The kind of money you’re talking about makes that inevitable.” “But it does seem clear to me that there will be some sort of realignment in the very near future. “Where it all leads, I don’t think anyone is sure right now,” said Navy Athletic Director Jack Lengyel, who just completed his term as president of the National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics.

The eventual result could be the disintegration of several existing conferences, the affiliation of most independents and, by the mid-1990s, the emergence of three or four “superconferences” with two divisions and 12 to 16 schools apiece-a transformation many see as the first step toward creating a college football playoff system. This summer may see the groundwork laid for rampant additions, defections and mergers that could test the structural boundaries of Division I-A, as the nation’s elite schools and conferences scurry to establish regional strangleholds in anticipation of megabucks television contracts. And when the NCAA’s major football conferences begin acting in earnest upon what has been stirring for months, they promise to gobble up everything in their paths with a race toward Manifest Destiny that could reshape the face of intercollegiate athletics. To the rules that govern the motions of terrestrial bodies must be added a new concept: conferential drift, the tendency of a large college sports league to try to engulf smaller ones when motivated by the pursuit of revenue.

Ncaa conference realignment