By all accounts, math is no longer an important criteria for college sports. At least not when it comes to college athletic conferences. As you may know with recent announcements, the Big 10 is about to house 16 teams. The Pac 12 is down to 10, where it used to be. The Big 12 will soon be 12 again, but it’s been 10 for a long time. Fortunately, the SEC and ACC have avoided numbers altogether, which makes their expansion and contraction much cleaners, even as they stretch the boundaries of geography.
Expect all of that to become even more pronounced over the next several years, as the game of college sports musical chairs continues in earnest into the great unknown. It picked up considerable pace last week as USC and UCLA, two of the nation’s most prominent athletics programs from the nation’s second largest TV market, left their long-time home of the PAC 12 to head to the Big 10, joining the likes of Michigan and Ohio State in what is now clearly the second most prominent athletic conference in the country. That leaves the rest of the Pac 12, all 10 of them, trying to figure out their next move. For some of them, like Stanford and Oregon, it might also be an invite to the Big 10. For others – say, Oregon State – the options might be less inviting. The same thing is going to happen on the East Coast, as schools like Clemson and North Carolina quietly wait for an invite to the SEC like it’s an ask to the senior prom. This process will continue until it doesn’t, which a lot of people believe is when we’re down to two mega conferences and a bunch of other schools that don’t matter. That will come as a big shock to a lot of schools in the latter category that used to believe otherwise. Such is the Hunger Games that has become big time college sports.
When we say sports, we mean football, of course, the driver of pretty much all major realignment. Men’s basketball gets a cursory glance, but little more. And every other sport combined is little more than an afterthought. You could basically take football ranking and multiply it by TV market size and get every university’s value, lowest to highest. Which also means that swimming and volleyball and softball athletes might travel a whole lot further for conference matchups, games that add nothing to the economic value of the deal but are simply the cost of doing business. Of course, business is the key word, as all of this is driven by the opportunity to make a whole lot more money joining a super conference than staying in a nice, if not as prominent regional one. That’s how you have two teams from Los Angeles scheduling games against Rutgers and Maryland, and why Oklahoma walked away from rivalry matches against Oklahoma State to instead schedule Florida and South Carolina.
If this sounds a lot like pro sports, that’s because it is. You might remember how a group of elite European soccer clubs recently tried to break away and form something called the Super League, which would have created a top tier formally separated from other top clubs. Only in Europe, pretty much every team and federation joined together to largely ostracize any club that joined this new operation. Which shut it down before it could begin, maintaining at least the illusion of competitive opportunity. That peer pressure doesn’t exist in American college sports, where the mantra is largely dog eat dog. Or dog eat dog after making a handshake agreement not to eat dog, as the Pac 12 and Big 10 essentially did before one poached teams from the other. Education may be a collaborative activity, but their sports programs are anything but.
There’s not much new to say about how quickly the once stable enterprise of college athletics is going through metamorphosis. Between the onslaught of NIL deals, which allows star athletes at big schools make literally millions, to the undoing of decades of history and rivalry, the college sports of tomorrow looks very little like the one of last week. And as much as we tend to believe that institutions are forever durable, like college sports and, I don’t know, American democracy, we’ve come realize that institutions are only as stable as their caretakers.
History, loyalty, and logic simply aren’t criteria for college sports anymore. And neither is math.
Keith Strudler is the director of the School of Communication and Media at Montclair State University. You can follow him on twitter at @KeithStrudler
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