1. I think this is right from ESPN's and Fox's point of view
2. I think that the ironic drawback to superconferences is that they'll eat up the undefeated teams (i.e maybe you'll only have one of those matchups, and a bunch of 8-3 matchups of teams that got beaten up along the way). You'll get more marquee matchups, but not as many as you'd get from the current conferences with shorter seasons, and a 32-team playoff (or even a 16 team playoff).
3. Sankey (SEC commish) has already been circulating a new NCAA basketball tourney, but without the Cinderella teams. He's gotten some pushback. The superconferences have the same feel to me.
The Super-conferences will probably make a sh*t ton of money short-term, but long term they’ll just end up pushing fans away. Fans of teams left out of the super conferences will end up just abandoning college football. They’re not just going to magically start rooting for their rivals just because they’re in the super conference.
There’s probably not a ton of GT fans who would just start rooting for UGA or any other super team if GT gets left in the dust. So there’s a couple hundred thousand college football fans that you’ve just abandoned. The same would ring true for places like Oklahoma State, Iowa State, Texas Tech, TCU, Baylor, Stanford, Cal, Virginia Tech, Pitt, and any others who might not make the cut. That’s probably a couple million fans who will just totally lose interest in the sport. That’s not a recipe for success. And it’s not like you’re going to draw any new fans that have previously been uninterested in college football simply because there’s more teams in the super conferences. If they weren’t already watching Ohio State vs. Penn State or Alabama vs. LSU, they probably won’t start watching when Michigan plays USC or when Florida plays Texas.
European soccer’s smaller clubs almost started a riot when the European Super League was floated around. They know that if you cut out the small clubs, eventually the fan and money pool for the big clubs dry up.
I become more and more uninterested with college football by the week. Every time news breaks it’s almost never positive. That feeling has started to creep into college basketball, and even more disgustingly it’s coming to college baseball too. Long-term the super conferences will probably be the end of college sports