Ran across this blog on my Facebook feed. It's an interesting but never-gonna-happen idea. Good off-season fodder.
It's not an interesting idea. It is a stupid idea. It is a stupid idea. It is a stupid idea because the underlying assumption of how conferences should be set up does not make sense in today's reality.
This realignment makes the assumption that geographic proximity is the most important driver in how conferences should be aligned. And while that may have been true 75 years ago, it doesn't make sense today.
75 years ago, geographic proximity was important because travel time and travel costs were an important factor and was mostly correlated to distance. The cost of getting there (air or bus) was much greater than the cost of being there (hotel and food). Today, travel cost is a much smaller portion of athletic department budgets, and the cost of being there is a much bigger portion of the travel cost. And travel time is not as big of a deal, since air travel is more economical. Today, I can fly from New Brunswick to Madison Wisc in about the same time it takes to drive to Syracuse.
Goegraphic coverage today is more important than geographic proximity. That is why, when the SEC and Big Ten expanded, they added teams from outside their existing geographic footprint, rather than proximate teams from inside their footprint.
Also, the proposed realignment misses another big factor in conference alignment: having schools that are similar in mission. The Big Ten works because all the schools have similar missions in being major research institutions (even Northwestern, which is smaller and private, is still a major research institution). The Big East failed, at the other extreme, because the schools had completely different missions.