What would a P1 look like?
What if the top "brand" teams all joined together?
Conference realignment talk can get both complex and silly very quickly. It’s easy to come up with scenarios that various fan groups would enjoy. Everything from going back to regional rivalries to full cross-country 20+ team mega conferences that are football only. There is such a wide range of possibilities because the conferences have been very unpredictable.
But, we do have some hints at preferences based on stories that are repeated in the media (especially on the college football shows with well known analysts). There have been repeated suggestions for:
A single power conference with the top brands (the P1)
An expanded playoff (24 teams is possible)
Maintaining some version of existing conferences
So let’s consider what would happen if these suggestions actually happened. The outcome doesn’t really change if it is football only or all sports, so we will just put that to the side for a future article.
The P1 can be easily guessed based on known tv viewership numbers. Numbers shown below are in thousands (e.g., 2,000 below equal 2 million viewers on average per game).
I went with 20 teams for this example, but it would be easy to make this 22 or 24 teams. Based on average viewership, the next four teams on the P1 bubble would be Nebraska, Arkansas, Indiana, South Carolina. While the tv number might work, the geography of the teams would leave a lot of gaps across the country.
These 20 teams could play a balanced 8 game “conference” schedule plus 3 out of conference games in the regular season. And that would leave plenty of season for the playoffs where teams could play as many as five additional games if they make it to the national championship game (which would be a 16 game season).
And that brings us to the second bullet, the expanded playoff with a proposed 24 teams. If we carry forward the P1 example, we can assume that at least half of the P1 would make the playoffs. In the example below I am showing 13 of the 20 teams from the P1 in the playoff.
And that brings us to the last bullet, keeping the current conferences alive in some form. If the P1 teams broke away, as noted above, then these would be the remaining 48 teams in the P4 conferences (as of April 2026).
There would be plenty of opportunity for teams to move around, or conferences to realign and to schedule each other. But the SEC and Big Ten would become very different and require new media contracts.
Everything above is based on matching up known tv viewership data with hypothetical proposals being mentioned by members of the college football media.
Would the P1 games continue to get the high viewership, or would fans left behind turn off the P1 games? Would the playoffs be open enough to the left behind teams so that they were happy? And would the P4 conferences all continue to exist?