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I read an article recently that companies like Netflix, Facebook, Apple, Google and Amazon will be more instrumental in the whole realignment thing than some people realize and in a completely different way than previously thought.
The suggestion was that these companies will be bidding on covering specific teams and not a specific conference. The highest drawing teams will of course get the best contracts. The bottom feeding teams in the power conferences will only benefit because they play some of the these teams in a conference schedule. Gone would be the guaranteed conference payouts per team. A contract to cover the OSU schedule would make sense but not Northwestern.
The idea was that they will look at contracts with the top 30-40 powerhouse teams with the best audience (which does not include UC unfortunately). Regional coverage for conferences won't matter much anymore with the advent of streaming from just about anywhere via mobile devices and such. Conference realignment goes by the wayside for coverage of specific teams or specific games. More dream matchups etc to generate revenue and buzz.
These powerhouse teams will still have to schedule some lower level games so they aren't playing a high profile matchup every week. They would still play a conference schedule so getting in one of these conferences would still probably make some sense unless we have a great AD that can get some of these OOC games on the schedule without getting in one of the top conferences.
It all sounds rational but not sure if this is where it is headed or not.
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