Nebraska AD issues warning to college football fans

Nebraska Cornhuskers athletic director Trev Alberts issued a big warning to college football fans and the college football world at large.

Alberts spoke with the Lincoln Journal Star’s Amie Just for a two-hour interview. The Journal Star published an article Sunday based on Alberts’ comments.

Alberts spoke about the big topic in college sports: realignment. He said that conferences that are not willing to expand are asking for problems. He also warned that next year’s realignment could be more disruptive than this year’s round was.

“I don’t believe it’s done. It’s never been done. It’s more likely than not that there will be continued periods of angst. I believe that the next go-around—that’s my basic conclusion—will be far more disruptive than anything we’re currently engaged in. We need to prepare ourselves mentally for that,” Alberts told Just.

Oklahoma and Texas are leaving the Big 12 for the SEC next year, while Oregon, UCLA, USC and Washington are leaving the Pac-12 for the Big Ten. Arizona, Arizona State, Colorado and Utah are all leaving the Pac-12 for the Big 12. That all is scheduled to take place in 2024. Some of those moves we learned about last year or the year before, while many of the other moves were recently determined. Alberts suggests even more surprising moves could take place next year.

Alberts also believes college football is headed to something completely new.

Alberts feels a super conference in college football is imminent, and that the super conference will be separate from other sports.

“We’re moving to a 35 to 40 top brands being part of something. If you just look at football in isolation, eventually conferences will matter less in a sense. If we can find a way to take football and have that be this entity here, I think then you can get back to doing some much more intelligent thinking around the rest of the sports, which should be regionally based,” Alberts told Just.

Alberts is not alone in feeling this way. Plenty of other people have felt this is the way the sport is moving, and also that dragging all the other sports along makes little sense. If football is branching off, it doesn’t make sense to rip apart the regional conferences to which the schools have been tied for all the other sports.

You can read his full comments in the Journal Star.