It’s 2032. At long last, humans have landed on Mars.
Back on Earth, US sports fans have a simple question: Is the Mars colony in the Big Ten or the SEC?
Back here in 2022, the travel distances are already veering into the astronomical, and the gravitational pull of college sports’ “megaconferences” is relentless. UCLA and USC (the California one, not the Carolina one, though the latter would make slightly more sense geographically) are leaving the Pac-12 – which is supposed to be for teams on the Pacific coast – to join the increasingly inaccurately named Big Ten (which will have 16 members by the time UCLA and USC arrive in 2024).
It’s a move driven entirely by marketing money. The Big Ten – which for most of its existence was based around teams in the midwest – is on the cusp of some mammoth TV deals, and southern California is an attractive market.
And UCLA and the Big Ten need the money. The Big Ten pays out more money to its members than any other conference, according to research firm Navigate, but Covid wrecked several schools’ slim budget surpluses. In 2021, many schools posted eight-figure losses, according to data compiled by the Knight Commission and Syracuse University. Meanwhile, UCLA lost more than $62m in 2021, bringing its three-year deficit over $103m. (USC, as a private university, doesn’t have its books available to the Knight/Syracuse researchers.)
But who really benefits here? And who loses?
Winner: Big Football’s budgets
Division I football, the top level of the college game, has long been split into two subdivisions. They were formerly known as Division I-A and Division I-AA, but are now called the “Football Bowl Subdivision” (teams that can play in bowl games and the national championship playoffs) and the “Football Championship Subdivision” (teams that can play in a lower-tier national championship tournament). Division I-A then split into the elite “Power Five” conferences (ACC, Big 12, Big Ten, Pac-12, SEC) and the “Group of Five.” It’s not a full-fledged split, but Group of Five schools rarely crack the top bowl games or playoffs, and Power Five schools have a degree of economic autonomy that the others do not.
Could we see a “Power Two” in the near future as the SEC – which is made up of southern powerhouses such as Alabama and Georgia – and Big Ten grow in might? Unless the other three conferences can play defense, yes.
The SEC, which will add Texas and Oklahoma by 2025, is projected to pay each of its member schools $105.3m per year by 2029, according to Navigate’s projections. The Big Ten was already projected to pay $94.5m before adding that lucrative West Coast interest. The other three “Power Five’’ conferences – the ACC, Big 12 and Pac-12 – were in the $51m-$57m range. The Big 12 is bringing three of the top-earning Group of Five schools in Cincinnati, Central Florida and Houston, along with private-school powerhouse BYU. The ACC and Pac-12 are looking at some sort of partnership, according to multiple reports.
Loser: Everyone else who misses out on megaconferences
Not everyone wins in the game of musical chairs. The ACC has solid long-term deals with its members, but could those deals stand up if its current and former football powerhouses (Clemson, Florida State, Virginia Tech) or its biggest basketball schools (North Carolina, Duke) need to be placated? Does the Big 12 need to do more after losing Texas and Oklahoma, two of the only schools whose total revenues rival its future SEC compatriots? And what options would the Pac-12 have?
Any school left in the rump of a disintegrated conference won’t have the revenue to keep up with big-spending teams on the football field. And Group of Five schools may have a narrow window to follow Cincinnati and company into the big leagues.
Football is expensive. The facilities, including massive stadiums that are rarely used outside of six home football games a year, are just part of it. The other part is staffing. Clemson’s football staff includes a senior administrative assistant to the head coach and an administrative assistant to the head coach. At Alabama, the offensive line coach makes $900,000 a year (the women’s soccer coach gets $162,000; the school doesn’t offer men’s soccer). Florida State has six “senior analysts” or “analysts”.
Those that have money can spend money. Those that have not cannot. In 2021, the typical (median) Power Five school spent $25.9m on the gridiron, according to the Knight/Syracuse database. The median Group of Five school only spent $9.4m. As the college sports Gini coefficient spins upward like an electric meter on a summer day, any school left out of the Power Five/Three/Two will have virtually no chance of competing, which means the football team will be a millstone on the athletics budget.
Winner: Airlines and charter-flight operators
It’s not just UCLA’s football team that will make the occasional trip to the East Coast to face Rutgers or Maryland. It’s the basketball teams, the volleyball team, the softball team, the baseball team and so on.
Loser: Classwork
Sure, the pandemic and remote working helped us redefine what it means to attend class. But expanded travel schedules in megaconferences that span the US will make it tougher for students who want to combine sports with heavy academic workloads in majors such as engineering and pre-med.
Loser: Opportunities for football players
Imagine you’re a college president at a school that isn’t in one of the megaconferences. You’re looking at red ink from your football program. With Title IX gender-equity lawyers breathing down your neck, you’ve had to consider adding women’s rowing and women’s equestrian to balance out the numbers. What’s to keep you from cutting the football team instead?
Mixed: Other sports
Unlike football, basketball is relatively cheap. Basketball teams, including women’s teams that are steadily gaining in popularity, can be money-makers, and schools like Gonzaga, Villanova and Butler have shown that smaller schools can play Big Basketball without playing Big Football.
But basketball generally doesn’t generate enough money to pay for everything else. Aside from the Ivy League, which doesn’t directly pay scholarships for sports, few schools outside the Power Five have strong all-around sports programs.
As football money coagulates at the top of the pyramid, some schools might need to re-evaluate the notion of giving scholarships or preferential admission to athletes who don’t add any more to the student body than a journalist or a cellist. College sports advocates will fret that student-athletes will have fewer opportunities to learn valuable lessons of teamwork and competitiveness, but those lessons can be learned in non-varsity club sports, too.
Loser: Fans
College sports are built on folklore and rivalries. In football, those rivalries can span the continent. But in basketball, a conference tournament used to be an occasion that dominated conversation in its region. Imagine if North Carolina follows football money to a conference in which its basketball team is separated from its old rival, Duke.
So how do we preserve some semblance of what makes college sports great?
Let Big Football make its own map. Want a combined ACC and Pac-12 for football? Fine. But then split back into smaller groups based on rivalries and regional travel for everything else.
Then make Big Football fund Big Sports programs. Allow the top schools to do whatever else they want as long as they’re funding full-fledged Olympic sports programs, reversing a trend of cuts to men’s programs in particular and giving future Olympians a solid developmental platform at 50, 60, maybe 80 schools. That may include a waiver for Title IX gender-balance ratios, allowing them to add men’s sports as long as every women’s Olympic sport is offered.
That’ll ensure college sports are working for athletes – which is theoretically the point. And all those viewers on whom these giant megaconference media deals depend will have something worthwhile to watch.
