Realignment Blues: What is a College Conference?

I grew up a Big 8 guy. The Missouri--Kansas Game was holy day at our house. I never did recover from when we moved across State Line Street into Kansas and suddenly I was supposed to root for the hated Jayhawks, but I knew my loyalties even if my younger siblings rooted for Kansas. This time of year I knew which bowl to follow because the Big 8 went to the Orange bowl. Not any more. Now I am watching the umpteenth bowl I don't care about and Missouri joined something called the Big 12 and now is on its way to The SEC.

The truth is my Big 8 was a figment of my imagination and misplaced loyalty. It morphed into something called the Big 12 then the Big 12 with only 10 members and it goes on. My old rivalry game no longer exists. College Conferences, in the great DeToqueville tradition, are voluntary associations that can mutate, grow, shrink or even cease to exist. They are voluntary associations created by colleges and their Presidents and Boards for their own purposes.

A college conference resembles the original Articles of Confederation with little revenue, members who can leave at will and no central identity to transcend college identity.Whatever purpose they have, it depends upon self interest and not abiding loyalty or heritage.

(And what is it with this BIG thing. I mean the Big 10, Big 8, Big 12 and even the Big East. I mean only guys could come up with these names!)

The original conferences grew by fits and starts. Many originally had an organic quality of regional proximity and traditional rivalries. In the forties and fifties as scandals sundered college athletes, the Conferences took on the task of regulating competition. It quickly became clear that conferences could not regulate themselves; there was too much conflict of interest when schools that played each other had to stand in judgment over each other. The few good conference commissioners that tried to enforce discipline soon found themselves without jobs.

Many conferences sponsored championships but this did little to enhance them. Most conferences were what organizational theorists would call loosely coupled systems, with little to hold them against centrifugal forces. In a number of cases, conferences signed exclusive agreements with Bowl Games like the Big 8 and Orange Bowl or Pac-10 and Big 10 for the Rose Bowl. There were not many bowls and this gave them cachet and importance.

Two watershed events transformed conferences.

First the NCAA basketball tournament grew in stature, visibility and wealth. The tournament gave preference to conference winners, and independents found themselves left in the cold. Schools scrambled to create conferences just to get access to the tournament and its visibility and revenue. The most successful and artificial of these conferences was the Big East, the first real conference created just for money and NCAA access.

Second,  in 1984 the courts ruled that NCAA could not exercise monopoly control over college football. This meant that TV contracts devolved to schools and conferences. Many schools stuck their own deals, but the networks wanted reliable and consistent offerings. Conferences stepped in and offered an entire package as well as quantity and quality of product. This began the era of fundamental economic inequality in college sports as the SEC and Big 10 garnered contracts and TV status that outstripped everyone else.

The basketball tournament and TV deals drove conferences to emulate the SEC to create a " brand" for their conference that could be as powerful as that for schools. The Big 10 soon followed suit. Very quickly the college landscape evolved into Division 1 major conferences and all the rest. Even in Division 1 many mid major schools did not have the visibility or stature to garner TV contracts.

The BCS did for college football conferences what the NCAA tournament did for college basketball. Without a national championship and with conferences controlling television and bowl deals  access to the mythical national championship or to the big money bowls depended upon being a member of a marque conferences. The rest of the schools were stuck with secondary and backwater bowls and contracts. Many of the secondary bowls cost more to attend than they paid out.

This led to the last seven years of consolidation and pilfering, so much so a micro-industry has grown up just trying to predict and follow it.  All the moves reflect efforts by schools to get access to football TV money. For example, the ACC, a basketball conferences with no real football cache beyond Florida State, stole Boston College and Virginia Tech. This year they dismembered the Big East by grabbing Syracuse. The SEC and Big 12 evolved in similar manners. TCU illustrates this new world order. Desperate to get into a BCS conference for its football team, it joined the Big East. As the Big East disintegrated, it jilted the Big East and joined the reconstituted Big 12. Just look at this map of the new Big East to see the real logic of conferences.

