The most likely scenario is that college football may soon become a homogenized national sport.
For over a century, the sport was defined by regional rivalries and athletic conferences whose composition seemed almost set in stone. It was defined by tradition as fans geared up annually for games that were so significant that they had their own names. Kansas didn’t just play Missouri; they held a Border War. Oregon’s rivalry against Oregon State was so intense that it was Civil War. And the matchup between Oklahoma and Oklahoma State was just Bedlam.
But that is not what college football was meant to be. It is, or at least it was once, built around regional rivalries and local bragging rights. Passions were fueled by the fact that archrivals were clustered in such close geographical proximity to each other. College football rivalries divided workplaces and families and provided an almost sociological insight into states and regions.
There are both gains and losses from this. After all, prices tend to be cheaper at a Walmart than at a Main Street shop, just as the quality of football in a game between Texas and Alabama is likely much higher than that in a game between Texas and Baylor. But there are other more intangible things that are lost.