Money Vs. Geography

The College Sports Land-escape

Now that the 2023 college football season is officially underway, it’s a good time to reflect on the recent changes to the college sports landscape.  Of course, this affects all sports, not just the most popular ones, like football or basketball; but football is a good reference point to start with due to its history, pageantry, and popularity.

The changes I’m referring to are the conference realignment moves we’ve recently seen.  Conferences have always been changing and evolving, but the last few years have seen this in the extreme. We have now been pushed into a new, very disconcerting, but interesting, era of college sports. There is a new illogical aspect to conference realignment that probably portends a new major adjustment to how we think about college sports.

I say “new” because there was a previous illogical move one which occurred 33 years ago, in 1990, when Penn State joined the Big 10 Conference. This actually made sense from a regional and geographical cohesion standpoint.  Pennsylvania bordered Ohio, and you could make the case that much of Pennsylvania was the “heartland” so to speak and had some similarities to the Midwestern characteristics of the Big 10. It was a bit of a logical stretch, as Pennsylvania also has much in common with more metropolitan areas and was often thought of as being an East Coast state, even though there’s not actually any coast. But, it was an acceptable move and it could be justified with some mild creative geographical thinking.

The illogic came from the insistence that the Big 10 retain its brand and keep the number “10” in the name.  With some unabashed creativity, graphic designers were even able to insert the number “11” into the Big 10 logo, hoping that people would be subliminally coerced into mindlessly conceding to the reality of this misnomer. This addition to the Big 10 prompted a wave of expansions and school-shifting that has been accelerating ever since. In hindsight, it is obvious that this move was momentous and precipitated a disorienting evolution of the sports conferences.

Since the Big 10’s addition of Penn State in 1990, almost all other conferences followed suit in expanding over the next two decades (incidentally, most did manage to update their names to accurately reflect the number of teams in the conference).  At the time, Penn State was an “independent” school, not affiliated with a conference.  The proud independents were realizing that they could make a lot more money in the conferences which had ever-growing television revenues.  So most of them started joining conferences, such as Florida State and Miami (FL) in 1991 to the ACC and Big East, respectively. All of the adjustments during this time were themed on schools joining a conference that was best for them and their access to money. The only remaining significant hold out has been Notre Dame, which has their own television deal. There were some moves that didn’t make much geographical sense, or at least have a plausible argument in this respect, but these were relatively few and relegated to schools and conferences that had less visibility.

In 2023, we are now in the beginning of a new era, brought on by a new illogic: Geography.  The move by Southern Cal (USC), and UCLA to the Big 10 is an era-adjuster.  I don’t think anyone in their right mind can argue that this makes any sense geographically. The closest Big 10 school to Los Angeles. is Nebraska, at a distance of 1500 miles; the farthest is Rutgers, at 2800 miles away.  There are no regional, historical, traditional, or other non-monetary arguments for this move, not that there ever really was for any previous moves.  But previous ones at least made more sense from a profitability standpoint:  a marginal increase in travel expenses plus significantly more television revenue meant more profit margin.  In the case of USC and UCLA, the television revenue was too good to overcome any concerns about travel expenses.

Why and how the Pac-12 Conference – which was home to every major popular university on and near the West Coast – could not ever seem to secure a lucrative television deal of its own are questions that people have been puzzling over for some time.  It was anecdotally apparent from grumblings that something was not right, as it was easier to see a Gonzaga basketball game than a Pac-12 contest.  Another telling example is the first weekend of football in 2023 saw a primetime ESPN game featuring Massachusetts and New Mexico State, but a much more compelling game between USC, and their Heisman Trophy early frontrunner at quarterback, and San Jose State was on the Pac-12 Network.

It could be as simple as Pac-12 school presidents weren’t as business-minded as their counterparts at all the other major schools across the U.S.  That might be a noble thing in principle, but the eventual result has been the dissolution of a storied conference with loads of  tradition and history. The dam has now broken as two other Pac-12 schools, Oregon and Washington, are following USC and UCLA to the Big 10; and more are moving to other conferences. As an aside, now that they’re going from 14 to 18 teams, will the Big 10 finally change its name?  I doubt it, but they sure are testing the limits of the human mind with this stubbornness.

With the Big 10 at the forefront, other conferences now have to weigh their own geographically illogical moves.  Currently the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) is trying to work out a deal that would bring in the Pac-12 remnants Cal, Stanford, Oregon State, and Washington State.  

What does this mean for the future of college sports?  Well for the next 5-10 years, our brains will get used to the fact that the Big 10 now has 18 teams and is not a midwestern conference anymore, and the Atlantic Coast-based ACC now includes Pacific Coast teams. Similar twisted realities in other conferences will no doubt take effect during this time.  

But at some point, it is hard not to imagine that a total nation-wide realignment will need to be consummated.  The traditional regional order that we had grown accustomed to, and tried to hold on to, will be no more.  The current charades will be impossible to maintain, and a new sports world order will take effect.

It seems likely that in the not-to-distant future college sports will resemble professional sports in this regard.  There are signs of this already, such as with the new NIL (“Name, Image, Likeness”) income standards that student athletes have been taking advantage of recently, rightfully so.  The order of competition will probably follow this lead.  Conferences will likely devolve into 2 or more “Superleagues”, relatively equal in competitiveness to the other, much like the AFC and NFC in the National Football League, or an East and West Division in the National Basketball Association (NBA).  This seems to be what’s currently taking place, with the two most powerful conferences, the Big 10 and Southeastern Conference (SEC), expanding at the current speed.  Due to the sheer number of schools, other “Superleagues” are likely to form.

There may even be new divisions created to account for the perceived competitiveness of these “Superleagues”.  Much in the same way that there was a Division 1, 1-A, II, etc (now called FBS and FCS), there are likely to be top-tier Superleagues, likely made up of the Big 10, SEC, ACC, and Big 12, and lower-tier superleagues, perhaps including the Big East and Mountain West (no disrespect to these conferences, just trying to reflect reality).  

How they will be organized and compete with each other, and how a national championship will be determined, are among the harder to predict questions, but this will probably go through multiple iterations before it’s settled.  In fact, the 12-team college football playoff format that was just approved last year, is already forced to update its tournament participation rules due to these recent conference alignment events, which occurred before the format takes effect. The system can’t evolve fast enough for its own good.

For football, which has its own unique system for determining a champion, a future determination of champion is likely to become a somewhat stable NFL-style approach.  This could be the top 6-8 teams from each Superleague battling it out in a do-or-die tournament format, with the final two teams reaching the college equivalent of the Super Bowl.  The lower-tier Superleagues could be involved somehow, incorporating a similar tournament, but perhaps to determine twoto four teams to be included in a bye-round of the National Championship tournament between the upper-tier Superleagues.

There are many possibilities and the evolution will be ongoing.  This is a somber but exciting time for college sports. Traditions have been decimated by these recent events, but new ones will be created.  As with most things in the early 21st century, buckle up for a wild ride.