SAN ANTONIO — A mere 17 months ago, the NCAA’s Division I board of directors gathered in Indianapolis to approve a new governance structure that was celebrated as a way for the five high-resource football conferences to finally get significant things done and feared by many on the outside as a separation that would leave the financial have-nots unable to compete.
The push for power conference autonomy, as it was called, had been driven by the significant legal pressures on college sports and forced upon the smaller conferences at the point of a bayonet. They would either fall in line with the wishes of former SEC Commissioner Mike Slive and Big Ten Commissioner Jim Delany or else, a threat that implied the breakup of Div.