I laugh at all the boobs on sport-talk radio who go along with all this and assume because realignment is happening--spinning out of control, really--it must be a good thing, but they don't talk much about the greed underlying the process. And here's the thing: Realignment could conceivably go on and on and on.
Think about this: What's to stop, say, the 5 most prominent programs in the SEC and the 5 most prominent programs in the Big 10, and maybe you throw in another few prominent programs from around the country--Notre Dame, Oregon, others--and they form the CSC: College Super Conference? So you've essentially got the 12/15 most prominent programs in one conference, playing each other. Think of the TV deal a Super Conference could get? Massive.
The problem is that they'd all have to find a way to extricate themselves from their current conferences and their TV deals--and admittedly, that would not be easy. It would also kind of ruin the playoff system, I suppose--if you've got all the power programs playing each other during the regular season, there'd be no one for the Super Conference champion to play in the playoffs--it would have already played them, in theory. However, the TV money--if it could be arranged, would be massive for those schools.
It may sound far-fetched--and yet it's a logical extension of what we've been seeing. Oklahoma and Texas decided they were bigger and had more earnings potential than their Big12 brethren and so left for a conference promising more money. There were haves and have-nots in the Big12. The new SEC with texas, oklahoma and maybe others, is going to have "haves" and "have-nots." Vandy, Miss. State, Kentucky, Ole Miss, South Carolina--all could be considered have-nots, because they're not going to be the power programs AND their games, when televised, will not have the ratings that the power programs have. So just as Oklahoma and Texas decided that they were too big for the Big12 and left. The same thing could happen in the new SEC: Bama, Georgia, Oklahoma, LSU could say: "Hey, Kentucky and Vandy are a drag on our earnings; why we all get with Ohio State, Michigan and Notre Dame and form a Super Conference?
Couldn't happen? Might be difficult to pull off--but it is a logical extension of exactly what we're seeing. And where would Tennessee and all the other mid-tier programs end up?