[82lsju]

Option 2 (the option that I think we will eventually head towards): A major retrenchment from athletics for Stanford.  We can’t afford to support 36 sports so we start cutting them (our much maligned former AD might have been ahead of his time).  we can’t afford to buy ourselves a world class football team, and at the next conference realignment we find ourselves without a chair when the ACC falls apart because we have over a decade of futility in revenue sports and dwindling attendance.  Maybe we even get ahead of the curve and decide to move to a minor conference before the next realignment.  But this ends with Stanford having anywhere between 1/2 to 2/3 as many sports as we do now, competing in a WCC or back in the PAC-12 or even *gasp* a move away from D1.  Athletics may just mean less at Stanford in the future than it does now.

one of our last great hopes is that the "super leagues of college football" need enough pacific and mountain time zone teams to fill all their TV slots and not abandon mountain and western state viewers, that could be what gets us "a chair" in the next big reshuffle (which is coming in I think +/-5 years), the Big Ten has their "west coast division" the SEC has no one west of Texas (a fellow can dream)

[82lsju]

Option 2 (the option that I think we will eventually head towards): A major retrenchment from athletics for Stanford.  We can’t afford to support 36 sports so we start cutting them (our much maligned former AD might have been ahead of his time).  we can’t afford to buy ourselves a world class football team, and at the next conference realignment we find ourselves without a chair when the ACC falls apart because we have over a decade of futility in revenue sports and dwindling attendance.  Maybe we even get ahead of the curve and decide to move to a minor conference before the next realignment.  But this ends with Stanford having anywhere between 1/2 to 2/3 as many sports as we do now, competing in a WCC or back in the PAC-12 or even *gasp* a move away from D1.  Athletics may just mean less at Stanford in the future than it does now.

one of our last great hopes is that the "super leagues of college football" need enough pacific and mountain time zone teams to fill all their TV slots and not abandon mountain and western state viewers, that could be what gets us "a chair" in the next big reshuffle (which is coming in I think +/-5 years), the Big Ten has their "west coast division" the SEC has no one west of Texas (a fellow can dream)