Category Archives: college conferences

Rivaling tradition

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Gallows humor might be the only reasonable response to the accelerating college conference mayhem. Given the disorienting realignments, The Athletic has suggested such potential “traditional rivalries” as the John Denver Classic (Colorado vs. West Virginia—“Rocky Mountain High” vs. “Take Me Home Country Roads”); the John Wooden Bowl (Purdue vs. UCLA); Phil Knight vs. the Scarlet Knights (Oregon-Rutgers).

Don’t even try to connect any of those matchups to leagues that for so long were organized by geographic and institutional ties—leagues that have become incapable of doing math or reading maps. The Big 10 is going to have 18 schools. At last count, the Big 12 has 14 and likely could go to 16. The Atlantic Coast Conference reportedly is considering Stanford and Cal (from the other coast) and SMU (from neither coast) for membership.

Also: Whither and wherefore Notre Dame, which forever banked on its independence but appears adrift in this reshaped financial model.

All the nutty new associations, with everyone seemingly running off to join a more lucrative circus, at least serve to finally acknowledge that college football—the sport responsible for this kaleidoscopic shuffling—has nothing to do with college. Fully professional (except that the players are not paid directly and have neither a union nor guarantees of health care), college football has further evolved into just another version of the NFL.

So why not accept reality and erect a firewall between football and academics, as proposed by Baruch College law professor Marc Edelman years ago? “Maybe,” he said in the wake of repercussions after Northwestern players attempted to form a union in 2014, “there should be a football program that wears blue and maize and plays out of Ann Arbor and is separate from the University of Michigan.” And a team dressed in burnt orange based in Austin, Tex., with no actual connection to that city’s institution of higher learning.

Why not follow the lead of Ithaca College sports media professor Ellen Staurowsky, co-author of the 1998 book “College Athletes for Hire: The Evolution and Legacy of the NCAA Amateur Myth,” who suggested splitting revenue-generating sports from the amateur, educations process? Football players still could go to classes if they chose to, Staurowsky said, but university athletic departments would lose the role of promoters and brokers of athletic talent and mass sports entertainment.

Or why not establish a National College Football League such as the one recently proposed by Welch Suggs, an associate director for the watchdog Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, a writer for The Chronicle of Higher Education and journalism professor at the University of Georgia?

In the Suggs model, there would be one major college football organization—same as the NFL—with manageable regional divisions structured something like of the old Southwest Conference (seven Texas schools plus neighboring Arkansas). The other sports—men’s and women’s basketball and especially the non-revenue sports of gymnastics, field hockey, track and so forth—would be grouped in their own separate conferences, immune from being big-footed by King Football’s insatiable pursuit of TV lucre.

With that, an Oregon volleyball team, not privy to chartered flights always available to the football gladiators, could avoid a cross-country round-trip journey to New Jersey to fulfill a commitment to play at Rutgers in the rejiggered Big 10.

Over and over, the NCAA has demonstrated it had neither the clout nor the will to stop all the gold-digging football gallivanting that is going on now. At a Knight Commission meeting 12 years ago, shortly after the Big 12 had begun to fall apart when Nebraska skedaddled to the Big 10, Missouri and Texas A&M to the SEC and Colorado to the PAC-12, then-NCAA president Mark Emmert declared that his organization “does not have a role in conference affiliations and should never be in the business of telling universities what affiliations they should have.”

So now, we have what New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait called the “logic of untrammeled capitalism” steadily picking up steam, with strategies “now driven entirely by the logic of television contracts” that yearn for expanded elite conferences. “The new mega-leagues,” Chait wrote, “will be too engorged to have real conference [football] champions: There will be too many teams in each league and too few games to fairly crown a winner.”

A decade ago, then-LSU chancellor Michael Martin predicted that “we could end up with two enormous conferences, one called ESPN and the other one called Fox.”

He sounds now like a regular Nostradamus. Or just a realist.

That’s rich

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This is an old man speaking, susceptible to How Things Used To Be. Feel free to opt for trendier fare. TikTok videos. Look-at-me Instagram posts. Instant messages composed entirely of acronyms.

