It Always Was, Is, and Always Will Be About the Money
one more move please just one more move, one more dollar will do it
Don’t know if you heard, but they’re moving some teams around some conferences again. Colorado is back to the Big 12. Arizona will move to the Big 12 with them, in all likelihood. The Big Ten is weighing adding a couple more schools. The other money-pilled conference, the SEC, will do the same or beat them to it. We are in yet another era of conference realignment, and if you’re a commoner like me, you’re probably either loosely invested or beyond sick of hearing about it.
Join the club, mate. Personally, if I see another screen like this, from today’s edition of The Athletic, I am going to become a monk.
All coverage of these moves has taken on a football-first lens, which makes sense. College football brings FBS schools almost four times as many dollars to the average school as college basketball does despite playing no more than half as many games. The #1 school in college basketball revenue last year was (questionably) Duke, whose full-year intake would rank 48th - one spot ahead of Washington State - if it were a college football team.
That’s why football gets the headlines: it is, indeed, the most important sport to the bottom line. Men’s and women’s basketball is next in the firing line, but most forget about the non-revenue sports happily: ice hockey (minus about nine programs), baseball/softball, and track and field, not to mention a various dogpile of others that linger about at the bottom of a revenue chart. 99% of the coverage of this has centered around how it’ll affect football and our memories of the sport, though football more accurately represents a bit over half of all income.
In one sense, this is understandable. It’s the top sport; it will get the top coverage. In football, rivalries have had longer times to settle in, with the most-played FBS rivalry being Minnesota/Wisconsin (the Paul Bunyan’s Axe one, SEC people) at 132 times. Kentucky has played both Tennessee and Vanderbilt 154 times in men’s basketball since 1950 and has played Tennessee every single year but one since 1923, but it doesn’t hold quite the same national or regional cache as a 132-year football rivalry. In that sense, It Just Means More I suppose.
The problem is that even the football rivalries are going away now. Of the 51 rivalries which have been played 100 or more times, 13 have been temporarily or permanently halted since 2010. You know the big ones - Texas/Texas A&M, Missouri/Kansas, Missouri/Nebraska, Michigan/Minnesota - but you might not know that BYU/Utah, a rivalry with 101 meetings, will be played once between 2019 and 2024 and has been played in its traditional season-ending slot once since 2010. Or that Utah and Utah State have not played each other since 2015. Or that Illinois and Ohio State - owners of perhaps the strangest rivalry trophy - have played each other once in eight seasons.
Even the ones still on the board are in danger. Oregon/Oregon State - the oldest rivalry on the West Coast - is no guarantee to stay a thing once Oregon inevitably leaves the Pac-12. Arizona/Arizona State is endangered. Oklahoma/Oklahoma State is likely to end this fall. UNC/NC State likely goes away with an eventual split. The state of Virginia is getting out ahead of it by politely asking UVA and Virginia Tech to not screw the other over, but it’s college athletics, how do you think that’s gonna go? By 2030, half of those 51 rivalries, if not more, may be temporarily or permanently kaputt.
Part of this could be senseless alarmism. After all, nothing beyond a few moves here or there are finalized. If you ask anyone who’s not on Twitter very much, they may be completely unaware that any of this is going on in the first place. However, if it comes to fruition, angered college football fans can look to another sport that’s handled more than their fair share of realignment: college basketball.
The first NCAA Tournament I remember watching a significant amount of was 2002’s; I graduated college in 2015. In between, there were a few consistent mainstays of March Madness. Beyond the obvious every-year entrants (Kansas, MSU, Gonzaga, Duke, Wisconsin), there were a few pluckier sides that emerged from relative obscurity to stake their every-March claim to fame: Xavier (11 bids), UConn (10), Marquette (10), Memphis (10), BYU (9), Cincinnati (9), and Butler (8).
Collectively, they produced a lot of fun memories. Xavier’s pair of 2000s Elite Eight runs rank among the most fun teams of my lifetime. UConn had three titles. All of Marquette, Memphis, and Butler had one (or two) signature Final Four runs that made deep impressions; BYU and Cincinnati simply always had fun players. Anyone who watched college hoops consistently during this time period can likely name at least one player they liked from each team.
