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The beauty used to be the perceived parity between big and small, old and new, anyone who could build athletic programs.

The P5 leveraged the NCAA into letting them create their own set of rules for governance. One conference has already folded from power status, and the rest are about to eat each other.

The SEC doesn't want to share their revenue, TV or otherwise, with anyone but their brethren.

We never were part of the real conversation about the future of college athletics at their level. The NCAA tournament (now ruined by more and more teams, but consistently from fewer conferences) held it together, and that includes all the other sports who really don't make money.

But those NCAA tv deals are up relatively soon. The SEC doing this severely hampers the perceived value of their negotiations. The NCAA never controlled the football championship, and soon won't control any alleged national championship in other sports either, if the SEC can get the Big Ten or other power conferences on board.

In the end, if the landscape becomes fractured into national vs regional type players, it still comes down to funding athletics as an enrichment to the educational experience. That the body and mind should be built equally, and that athletics exemplifies this in a collegiate setting. That the university can be the bedrock for excellence not only on campus, but a gateway to the community. That national competition against like minded institutions unites them in purpose. Stanford found a way to get people to believe. Some small schools like Colby College in Maine truly view them as the same, and built beautiful facilities to back it up.