re: Big Ten, Pac-12, ACC expected to formally announce alliance today

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The problem with these conferences is not geographic reach. The problem is they have no good football teams other than Ohio St and Clemson.

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They are both big problems. If the Alliance is intended to be an impediment or rival to the SEC, it is doomed from the start. The SEC will soon have 16-equal member universities, including approximately half of the blue blood football schools in a neat, contiguous region of the southeast. Vanderbilt aside, the other 15 members share more commonalities than differences. For the foreseeable future, it will be the most stable entity in the college sports landscape.

On the other hand, the Alliance has a loose affiliation of vastly different universities across three conferences with very different goals and capabilities, despite what lip-service they may give to the public about having common goals and working for a common purpose. The B1G will use the PAC-12 and ACC to their advantage, but they must know that those two conferences top-to-bottom would serve only to dilute their product and result in a larger gap to the SEC, especially once Texas and OU have blue and yellow conference logos painted on their football fields.

I agree with the sentiment that the Alliance conferences should tread lightly, all the SEC would need to do to take them down entirely would be to snag its choice members from the ACC (say FSU, Clemson, UNC, and UVA, for example) and breakaway from the existing system to forms its own league. At that point, the Alliance is a non-revenue sports league with a few frustrated blue bloods stuck in the SEC's rear-view mirror.