ACC, Big Ten, Pac-12 form NCAA alliance

The Atlantic Coast Conference, Big Ten and Pac-12 announced an alliance Tuesday that will work together “on a collaborative approach surrounding the future evolution of college athletics and scheduling” with a clear eye on the growing power of the SEC.

Conference officials have been discussing the idea for weeks, but commissioners Kevin Warren of the Big Ten, Jim Phillips of the ACC and George Kliavkoff of the Pac-12 — all relatively new to their positions —acknowledged the plan publicly for the first time.

“There’s no contract. There’s no signed document. There doesn’t need to be,” Kliavkoff said.

The move comes less than a month after the Southeastern Conference invited Texas and Oklahoma to join the league and create a 16-school league by 2025. The move sent shockwaves through college athletics and will leave the Big 12 without its two premier schools in the paydirt sport of football.

The ACC, Big Ten and Pac-12 hope its alliance of 41 schools that span from Miami to Seattle leads to stability at the top of big-time college sports and thwarts future realignment.

The alliance is also being formed as the NCAA begins the process of handing off more responsibility to conferences and schools to run college sports, and with a proposal to expand the College Football Playoff in the pipeline.

The scheduling piece could lead to multiple nonconference football games per season between the league members, creating new and valuable television inventory.

Just how soon that might happen wasn’t clear: Nonconference football schedules are typically made years in advance and many schools already have mostly full slates in the coming seasons.