If you’re looking for heated competition and high drama, there’s no better place this fall than college sports. It’s high stakes, winner takes all, hard feelings kind of stuff. But I’m not talking about actual games. I’m talking about conference realignment, the musical chairs of Division I athletics that has more twists and backstabs than the Real Housewives franchise.
If you aren’t fully aware of conference realignment, it’s basically college sports mixed with the Hunger Games. Athletic conferences look to attract the best and most profitable sports schools to their group by stealing them from others. Which then means the depleted conference tries to poach from someone else. All the while, individual universities have to be vigilant and play everything close to the vest in making sure they end up in a top spot, peaking in either the Big 10 or Southeastern Conference, the two gorillas of college sports. It’s also why you may have noticed Syracuse hosting Stanford last weekend in an Atlantic Coast Conference game, even though Stanford couldn’t be further from the Atlantic if they tried.
The fight of the moment is happening on the West Coast, as the remnants of the PAC 12 conference – which is all of Oregon State and Washington State – are trying to rebuild the organization from the ground up. All they really had left was the name, so whatever the new PAC 12 becomes is like the equivalent of watching a Foreigner concert today. After the PAC 12 broke up last year, precipitated by USC and UCLA jumping ship, the two remaining schools formed an uneasy alliance with the Mountain West, which is basically another Division I conference of schools with smaller budgets and less pedigree. Schools like San Diego State and Boise State and Fresno State. It’s like going from a Lexus to a Toyota. They collectively decided to include Oregon State and Washington State in their football scheduling this year for a price. And the general assumption was that in the near future, everyone would combine to form the new PAC 12, which would be about as convincing as Spinal Tap Mark II.
Only what happened was instead of a merger, we got a hostile takeover, as the PAC 12 poached first four and now five of the top Mountain West schools to join them, who essentially turned on their own conference, leaving the Mountain West with seven schools while the PAC-12 grows also to seven – one shy of the required number but one too many to change its name to the 6 PAC. For that, the Mountain West is billing the new PAC 12, or 7, over $50 million for poaching, a provision put in their contract this year as something of a poison pill to prevent something just like this. For the record, that’s on top of the $17 million exit fee each university has to pay to leave. To close the loop, the PAC Whatever is suing the Mountain West basically for extortion in forcing them to sign a bad contract that restricted future competition. There’s a lot more there, like accusations of price gouging. But in the end, what we’ve got is now two “lesser” conferences in a legal battle over who was the more dishonest in a Game of Thrones play to become less irrelevant in an increasingly top heavy college football landscape.
I’m certain both economists and political scientists have ample theory to describe both the financial conditions and political environment that led to third tier football programs fighting with one another while the sport’s elite are cashing in. There’s some irony or at least misplaced aggression of Wyoming hating Fresno State when it’s really schools like USC that started this domino effect in the first place. And while places like Ohio State and Alabama divide an increasingly enormous pie with an also increasingly well-defined list of players. And for the record, I’m not suggesting that Nevada football is as valuable as Georgia. I’m simply saying that lawsuits like this one really miss the mark.
Perhaps what I’m really saying is that this breakup of sorts reminds us of the only two knowables in college sports right now. One, it’s more popular than ever. And two, it just doesn’t work for most of its members. Not as is. And no matter whether it’s the PAC 12 or Mountain West, we’re basically playing an inevitable game of Survivor until we fully acknowledge that around 50 universities play big time college football. The rest, not so much. The sooner everyone figures that out, the sooner we’ll create manageable divisions and conferences where the drama is more on the field than off.
Keith Strudler is the Dean of the School of Communication and Media at Montclair State University. You can follow him at @KeithStrudler
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.