Mandel’s Mailbag (realignment edition): What to make of college football’s chaos

In a normal week in the offseason, I put up the submission form for Mailbag questions late afternoon on Monday and you guys post around 30-50 responses. This week, I had more than 300 in the first 12 hours.

Realignment for the win (again).

I want to get to as many as I possibly can, so this week’s Mailbag will be a little different than usual: More questions, shorter answers.

It’s still super-sized, though — much like college conferences.

Note: Submitted questions have been lightly edited for length and clarity. 

Why hasn’t the Big Ten added Cal and Stanford already? It seems like a no-brainer from both sides. The schools get a very cushy landing spot as their conference collapses around them, and the Big Ten gets to add two very highly regarded academic institutions with pretty good top-to-bottom athletic departments. — Nathan J., Whitefish Bay, Wis.

Since Stanford and Berkeley apparently are two of the four most unattractive athletic programs in the Pac-12, can we put to rest this curious notion that academics matter in the world of sports? — Mike C., Blaine, Mich.

Mike, thanks for answering Nathan’s question. But I’ll add a few thoughts.

The Big Ten hasn’t added them because Fox probably doesn’t think they’re valuable enough to merit paying the Big Ten even more money. And as much as presidents claim to care about academics, that goes out the window if it means their share of the pie gets diluted from $75 million a year to $70 million a year.

There’s a degree of recency bias in realignment, and I wonder if this would be a different story had the Pac-12 imploded around 2016 when Stanford had Christian McCaffrey and Bryce Love and was coming off three Rose Bowls in four years. It had no problem garnering eyeballs then. But if you’re a TV network looking at the broader picture, that was more an aberration than the norm for Stanford, which has since regressed to 4-8/4-2/3-9/3-9 and faces an uphill climb in the transfer portal era.

I don’t think those schools’ hopes are dead. They are surely lobbying the Big Ten hard right now, and the conference may decide it makes sense to have a full pod of six West Coast schools and/or find it appealing to get two schools that produce a whole lot of Olympians and national titles in the non-revenue sports. But they could also come in and be two more Rutgers’ in football.

If Florida State can find a way to get out of the ACC grant of rights without having to pay the equivalent of the fortune of a small nation, how many of the other ACC schools would follow suit? Would that lead to the fall of the ACC similar to the Pac-12? — Griffin M.

If I’m the ACC, I’m pretty nervous. As the Pac-12 found out, none of these leagues besides the SEC and Big Ten are too big to fail.

There’s no obvious solution to the ACC’s revenue gap. Some people think Florida State is bluffing. I believe the school is dead serious about bolting, though probably not in time for 2024. And…