Nevertheless, I shall rail against the latest realignment of college athletic conferences, which really has nothing to do with colleges and very little to do with athletics as a whole. These days, it’s all about football “programs;” nobody calls them “teams” anymore, because their function is to serve as cash cows for television, coaches and athletic directors.

My problem—and here I acknowledge a fusty nostalgia—is believing in the outdated sense that conferences should reflect regional ties, traditional rivalries and institutional similarities.

Alas, the universities of Texas and Oklahoma which, in the public mind, are not so much bastions of higher learning as football operations in pursuit of wealth, have announced they will leave the already diminished Big 12 to join the nation’s richest league, the Southeastern Conference. It feels like a modern version of the priority voiced 70 years ago by Oklahoma president George L. Cross: “We’re working to develop a university that our football team can be proud of.”

I admit to loving the college game in spite of its meaner aspects, including a long history of tenuous connections to academics. In the late 1800s, for goodness sakes, the original football factory was Yale University. But there was a fairly recent time when a reasonable percentage of the hired guns were actual students and conferences facilitated contests for nothing more consequential than neighborhood bragging rights.

Then the big bucks got a little too big and the social climbing commenced, in the 1990s destroying the Southwest Conference that was modeled on geography, a collection of Texas colleges plus Arkansas. Roughly 20 years on, the Big 12—a grouping of mid-America/breadbasket schools which had cherrypicked four former SWC teams—went into decline with the departure of Nebraska (to the Big 10), Colorado (to the Pac-12), Missouri and Texas A&M (both to the SEC.)

When that shameless gold-digging was afoot, NCAA president Mark Emmert washed his hands, telling the watchdog Knight Commission in 2011 that his organization “does not have a role in conference affiliations and should never be in the business of telling universities what affiliations they should have.”

At that same Knight confab, though, then-Knight co-chair Brit Kirwan, at the time president of the University of Maryland system, expressed “great concerns over the fragmented governing structure” in which football establishments, seeking the most affluent league connections, were “wreaking havoc on a number of institutions” and their non-football athletes.

Kirwan recognized “the dance going on” to be based on the urge for Bowl Championship Series eligibility; i.e., more TV payouts. The next year, sure enough, Maryland—a founding member of the ACC more than a half-century earlier—jumped to the higher income bracket available in the Big 10.

It was then-LSU chancellor Michael Martin who in 2011 guessed, presciently, that “we could end up with just two enormous conferences, one called ESPN and the one called Fox.” Which sounds far more likely than the argument put forward in a recent article by Michael Benson, president and professor of history at Coastal Carolina University.

Benson claimed that “the two biggest brokers in these conversations” are not football muscle and TV riches; rather, “the role of academics and a given school’s ‘institutional fit.’” He cited the Big 10’s insistence that it welcomes only members of the Association of American Universities, the most exclusive club of pre-eminent research-intensive schools that includes only 64 of the nation’s roughly 4,000 degree-granting institutions (1.6 precent).

But Nebraska, now firmly ensconced in the Big 10, recently was booted out of the AAU. And when my dear old alma mater, the University of Missouri, jumped to the SEC in 2012, it became only the fourth of the league’s 14 schools—along with Vanderbilt, Florida and Texas A&M—that is inside the AAU’s velvet ropes. Texas would be No. 5. Oklahoma does not belong to the AAU, though it is doubtful that the Oklahoma football team’s pride is hurt by that fact.

Consider: Of the 23 Division I national football championship games dating to 1998, 16 were won by non-AAU schools. So much for the role of academics in these matters. Just follow the money.

Which gets back to my earlier Yale reference. Only last week, Don Kagan, Yale’s former professor of history and the classics, died at 89. In 1987, when Kagan was serving as Yale’s interim athletic director, we had a chat about that school—and its fellow conference members in the Ivy League—having long-ago chosen scholarly might over football supremacy.

Kagan said then, “This desire to gain [football] glory is understandable, and to a certain extent, not contemptible. But you have to realize that you’d still be great if you never won another football game. You have to think: Is it glorious to hire a bunch of mercenaries and then, when you win, say ‘Our mercenaries can beat your mercenaries’? What’s the point?”