Pretty sure the USA is the only place with college varsity athletics.
Yes, it's all gotten astoundingly crass and stupid. The evolving soon-to-be 20-team P5 conferences won't be conferences in the traditional sense--as
they were known and loved (until recently) for decades. They're now just agglomerations of schools who want and hope to suck on the expanding TV-rights
teet. The whole idea of this idiotic madness is for P5 programs to make even more money from college football. And assuming that happens, most P5 athletic
departments should have even more money for non-revenue sports. The supposed losers--like those schools remaining in the Pac12 at the moment--might have
less money. The problem with the Pac12 is that it has never figured out a way to compete with Eastern/Midwestern/Southern conference in the TV marketplace--
the time difference being one problem.
I can't imagine college football programs splitting off into a separate entity and not contributing money to their school's non-revenue sports. It would be a major
scandal, I think. But then college football has become less and less about "college." If P5 conferences did create their own college-football organization,what would stop it from creating its own streaming/broadcast platform and bypassing
all the existing networks? It would lose all the rights money, there would be costs involved in creating the networks--but all the ad revenue would be its alone.
It is also possible that in the years ahead college sports viewership diminishes. Younger generations have grown up watching a cornucopia of infotainment
crap on a multitude of platforms---much of it now delivered in 20/30 second bites---and they probably don't have the attention span to spend 2/3 hours watching anything.
Conference expansion/realignment has spun completely out of control, and I'm pretty sure nobody knows what's going on or where it's headed. All I see
is lot of desperate commercial money-grubbing that is making an unholy mess of college athletics. I'm an east-coast guy, but to see the more than 100-year-old
Pac12 get destroyed by all this nonsense is just sad and stupid.
I read something recently--a piece that was somewhat old but interesting--that suggested that ESPN was a major instigator for conference realignment---suggesting to certain
schools that they join conferences to which ESPN had the broadcast rights, the idea being that the new members would create more viewers, higher ratings, etc. The writer mentioned that ESPN was the catalyst for Pitt and Syracuse joining the ACC. He didn't cite any sources, so not sure if it's true, but there's no doubt that the networks
have been involved in all this.