What college sports fans once knew as the ACC, Big 10, Big 12, SEC and Pac-12 – all look significantly different now and are in danger of dissolving completely.
Talks of teams changing conferences ramped up a few years ago, but never came to fruition until recently.
We saw the greatest exodus from the Pac-12, with 10 of its 12 teams leaving. Arizona, Arizona State, Colorado and Utah left for the Big 12, UCLA, Oregon, USC and Washington are now members of the Big 10, while Cal and Stanford are in the ACC – despite not being remotely close to the Atlantic Coast. I think the newly-formed Big 12 and Big 10 are going to be strong basketball conferences – maybe not at the ACC’s level, but close to it.
Texas and Oklahoma are joining the SEC, giving the nation’s top football conference two more historic powers. They both come from the Big 12, which is not as strong a football conference, so year one in the SEC could be an adjustment.
The North Carolina Tar Heels, a flagship member of the ACC, have been able to avoid conference realignment – for now. It’s only a matter of time before UNC likely joins a “mega-conference,” which will likely be anchored by the Big 10, Big 12 or SEC.
I would hate to see North Carolina leave the conference where it has enjoyed a tremendous amount of success, but that’s just the nature of college sports these days.
With the inevitable coming, let’s take a deeper dive into the Tar Heels’ best fits for conference realignment:
Does UNC to the SEC make a lot of sense?
Technically, Chapel Hill is in the southeast, so this potential move could be seen as a geographical one.
The SEC is best known for football success, particularly with Georgia and Alabama in recent years. If you’ve watched Tar Heel football in the past decade, you might think our team would get destroyed in the SEC.
I think that’s a fair assumption to make, though North Carolina did beat South Carolina last year. UNC would fit better into the SEC because of its basketball program, as UNC could compete atop its possible new conference with the likes of Alabama and Kentucky.
The SEC is a basketball conference on the rise, so the Tar Heels wouldn’t be guaranteed immediate success.
