ESPN’s Pete Thamel on Chances Big Ten Could Join SEC to Form a Superconference

Breakaway talk is the best business college football has. It is also, according to Pete Thamel, mostly a business that runs on clicks.

Rich walked ESPN's Thamel through the scenario everybody is circling: the SEC going off on its own, the Big Ten deciding it has the same grievances, and the two of them waking up as a superconference. Rich's read is that a solo SEC season collapses under its own logic almost immediately, because everyone would spend the fall asking whether that champion could have handled the Big Ten, the Big 12 or the ACC. That is not progress. That is the BCS era, or worse.

Thamel did not dismiss the frustration. He confirmed it.

"The Big Ten has similar frustrations to the SEC in terms of rules making, in terms of process, in terms of governance," Thamel said, adding that there has been plenty of rhetoric out of Washington that amounted to fear-mongering about super leagues.

What he pushed back on was the idea that anyone has thought the endgame through.

"If you break away and the SEC runs on its own, what do you do with the NCAA tournament?" Thamel asked. "What do you do with Omaha? If you really want to break away, are you going to give up all of the very powerful platforms for your non-revenue sports?"

Football would survive that trade. It would just shrink.

"Football would be fine in the SEC. I'm not diminishing what football could be," Thamel said. "But it would be regional and it wouldn't be national."

He was candid about why the story never dies. "Nothing traffics on the internet better than realignment talk," he said. "Any editor would tell you that."

The most interesting turn came when Rich brought up the BCS, which sent Thamel somewhere unexpected. Their friend Dan Wetzel wrote "Death to the BCS." Rich was at SportsCenter in those days, watching Brad Edwards break out slide rules and protractors to explain why a team was at 1.2 percent. Thamel's argument is that the thing everyone hated did something nobody credits it for.

"The BCS, though generally remembered as wildly unpopular, I really think almost a missing part of the legacy of the BCS was that it taught us that this sport that has such regional passion can be a national sport," he said. "I do think the BCS lit the fuse for college football being the second most popular sport in America right now."

He has a specific memory for it. Around 2007, covering a game at Oregon, he sat in a bar in Eugene and watched Oregon fans watch a South Florida and Louisville game on a weeknight because both teams were ranked in the top 10.

"It connected everything together," Thamel said. USC fans watching Rich Rodriguez's West Virginia teams. A sport that had never had that.

Which is why he keeps coming back to the circus tent metaphor. You never know who the next lion tamer is. If he had come on the show three years ago and predicted Indiana would go 28-2 under Curt Cignetti, he said, an ambulance would have been dispatched to his house for a health check.

He sees the same belief driving South Florida, where he visited Brian Hartline and athletic director Rob Higgins this week. They are building a stadium. They are in the number one market in Florida. They want to grow.

"A retreat to regionalism, honestly, it would hurt the bottom line," Thamel said. "And it would hurt the overall popularity of the sport, because you want that interconnectedness."