Chris Del Conte has long been the leader of a close circle of friends of athletic directors, if only in voice volume. At one point, they were all upwardly mobile career climbers with ideas on how to reshape college athletics.
They age into their fifties and have only increased their influence. Formerly, the think tank of emerging thinkers consisted of seven current ADs and power brokers: Del Conte (Texas), Greg Byrne (Alabama), Scott Stricklin (Florida), Ross Bjork (Texas A&M), Whit Babcock (Virginia Tech), John Currie ( Wake Forest) and Greg McGarity (CEO of Gator Bowl). Others circulated in and out, but that only added to their vision of the future.
“Does the group have a name? I think Currie called it ‘The Next Gen,'” Del Conte said this week as Texas prepares for No. 1 Alabama. “Now we’re the ‘middle-aged gene’. Now we’re getting close to the ‘older gene’. Now we’re damn close to the old bastards. But we started out as young bastards.”
If Del Conte wasn’t the most personal of the group, he certainly stands as the unofficial historian.
“Our group has come up with a lot of crazy ideas that have now come to fruition,” added Del Conte. “We were a bunch of guys. We just became friends.”
A few years ago, those “bastards” started to see the future. It included College Football Playoff expansion, reshuffle, guerrilla marketing, and mega games, the shining example of which (Alabama vs. Texas) is in our midst this week.
It is a direct extension of Texas and Oklahoma migrating out of the Big 12 and into the SEC by 2025 (at the latest). It is a tangential reaction to the expansion of the playoffs. It’s one reason we’ll be seeing a lot more of these high-profile games. That was ensured last week when the CFP Board of Managers (university presidents) approved a play-off of 12 teams as early as 2024.
“Movements and playoffs and where we were going all came from those same conversations,” said Del Conte. “Nobody knew exactly what would happen, but we were just trying to project what might happen and put ourselves in the very best position to be successful.”
Del Conte, 54, arrived in Texas from TCU in 2017. It occurred to him that the Longhorns played their traditional rivals in neutral venues, if at all. The Oklahoma game is in Dallas. Nebraska was long gone to the Big Ten (actually because from Texel). Texas A&M went to the SEC for the same reason, if you ask the Aggies.
The Southwest Conference’s old rivalry with Arkansas — last played in Austin, Texas, in 2008 — was renewed for 2014 in Houston and last year in Fayetteville, Arkansas.
All of this had a direct impact on Del Conte, who is responsible for one of the country’s two largest sports budgets. He had to find a way to fill his stadium consistently. That, in turn, would help fund other sports.
Not without perhaps switching conferences. Not without adding one Woodstock atmosphere before the matches.
Not without tax benefits. In 2017, a tax reform bill scrapped the deductions that ticket buyers had enjoyed for years.
“I think we were all afraid that people wouldn’t.” [donate as boosters] because of the tax situation,” said McGarity, formerly the 2010-20 Georgia AD.
So there was a convergence of Congress, expansion of the playoffs, and willing scheduling partners that went along with reshuffling. The Next Gen saw that one day the bracket of four teams would expand. They foresaw that a record of 10-2 – even 9-3 – would be good enough to enter. (The Will of Utah) would have ended up in a field of 12 teams last season at 10-3.)
The power of the scheme only became Lake important, making it a huge consideration in tuning. It’s not just about playing better teams, it’s also about playing against them more often. The SEC grows to 16 teams. In 2021 Alabama played in Florida for the first time in ten years. Georgia has still not visited Texas A&M, despite the Aggies joining the league in 2012.
With its 16 teams, SEC officials are doing their best to come up with a scheduling model that would allow teams to play against each other home and away within a four-year period. If not, what’s the point of adding two of the country’s biggest sports brands?
Three times in the past decade, the SEC has secured a national championship before the title game was played: 2011, 2017 and 2021.
Between 2020-33, Georgia made the conscious decision to play 13 non-conference games against Power Fives and Notre Dame.
People like Florida, Georgia, Texas and Alabama of that Next Gen group could not only afford to plan, the future obliged. Stricklin, 52, got into media relations before becoming Mississippi State AD in 2010 and joining Florida in 2016. Byrne, 50, preceded Stricklin in the state of Mississippi and has been in Alabama since 2017. Bjork, 49, was with Ole Miss prior to Texas BEN. Currie, 49, was in Kansas State and Tennessee for Wake Forest.
They all know that in the extended playoff, a 10-2 team performing in non-conference play looked much better than a 10-2 team playing three or four punching bags around a conference schedule.
Del Conte says three or four years ago, a group of his Next Gen colleagues got together to… arm their schemes. Texas added Florida, Alabama, LSU and Georgia in schedules through 2030.
In a span of four months from February 2019 to May 2019, eight national non-conference games were announced. All but one were planned after 2025. Feel free to dot the i’s and cross the t’s. The CFP’s current contract with ESPN expires after that season.
“I spoke to Coach [Nick] Saban,” Byrne said. “He and I agreed we’d try to make some of these [games]. Texas [in 2022-23] and Notre Dame [in 2029-30] were the first two we announced.”
Alabama also has home and away games with Wisconsin, Florida State, West Virginia, Ohio State, Oklahoma State, Oklahoma and Boston College through 2035.
Combine that with the supposed schedule-strength advantage the SEC already enjoys playing its league slate. That’s not a competitive imbalance in realignment, that’s a competition orbiting the moon and others catching a public bus.
When the SEC opportunity presented itself for Texas, there was really no decision to make. The school traded those home schedule fears for regular games against Bama, LSU, Florida, Tennessee and yes, rival Texas A&M. The previously scheduled non-conference games against SEC opponents will be incorporated into future conference schedules.
Don’t shed a tear over Texas this week. It has the best of everything, including a place to land when the rearrange musical chairs started playing again. It must possess its perceived influence on Nebraska and Texas A&M (at least) and leave the Big 12 in the first place.
But it was also Texas that decided to stay in the Big 12 when the Pac-12 came in 2010 with an offer to make it the Pac-16.
Rearranging has once again become a competitive sport. The Big Ten picked up USC and UCLA this summer in response to the SEC bringing in Texas and OU. Is it all done?
“USC, UCLA, did I see it coming? No.” said DelConte. “But I think things were shaking. … You could feel things just from the conversations I had. Things were going in different directions.”
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