Also, all seven of those teams belong in a different conference than they were in at the start of that time period. Some, like Cincinnati and Butler, have changed conferences multiple times in the last two decades. In the early 2000s, Cincinnati, Louisville, Memphis, Houston, Marquette, and many others all belonged to the same conference, conveniently named Conference USA. CUSA was far from a perfect being - it was born of two conferences (Metro and Great Midwest) and left out a few previous members. It also confusingly ranged from Florida to Wisconsin to Texas.
What CUSA did do well was emphasize specific regional aspects that were crucial to the communities themselves and were generally unconcerned with how things were done in other leagues. Cincinnati, Marquette, Louisville, and an ascendant Memphis provided the league with real rivalries to build upon one another. It helped that each team had unique quirks and personalities leading them: Cincinnati had Bob Huggins; Marquette had Tom Crean and Dwyane Wade; Louisville hired Rick Pitino; Memphis had John Calipari. Not everyone in the conference flourished, but that’s never happened in any conference ever. What matters is whether the cream of your crop establishes something that feels like it matters to those involved. The CUSA mattered.
Prior to the 2005-06 season, the Big East came calling. A pair of key football members - Miami and Virginia Tech - left for the ACC. Boston College would do so as well. Instead of replacing those teams with an appropriate threesome, the ACC expanded to a 16-team super conference. Cincinnati, DePaul, Louisville, Marquette, and South Florida (somehow) would be added. In an instant, several important rivalries of the early aughts were over.
Memphis and Cincinnati, who used to have ranked vs. ranked matchups every single season, went six years without playing each other. Memphis and Louisville have played once since 2014. Marquette and Louisville, a rivalry that both fanbases still claim despite not being in the same conference since 2013, have not scheduled each other since.
This is merely one example of many. All four teams involved in our study here would likely tell you that they got something out of changing conferences, but what remains unclear. Cincinnati departed the 7th-best basketball conference in 2005; they reside in the 8th-best conference in 2023. Louisville (ACC) and Marquette (Big East) generally upgraded, but Memphis is stuck in the same boat as Cincinnati. This is to say nothing of other CUSA stars of the 2000s, such as Charlotte (downgrade), Saint Louis (marginal downgrade), or even DePaul, who is in a superior conference but hasn’t come anywhere near the field of 68 since departing CUSA.
Others in hoops haven’t been as fortunate, either. BYU hasn’t won a Tournament game since leaving the Mountain West and has finished ranked twice in football since 2010. Texas A&M has three Tournament bids in 11 SEC seasons after going 6-for-7 in their latter Big 12 days. Missouri has fared better but functionally feels like a filler track on a 14-song album. Nebraska’s move has been an on-field and on-court disaster. Of the major-conference moves post-2010, one of the few all-sport moves to a Big Six conference you can point to as obvious successes are TCU and Utah, who moved into more regional leagues than they were previously members of. (Honestly, Maryland has not been a terrible addition to the Big Ten, either.)
Countless other examples exist in smaller conferences, which are pillaging and getting pillaged more frequently than ever before. The Atlantic Sun has not gone more than three seasons with the same lineup of programs in its history. The Mountain West, which has finally recovered in basketball from its early-2010s losses, is on the verge of losing multiple members. The WCC is constantly at threat of losing the one program your average American has heard of.
But! At this point, I suppose I’m used to it. This has happened many, many times before; it will happen many, many times over, even once we eventually transition to 16 or 20-team super conferences. That is how college sports works: an endless cycle of change, whether you want it or not. You don’t want it, by the way, but the people who somehow need more money despite already having tons and tons of money want it. Traditions, regional quirks, and rivalries are of no interest here; it is all cold hard cash, baby.
Too bad.
I don’t write this from some position of above-it-all menace, either. The dissolution of the Pacific 12 (formerly the Pacific 10, formerly formerly the Pacific 8, Big Six, and Big Five) was done of its own free will by a commissioner more interested in being the smartest guy in the room than doing something that actually works. The people who this supposedly should make feel bad will get millions of dollars in settlement checks and/or severance to not feel too bad about themselves.
The people who will actually feel quite bad about this are the fans. That sentence could have been said in 2010, when Nebraska departed the Big 12 for the Big Ten, a move that has proven itself to be a mistake. Or when Colorado left the Big 12 for the Pac-12, formed zero new rivalries, and is now groveling back home to a conference that no longer has several of its historical foes within its confines.
