Why is Texas making the move to the SEC?
2:00min mark- RECRUITING
I still think everyone is missing RECRUITING is the reason. TX doesn’t need more money but they can’t pay their kids to play. Wherever the endorsement contracts are bigger and more lucrative is going to decide where the kids go play ball.
A super conference like the SEC expanded will have the largest viewer base and in connection get the most money for NIL endorsements. The kids will follow the money to whatever school it leads them.
While Texas and OU may want the elevated recruiting profile/pitch that being a member of an SEC super conference will afford them, the reason that Greg Sankey and the conference are doing this is two-fold in my estimation: (1) Money. The ability to restructure the existing television deals will bring an unthinkable amount of money to the league; (2) Competitive necessity. Looking at this from Sankey's position, if Texas and Oklahoma are absolutely leaving the BIG12, then your only option is to either acquire them and raise the profile of the SEC as the preeminent college football conference, or allow them to go to another conference and thereby weaken the SEC's prestige by comparison. If those schools join the B1G instead of the SEC, then we are thrust back into a 2005-07 situation where the media fawns over the B1G teams, despite logic and evidence demonstrating that they are not as competitive as the SEC.
You cannot allow expansion to begin with another conference if you are Sankey, especially as we watch the NCAA deteriorate in real time, and the writing on the wall signifies that in the relatively near future the Power conferences will have the ability and the necessity to break away and form their own entity.
Will recruiting improve for the present members of the SEC? No, I really do not believe that it will. Texas will be no more open to the SEC than it already is, and in fact, it will likely hurt much of the SEC in accessing that recruiting territory, because now Texas kids can to go the premier program in the state and still play in the SEC. From that vantage, I feel bad for A&M, because their biggest recruiting pitch to in-state players just dissolved before their eyes.
The NIL will play some factor, but we really have no idea how the NIL is going to factor yet. It is just extremely new, and there are a number of odd technicalities on how boosters are allowed to function within the NIL rules. I anticipate that we will see some players make large sums due to endorsements, but a majority of these kids are going to make very little.
