Editor's Note: With the potential for massive realignment among college sports programs following the announcement of Texas A&M's intent to join the SEC, we wanted to cut to the chase. Since the purpose of realignment is to maximize potential revenue for each athletic program, we're exploring the optimal alignment for college athletics to supply the best product to its national audience. Given his ample experience creating regional groupings based on the strength of certain programs, we turned to our resident bracketologist, Joe Luanrdi, to analyze what every school offers in both football and basketball and shuffle the NCAA sports landscape based on team strength and geographical considerations. The following is Part 1 of a three-part series exploring what this optimized NCAA world would look like.

Since realignment is suddenly the dirtiest word in intercollegiate athletics, let's scrap it. Instead, let's forget about the "re" part and focus solely on alignment. As in, what would college sports look like if we could flip all the cards and start from scratch?