Kirk Herbstreit: 'Conference commissioners don't know what will happen'

ESPN personality Kirk Herbstreit joined the Pat McAfee show Monday to talk conference realignment and the current landscape of college athletics. With Oklahoma and Texas recently leaving the Big 12 to join the SEC, there has been a lot of speculation about what conferences will look like in the coming seasons.

The ACC, Big Ten and Pac-12 met this past week to discuss a scheduling alliance. That has further sparked discussion about changes among the college conferences we know. Herbstreit said it seems impossible to predict what is going to happen right now, but gave his best guess.

“We’ve got image and likeness,” he said. “We’ve got transfer portal. Texas and OU in the SEC and everyone else scrambling to figure out what they’re gonna do. I can sit here and B.S. and tell you, ‘This is what I think is gonna happen.’ But I’ll tell you right now I don’t think the conference commissioners know what’s gonna happen. It feels like we’re heading toward four premier big 16-team conferences.

“And it feels like those conferences will pull away one day from the NCAA, go out and hire a commissioner and create their own world.”

Kirk Herbstreit also suggested that the College Football Playoff expansion could be delayed in light of conference realignment. The committee announced in June it would consider going from a 4-team model to 12. However, recent news of conference realignment has caused some commissioners to express skepticism about moving forward with that plan.

The ESPN anchor thinks they are right on the money.

“I also don’t think this Playoff is gonna go down,” Herbstreit said. “They’re talking about expanding it to 12 teams. After everything that happened with Texas and OU, I see this full cycle — it was a 12-year cycle that started in 2014 — I think it will go all the way through. There’s too much going on right now for them to be able to say, ‘Hey, let’s change it in 2025.’

By the end of the 12-year cycle, he believes there will be a more clear idea of what conferences will look like. Then the committee can begin to consider expanding to 12 teams. The only thing that seems clear right now is that more is coming. Exactly what that will look like is anybody’s guess.

“Maybe by then we’ll have an idea of what’s happening to these teams left in the Big 12,” Herbstreit said. “Where is the Big Ten going? What is the Pac-12 going to do? The ACC? Everybody is going to respond to what the SEC has done by flexing its muscles and bringing in Texas and OU.”