keep thinking of Abraham Lincoln's deep innate sense of fairness. We need to find an Abe-like-person to run the NCAA and deal with the Transfer Portal, NIL, Transgender athletes and all the other problems the current NCAA has ignored.
If a dozen AD's from across the country got together and signed a proposed plan of action and sent it to every AD from the Power Five schools and invited them to a meeting in March 2024 - I think they would come ready to tackle the problems and let fairness reign.
Let's do this!
