What if college basketball ran conference realignment? We sorted all 364 teams to find out

New York Times

5 days ago

Money drives nearly everything. In college sports, that means football is the overarching power under which all other sports must exist. And as even the richest football programs look to scrape together more money, conference realignment has become one of the driving stories in college athletics.
In hopes of securing more lucrative TV deals, the largest leagues — the Big Ten, the SEC, the Big 12 and the ACC — have gobbled up more and more teams, consolidating to the point that each 'superconference' has between 16 and 18 members. Proximity within the leagues has become all but irrelevant, fully overwhelmed by the importance of adding new markets and expanding each league's footprint.
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That has left smaller programs and conferences scrambling, with some schools desperately searching for a secure home and entire leagues in crisis mode trying to avoid complete dissolution.
The shuffling is far from over. The Pac-12 was dead, and then it wasn't, raiding the Mountain West to repopulate the league around Oregon State and Washington State. The Mountain West has subsequently pillaged lower levels for new members, and the domino effect has left many mid-majors in a state of unease at best, total disarray and panic at worst.
However, for a few glorious minutes, we can ignore all of that. Let us imagine a world where football is no longer the bullying juggernaut dictating every move in college sports. Instead, what if the central tenets that drive the enjoyability of a conference — local rivalries, historical animosity, recruiting battles — were the focus? Dream with me!
What would the college basketball landscape look like if the sport were self-sufficient? I set out to reconstruct the entire layout of Division I with that hypothetical as my guiding principle. Perhaps the most important rule to fall back on is that of a truly balanced schedule. Double round-robins (in which each team plays a home-and-home with every other team in its league) are fading out of college hoops, with fewer and fewer leagues still retaining that schedule purity. Bringing back the double round-robin would enhance the meaning of the regular-season championship, so I am allowing a maximum of 11 teams in each league (which would create a 20-game double round-robin).
Included next to each conference is the members' average Net Rating per KenPom over the last five seasons. I used Net Ratings as a loose guide to ensure each league remained somewhat competitive as I swapped members.
The current top five basketball conferences (the Power 4 football leagues and the Big East), as they stand today, include 79 teams. That means I chopped 27 squads to reach the above groups. If you were one of those 27, fear not; you generally found pretty strong homes in the next tier. Within these new P5 groups, the goal was to remain loyal to the historical roots of each league while also acknowledging the current competitive level — and spending — of each school.
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The Big 12 is close to its mid-1990s footprint (you know, when it actually had 12 teams), sans Nebraska and Colorado. With Houston's recent basketball resurgence, I had to make sure the Cougars remained, and they are a natural fit with the other Lone Star State programs. Texas, Texas A&M and Oklahoma are reunited with in-state foes, while Missouri and Kansas once again become conference rivals. The league now exclusively exists within the Central time zone.
The SEC was a challenge, as it has been a 12-team league for a long time. When it comes to basketball, Vanderbilt, Georgia, South Carolina or even LSU all have their warts and were candidates for removal. I ultimately shipped out South Carolina, as the Gamecocks were the last to join. Arkansas, who joined in 1991 with South Carolina, gets a pass due to being a consistently better hoops program. Sorry, Gamecocks fans.
The Big Ten has 10 teams again and no longer touches either coast. That result alone is worth this reorganization. The beloved 'Maps' commercial will have to be shortened, but that's a small price to pay to have order restored in the world. Once again, cutting the membership was a conundrum, and Northwestern ended up getting the hook despite being a founding member in 1896. The Wildcats' new home has 11 teams, so you could easily flip them back here without any issue. You could also move Penn State, which only joined in 1991, to a different home to bring Northwestern back.
Part of that Northwestern decision, though, was a synergistic move to finally relieve DePaul of its Big East duties. That conference is now much more concentrated on the East Coast (go figure!), with its 10-team membership reminiscent of a streamlined version of the Big East's classic 16-team alignment. Rutgers, West Virginia, Syracuse and Pittsburgh are back where they belong.
Another former Big East power, Louisville, remains in its new ACC digs. The conference also welcomes back Maryland, which always felt more at home there, and rids itself of its illogical Bay Area/Dallas outposts. Louisville replaces the Florida State/Miami (FL) duo from the 2005 setup of the league — again, I tried to defer to historical membership where reasonable.
Just below the P5 rests this quintet of conferences, all of which would have a high likelihood of multiple NCAA Tournament bids in this new landscape. I had to invent two new leagues, the Central and Eastern, to create enough landing spots for all of the remaining high-end programs. The result is five conferences that are, by and large, geographically logical and competitively balanced.
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Sorting out the three West Coast leagues — Pac-12, WCC, Mountain West — is definitely a 'choose your own adventure' exercise. I went with the classic 10 programs for the Pac-12 (bring back the Pac-10 name!), one of the most logical conferences ever created, with five groups of two extremely obvious travel partners.