Modern conferences now have a  set of clear purposes.

1)        Maximize the revenue for all the schools to address the costs of college sports.

2)        Maximize television value by capturing top markets or schools with high viewership loyalty.

3)        Maximize TV exposure in football that generates revenue and enhances public visibility.

4)        Maximize the chance to get schools into the NCAA basketball tournament.

5)        Create a strong brand that enhances the reputation of any school in the conference to makes it a destination for schools and networks.
6)        Connect with schools that might share common goals or purposes academically or have geographic affinity.

Notice the original purposes are now last, and no one even worries about using the conferences as a tool to regulate competition.

It's not pretty, actually it is pretty ugly. But the Presidents and Boards face continuous budget deficits and hemorrhaging losses from sports especially football. They will pursue anything to increase the attractiveness of games to TV or get more teams into the tournament.

For most fans their loyalties lay with schools and this is a good thing. Keep them there. As the TCU saga illustrates, conferences may be brands but not objects of loyalty.

Defending College Presidents on Conference Alignment II

PART II

No President can or will eliminate athletics or deliberately downgrade the athletics by going to a lower status or less economically viable conferences. As Clotfelter’s book and the politics of athletics makes clear, the external constituencies are too strong and the benefits are quite real.

This is where conference affiliation comes in. Conferences control both money and media access and can confer stature.

Let no one romanticize conferences. They are plastic and porous voluntary associations of schools that have changed a lot over the years. The Big East was created solely to gain money for east coast basketball schools. The SEC only took final shape in 1991 after the Southwest conference broke up over Texas’ hubris. The Big 12 was a shotgun wedding of my old Big 8 and the Texas remnants of the end of the Southwest Conference in 1996. The Pacific 10 has permuted from 3 to 5 to 8 to 10 to 12, and even the vaunted stable Big 10 once kicked out Michigan and lost Chicago as well as letting in Penn State. So let us be clear, the conferences are voluntary associations for the combined advantage and regulation of athletics for the member schools. They have no sacred status and constantly evolve.

Thanks to Supreme Court decisions, Universities and Conferences control their media rights. Most of the possible increases in revenues that universities can attain to offset athletic costs are tied into conferences. Media companies care nothing about Olympic sports and barely care about basketball except to fill media slots; the real money is in football. The real football money lies in conference contracts.

Except for Texas and Notre Dame, the most successful and powerful schools have agreed to assign their media rights to conferences, and conferences negotiate the complex media deals and distribute the money among the member schools.  Conferences also launch their own media networks. This economic structure launched the incredible wealth of the SEC and the Big 10 in the last ten years. It also drove the consolidation of the western teams into the new PAC-12.  So moving conferences offers one major set of opportunities for schools to increase revenue and offset structural deficits and also increase their stature. Any president who seeks to protect their school must consider conference membership.

A clear hierarchy of status and prestige exists among conferences. This cachet is both about sport as in the SEC but also extends to academic prestige as in the Big 10 (even if it can’t count). So switching conferences presents a twofold opportunity to a university and its President. It can increase the revenue stream needed to minimize the internal subsidy; the freed subsidy money can be spent on other university activities. Conference membership can also raise the profile of the school in non-athletic areas.

 If you look at recent alignment decisions, the Presidents made good calls for their schools. When Nebraska left the Big 12, it entered a better academic conference and better athletic conferences, a true win/win. It also escaped the suffocating arrogance and control of Texas in the Big 12. When Colorado and Utah jointed the PAC-12, they both experienced similar win/win. The most recent move of Syracuse and Pittsburgh to the ACC not only rationalized the ACC’s geography by connecting Boston College to the rest of the league, but served as huge prestige win/wins for both colleges.

This is not about greed or tradition; it is about financial responsibility, quality of competition and prestige. The Presidents are doing their jobs and should be praised for what they accomplished for their schools in terms of getting more revenue to close their subsidies, better competition and higher status.