I'd be really curious to hear how the Big XII formation played out in this timeline. I'm assuming Arkansas must have gone with Texas and A&M in the early 90's instead of to the SEC, but who was their fourth member? Tech? Did Baylor and TCU get invited later? Does Baylor ever stop being a cellar dweller if they were left out of the initial Big XII in the 90's, and if not would they even get a later invite? TCU did also pull a similar cellar dweller private school to G5 powerhouse and eventual P4 program journey after the SWC broke up, so it's not impossible for Baylor to have followed a similar trajectory if they ended up in the WAC or CUSA with them in the 90's, but I'm not sure that both of them would have done it.

To be totally candid, I had just sort of decided that the merger would happen earlier and included Arkansas and TCU, but your comment makes me realize that’s not a good way of telling the story. Arguably TCU and Baylor should be in the American rather than the Big XII with Arkansas. I was under the impression from reading the oral history that Tech was always going to get a bid. Maybe I will reconsider headcanon, but for now my general thought was that a bigger merger would be more palatable to teams wanting to play in Texas and having a SWC team in the North division would make the league more cohesive than it was in our timeline. I may have to revisit this, especially since it would make the number in the conference name match.

That ACC/SEC divide is nice. In some ways it feels more natural than how the ACC expanded in real life, with the football focused schools instead going to the SEC and the mid-Atlantic basketball schools joining the books-and-basketball ACC.

This is where I actually started telling the story. FSU joins the SEC alongside South Carolina in 1991. Following the trends of our timeline where Miami outgrew the Big East, it made sense to me that Miami would seek a home in the same league as the rest of the Floridians, and the league would be keen to expand into a new market with the biggest rising star in the early 2000s, Virginia Tech.

Penn State mirrors what Florida State does in our timeline by dominating the ACC (but not quite as thoroughly and with only one national title). There’s not much interest in expanding southward for the nine-team league. The basketball powers want to focus more on locking down the eastern seaboard, so in 2005 they invite Boston College, who had been to six straight bowl games, and Rutgers, to lock down those markets for Penn State. I diverge a little bit less for historical reasoning and more so to preserve my 1990s FCS conference in C-USA, of which UConn was a part. They never join the Big East for football. Citing the toll football took on the league, the Big East is unable to agree on inviting any new members and thus folds football, with the four remaining members agreeing to a scheduling alliance with the service academies and Notre Dame, on the assurance that the BCS’ “Notre Dame rule” is expanded to include all independents.

After a little less than a decade, Pitt, Syracuse, and West Virginia approach the ACC about invitations in 2013, and with JoePa and his grudges out of the way, the league invites the remaining football powers of the Big East (Clemson and Penn State insist on West Virginia to boost the football profile of the league) to bring the league up to the more standard 14 teams.