re: Big TV betting on Consolidation in NCAAF

Broadcasters want and will pay for better matchups. The easy solution that wouldn't create this mess was a combination of the following: everyone to stop scheduling FCS teams, conferences to have more conference games, P5 teams scheduling more OOC p5 games. Since there is so much autonomy among teams and conferences for scheduling and the NCAA is an incompetent clown show (and power brokers reward record over resume time and again), the broadcasters incentivized bringing more brands into fewer leagues.

Ultimately, what everyone wants (and the search for more money) could have been handled by the status quo doing smart things in coordination. Because of a catastrophic failure of vision and leadership, the solution was imposed in a way that laid to waste a lot of individual teams.