For fans of scorned fanbases - hello Boise State - the downfall of the Pac-12 is simply Something They Had Coming To ‘Em. For fans of scorned conferences(?) they would say the same. For the rest of us - me, you, and all the normal college sports fans who just want things to care about - it is a sad day for a variety of reasons. Gone are a lot of things we grew up watching and cherishing. The very specific regionality of the Pac-12 made it special, even if you maybe didn’t care that much about the rivalries themselves.
In that sense, the Pac-12 may have been the last semi-normal major conference left standing. All of its members, even with Colorado included, were west of the Rockies and therefore sustained this inherent regionality that so many other conferences have already lost or are in the process of losing. The Big Ten is soon to have teams from California after adding teams from Maryland and New Jersey. The Southeastern Conference is expanding into Oklahoma next year. The Atlantic Coast Conference, if it survives by the time this is published, has teams in Indiana and Kentucky. Even the Big East - a conference headquartered in New York - has a team in Nebraska.
This is no new news to people who’ve followed along, but it feels like it’s worth restating. The end began a long time ago; this is merely the third act of a decades-long play. This is probably the perfect summation of it all:
That was over two years ago, by the way. Before UCLA and USC became Midwestern schools and we had to convince ourselves that UCLA making a mid-January visit to Rutgers in basketball was not utterly insane. Before Oregon and Washington considered doing the same. Before Arizona and Arizona State started trying to convince themselves they could handle yearly trips to West Virginia. Before Florida State…well, that one actually makes some amount of sense on paper. Before I had to sit and think about what happens to beautifully unique settings like Washington State or Oregon State or Wake Forest, settings that can only exist in college sports.
The writing has been on the wall for years, this is just the death knell. How’s that for a positive August spin on things?
Now: the actual positive spin.
The games are still gonna be there and we’ll all find things to love. Obviously. I think that’s something I have to state for myself as much as I do you.
There are conferences in existence that actually desire to stay regional and are doing a good job of it. The new look Sun Belt is one of these that I appreciate very much. The 14 programs involved range from Texas to West Virginia, but minus the West Virginia portion (Marshall) it really is a Sun Belt conference. Plus, they’ve helped reboot old rivalries of both gridiron and hardwood (App State/Marshall; James Madison/Old Dominion) and have done a great job theming their conference around its regionality.
More examples: the Mid-American Conference; Mountain West (barring changes); most FCS and non-football conferences.
You can simply choose to not engage with it the way I’ve engaged with it. A healthily-removed fandom of college sports is very likely the way to go. Being an obsessive is fun, but it leads you down these rabbit holes and whatnot. The I Don’t Care Option is always right there. Game’s on dude.
The odds are that your program will stand to make more money if they make a move than if they stay put on the sideline. Just don’t ask any questions about if you will enjoy your new ‘rivalries’, how your expense-to-revenue ratio compares to that of your new conferencemates, or if the TV contract allows you to actually see all of the games. Just pay for four different streaming services. You’ll be fine! Unless your program is one of the ones in a tiny media market then maybe skip this whole section because you will be really sad.
Well, maybe that’s not the most positive spin. College sports will go on; I think the latest rumor(s) of their collective demise are once again overblown. They’ve survived far worse than conferences realigning their respective members, even though history would tell said conferences that huge conglomerates rarely work out all that well. The safe bet here is that by 2033 we’ll be having another form of this same conversation, but as to which 20-team conference will be splintering into two separate ones. Maybe on XMode or whatever it is called by then, we can have the exact same discourse…unless they’ve finally, blissfully banned all social media from human hands.
The good news is that, in a lot of sports that aren’t football, the conference still does matter in some fashion. It means something when Tennessee wins the SEC Tournament for the first time in 43 years. It means something when Michigan wins the Big Ten Tournament four days after their plane crashed on a runway. Those are just the big-picture examples. It means everything to teams who aren’t guaranteed a spot in the field, whatever size their field may be in their sport, when they win their conference.
That will always be there, and it’s something we can continue to cherish. The problem is that the people in power of these conferences seem to have no interest in what we, as fans, want to cherish. It always was, is, and always will be about the money, the TV contracts, and those sweet sweet advertisements. It’s up to us as consumers how much that affects our enjoyment of the sports themselves.
Well, I’m still here. They can’t kill me. Give me the garbage, baby.