I was just listening to Dan Patrick on 97.7 talking about the California pay-for-play bill. It was pretty interesting. Somethings Patrick had to say on the topic of pay-for-play and realignment:
1) According to Patrick, in California to qualify for pay-for-play a university has to have $10 mil or more in media revenue. Which means it only applies to USC, UCLA, Cal & Stanford. He said other state legislatures are discussing similar laws, like South Carolina. He expects all of the P5 conference members are going to push for equivalent legislation in their states.
2) As this moves forward, he expects it won't be long before the top 60 P5 split off from the NCAA and have their own organization because they're "in the business to make money and the rest of collegiate football isn't". So let the NCAA take care of them and the P5 will do its own thing.
3) The top 60 P5 membership will move to a "play-in" situation where the top G-5 school each year will move up to the P5 and the bottom P5 school will move down to the G-5. Patrick thinks this will inject a lot of interest into a new NCAA G-5 championship because the winner is moving up and the loser isn't.
I can see the pay-for-play thing will take a couple of years to shake out. In Louisiana, I won't be surprised for it to come up in our legislature next year. Just about the time that gets worked out, the P5 media rights thing will be on the horizon (which puts the FANG money issue on the table):
https://www.espn.com/college-football/story/_/id/19743196/why-2023-next-big-date-conference-shuffling
Whether or not what Dan Patrick has everything right, changes are coming because more money is about to begin getting injected into to college athletics, especially football. More than likely we'll look back and see the California pay-for-play law marked the beginning of the next phase.