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you say this as if it's a conference dog competing with another conference dog, while not realizing that the cannibalizing of dogs eating each other would be taking place within our own conference. If the SEC, as a hypothetical example, had 24 teams and it was the top 24 teams in CFB history, on paper that would seem to really make a lot of people happy because "we're bette rthan the big 10 lol!!!!" when in reality all it would do it make things harder than a motherfricker for everyone actuall in the sec. You could have a team that's legitimately a top 5 or 6 team in America that won't sniff the playoff becuas ethey have 4-5 losses.

At what point is the conference big enough? 12 was fine. 16 is way, WAY more than fine. We don't need fricking 20.

This isn't about liking giant-sized conferences. But you're being a bit too focused on "big conference bad; old small conferences good". This is a zero-sum game. Your line of thinking is exactly what caused the PAC-12 to fail.

If the SEC sits by and lets the B1G gobble up FSU and Clemson, not only have they nabbed the last two blue-ish bloods for free (aside from Notre Dame, but that's another topic), they've also gotten excellent footholds in SEC territory.

This is about match-ups and brands now. So we agree there. But why would the SEC sit back and let the B1G have 20 to its 16? That gives them two more match-ups every single week, and we're adding another week to the college football schedule next year. If the brands are valuable enough (hint: Florida State is), they will get the schools in the conference more dollars per team in the long run.

The SEC's present, short-term mistake is that they saddled up ENTIRELY with ESPN who now has us by the balls a bit in terms of whether they want to pay more money to add more schools. But I don't think it makes sense to be shortsighted there. The ACC's shortsightedness led them to this reckoning.

The death of the ACC will be the end of major realignment talk for this generation, you can bet on that. But I simply don't understand the line of thinking that 16 is already too many schools, so we should just gift the B1G two elite football schools in the heart of the south. It's been expand or die for decades, and the SEC has always been at forefront.