With Big Ten season canceled, can teams join another conference for a year?

Big Ten teams can’t just go around switching conferences.

The Big Ten fall football season has been canceled.

Prior to the news, there was plenty of college football players and coaches fighting against the potential cancellation of the 2020 season. Several Big Ten coaches have joined the conversation.

This has led to an idea of Big Ten teams seeking other conferences to join in 2020 in order to play a season. While this sounds intriguing as a concept, making the switch is not so easy. ESPN’s Rece Davis shot down the idea pretty fast on Get Up!.

Big Ten teams seeking leverage

Nebraska’s Scott Frost was the one to get this conversation going. He spoke to the media this week and declared he would seek all available options to play in 2020, whether that is within the Big Ten or elsewhere.

The whole point of joining a conference is to get an equal share of the massive revenues generated by the collective whole of all the teams. Nebraska leaving the conference for one year may mean they are kicked out permanently. That would be foolish after being a relatively new addition to the Big Ten.

The goal here seems to be to essentially threaten university presidents into not canceling the season. However, coaches do need to be careful to not get their entire program into a bad place with the conference.

Unfortunately, fantasy scenarios of teams swapping conferences in 2020 is just not realistic. That may be for the best and avoid an even messier situation that what is being seen now.

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