Congratulations, everyone. We’ve now made it almost a complete week without the announcement of any conference realignment moves which would create a tectonic shift in the college football landscape.
Last week’s announcement that PAC-12 stalwarts Southern Cal And UCLA would be decamping for the Big Ten caught some in college football circles by surprise, not because there weren’t rumors of it (there were) or because there was no justification for the move (there is), but because it simply flies in the face of the existing order. There’s a vignette in the Michael Lewis book The Big Short in which Lewis talks about two of his protagonists making a great deal of money in the options market betting on bad financial outcomes, which were mispriced in the market in part because people simply didn’t want to think that the worst case scenario could come to pass.