Big Ten, ACC, Pac-12 expected to announce 'alliance' in next seven to 10 days

Texas and Oklahoma confirming in late July their plans to officially defect from the Big 12 to the SEC after June 2025 left other conferences scrambling for ideas on how they could react.

The Atheltic's Nicole Auerbach and David M. Hale of ESPN now report the Big Ten, ACC and Pac-12 are expected to formally announce some sort of alliance between those entities within the next seven to 10 days. 

The exact nature of this agreement is publicly unclear. Hale wrote that recent conversations among athletic directors focused only on football and men's and women's basketball and, specifically, non-conference scheduling opportunities for programs from the three leagues that would lead to profitable media-rights agreements. 

Interestingly, both Auerbach and Hale noted ADs from the Big Ten, ACC and Pac-12 are against the idea of expanding the College Football Playoff to 12 schools and instead prefer proposed six- or eight-team models. Such individuals are also concerned the SEC becoming the NCAA's first "superconference" could allow it to develop into a sort of minor league for the NFL, one that theoretically could include salaries for players under new guidelines that recently allowed collegiate athletes to profit off their names, images and likenesses. 

It's long been thought multiple "super leagues" throughout varying levels of college athletics were inevitable. Friday's updates merely seem to confirm those assumptions.