Great article about the realignment of the last few years:
https://www.extrapointsmb.com/p/didnt-way
I'll admit that there have been times in the past that I wished that I was a fan of a "big time" college football team (or that WIU was a "big time" team) so we could watch them on national TV or see a stadium filled with 80k loud fans cheering for them...but last week is not one of those times.
One suggestion that I saw online that might help a bit would be to completely separate football conferences from all other sports conferences. So, a team like Oregon or Arizona can be in the Big 10 (18) or Big 12 (16) for football, but play in a much more "regionally-focused" conference for all other sports.
I already saw a comment elsewhere that suggested that Stanford might decide to just go independent in football (like what BYU did for quite a while) and join either the West Coast Conference (almost entirely California-based, all private, although they're all religious:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Coas ... ll_members) or the Big West Conference (also almost entirely CA-based, but all are public schools:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_West_ ... nt_members) for all other sports. The WCC has much better basketball (on par with the Pac 12 as of last year) but idk how adverse Stanford is to joining an all-religious school conference considering they spent so much time in a conference that was majority public schools.