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College football is already several weeks into its new Power 4 era. But this weekend is when the impact of conference realignment—the good, the bad, and the ugly—will be felt the most yet.
Four debut conference matchups in particular highlight the sport’s wild, cash-driven new reality.
In the expanded 17-team ACC, Stanford is making the roughly 2,400-mile flight from Northern California to upstate New York for its inaugural conference matchup against Syracuse on Friday night. On Saturday, Cal will visit Florida State after flying more than 2,200 miles across the country for its first ACC game.
And that’s just the beginning for the ACC’s two new West Coast members. Stanford travels cross-country again to Clemson next weekend, and plays at NC State on Nov. 2. Cal has road games at Pitt and Wake Forest this fall, too.
But while taxing travel schedules show the dark side of conference realignment, the shifting landscape is also giving fans and networks some can’t-miss conference matchups like never before.
On Saturday afternoon, No. 11 USC will play its first matchup in the 18-team Big Ten at No. 18 Michigan. CBS gets the game broadcast as one of three companies (alongside Fox and NBC) paying the conference roughly $1 billion annually for the remainder of the decade.
That night, No. 6 Tennessee will visit No. 15 Oklahoma in the 16-team SEC. Disney (ABC/ESPN) is the benefactor as the conference’s sole media partner, beginning this year, at a cost of $710 million annually.
Coast to Coast
With intraconference schedules beginning in earnest, the madness of realignment will be at play all season.
Rutgers is a particularly interesting case of cross-country contests in the expanded Big Ten. The Scarlet Knights welcome Washington to New Jersey next weekend, and in October, host UCLA before traveling to USC six days later for an 11 p.m. ET kickoff the following Friday night.
In the SEC, Georgia will make just its second visit to Texas on Oct. 19, setting up to potentially be the game of the season. The Longhorns just leapfrogged the Bulldogs as the No. 1–ranked team, and Arch Manning is likely to keep filling in while starting quarterback Quinn Ewers is injured. ABC/ESPN will be hoping both teams are still undefeated, as Texas’s 31–12 victory at Michigan is the most-watched game so far this year with 9.35 million viewers on Fox.
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