After that, uniting some of the best remaining western squads within the WCC led to an overpowered conference. Gonzaga's elite history also helps raise the overall profile, as well. This version of the league would be a basketball powerhouse — welcome back, BYU! — and Grand Canyon should only get better in the future.
I tried to make the new Mountain West more focused on the mountains while adding in a Texas outpost with TCU and SMU. The bottom of the league got a little watered down with the additions of UTEP and New Mexico State, but those programs have solid upside and fit the geographical footprint. And at least they've been better than Fresno State!
And welcome to the first two 'new' conferences that I made up, the Central and Eastern! The Central makes a ton of sense in my mind: a Midwestern hotbed of programs that have been pulled toward the coasts in the current realignment world. The Eastern group is more of an odd fit, with Cincinnati and Xavier getting slotted into a sunnier southern setting. I'd be open to tweaking there, but I couldn't make anything work perfectly.
This next tier introduces the most likely candidates for Cinderellas come March Madness. These leagues did not need much tweaking, aside from adding another invented league (the Western) to supplement the Pac-12, Mountain West and WCC. The result is more rationally split leagues with the ability to easily play a concentrated conference schedule.
The 'Best of the Rest' remains the Missouri Valley, which has weathered plenty of realignment storms over the years. Here, the Valley gains a strong program in Western Kentucky, while struggling squads Valpo, UIC and Evansville drop down to the Horizon (see below).
The brand of the Atlantic 10 takes a hit here, though I suppose you could swap the newfangled 'Eastern' moniker above with the A-10 and keep some luster to it. This new A-10 gives Boston College an actual chance to compete in basketball, and it restores UMass to where it belongs, rather than its ridiculous football-motivated move to the MAC.
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The new 'Texas/South' league could probably use better branding, but it's a pretty logical assembly of programs in both geography and basketball success, especially now that Wichita State has proven mortal in a post-Gregg Marshall world. It would be nice to have an obvious travel partner for UAB, but that's a minor concern.
Appalachian State makes a triumphant return to the SoCon now that football is not dictating life in Boone, and Middle Tennessee and Jacksonville State arrive as well. This trio replaces the two military academies, VMI and The Citadel, which have always struggled at this level, and Western Carolina, which has long been on the low end of league budgets.
Not touching the Ivy League was an easy choice. The Ancient Eight belong together, even if some programs clearly outstrip the others in terms of resources and basketball upside.
Davidson fans may not be thrilled to see a return to the CAA, but hear me out, Wildcats fans: big fish in a little pond! Charlotte and East Carolina also join, clustering the league's locations, but a New England chapter still remains via Hofstra and Drexel.
The Western is another newly formed conference, picking up some remnants of the WCC and Mountain West, plus a few high-upside programs in Hawaii, Cal Baptist and Portland State. The Big Sky is made up of more inland programs, largely ones in the Mountain time zone. You could swap Eastern Washington and Air Force for what might be a better fit all around, but it felt cruel to demote the troops that far.
Only one change for the Summit League, with Northern Colorado fitting in snugly as a Denver travel partner and bolstering the membership to 10. Similarly, the MAC looks a lot like its current version. The changes: Cleveland State and Wright State join to amp up the Ohio representation, while Ball State, Buffalo and Northern Illinois shift to better geographical situations.
The bottom of Division I hoops got a makeover, as well! Many of these leagues ended up at 11 teams by necessity, as my self-imposed geographical mandate grew tricky if I kept many of these conferences limited to 10 members. This was especially important with the 22 combined members of the SWAC and MEAC, both leagues made up of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). It felt natural to keep those schools aligned.
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Eleven teams in a league means a 20-game league schedule, which does limit buy-game opportunities (aka crucial revenue sources) for many smaller athletic departments. However, with the NCAA's coming expansion to a 32-game season, that issue could be somewhat alleviated.
On the plus side of this arrangement, 11-team leagues at this level will also keep the power conference fat cats happy by limiting the additional auto-bids doled out to mid- and low-majors. That would surely be a discussion point in this approach, as more conferences equals more auto-bids and fewer at-larges available for the NCAA Tournament. However, with the eventual expansion of the Big Dance seemingly inevitable, that concern is also mitigated to an extent.
One final note: Saint Francis will be dropping down to Division III after this season, so the NEC would revert to a 10-team conference in 2026-27.
Realistic or not, this setup for college basketball makes the sport better. Regular-season standings would matter again with fully balanced schedules; those who didn't like seeing 6-12 SEC teams make the NCAA Tournament should support this alternative wholeheartedly. Using geographical proximity encourages more heated rivalries and satisfies basic common sense for travel. As superconferences continue to balloon in size and footprint, the luster of regular-season competition wanes to a degree. Reverting to smaller, more localized leagues like the ones proposed here would generate huge benefits for college basketball as a whole.
(Illustration: Will Tullos / The Athletic; Photo: Sarah Stier / Getty Images)