KANSAS CITY, Mo. — College athletics are careening towards chaos, if not already embroiled in it, with ever-churning conference realignment implications. And that’s entwined with the insatiable demand for profits and commercialism that obscure, if not outright mock, the educational mission.
It all makes for “an air of insincerity to the whole university-college scheme,” one groundbreaking and cautionary report says.
Welcome to the ‘20s …
The 1920s, that is.
That’s when a sweeping Carnegie Foundation report on “American College Athletics” called for a “a change of values in a field that is sodden with the commercial and the material and the vested interests that these forces have created.”
Safe to say that 1929 bulletin went unheeded.
So while we try to grasp at shadows and whispers to understand where this latest wave of realignment ultimately is heading (and have come to realize that few can do more than guess), it’s useful to remember the reshuffling is more evolutionary than revolutionary.
Same as it’s ever been … only more so.
That doesn’t mean we have to like it.
Call me quaint or call me a dinosaur, but count me among those disillusioned by the way this has been going at least since Missouri left the Big 12 a decade ago.
Mizzou had valid, even vital, reasons to seek stability and prosperity in the Southeastern Conference. And that move sure looks all the better for MU now amid the latest unrest.
But the departure still tore at the fabric of what I loved most about college sports: traditions and rivalries and familiarity and geographical sense … and the abiding sense of symbiotic relationships even among the fiercest of foes.
It just means more in the SEC, they say, but to me it also means less in a most basic way because of what was lost — as embodied in the end of the MU-KU rivalry as we knew it even as the schools have loosely resumed playing each other.
As those century-plus connections either have dissolved or lost their context, the prevailing pageantry of college athletics has a mercenary feel to it, guided simply by looking out for No. 1 and maximizing revenue streams.
That’s not all bad.
Fifty years now since Title IX was passed, the windfall has in many cases happily advanced the cause of women’s athletics. And the corollary willingness of boosters and donors to invest in their programs in the era of NIL (name, image and likeness) deals has empowered athletes in another way …
Albeit in a wild, wild West environment (because the NCAA failed to act in a timely and meaningful way), amplified by the emergence of the transfer portal that along with the Tilt-A-Whirl of realignment makes the horizon difficult to comprehend … and seems to favor the rich getting richer instead of being an equalizer.
But even if we can’t see where this is going, especially considering the likelihood of an expanded College Football Playoff in the years to come, we can see exactly where it came from.
All the momentous movement we’ve seen in the last year, from the announcement of Texas and Oklahoma to the SEC to last week’s news of UCLA and USC to the Big Ten, reflects what’s been constantly bubbling and percolating in college sports for generations now:
How to make the most money and gain the most exposure and wield the most influence … and be able to pay to continue to do so.
Which is how we’ve come to have whopping football revenue drive everything … and astronomical television contracts drive football … and thus television executives dictating to colleges … and hence yet another new frontier of realignment.
Round and round it goes, as the old saying went, and where it stops nobody knows — including for the Big 12 itself and Kansas and Kansas State. The sands are ever-shifting beneath them toward whatever might loom next, in their traditional home or otherwise.
Mizzou, meanwhile, continues to reap the benefit of joining the SEC a decade ago. That was in part triggered by then-Oklahoma president David Boren’s bit about “I don’t think OU is going to be a wallflower when all is said and done.”
Those words were jarring then, partly because they contradicted what seemed a fresh peace in the Big 12.
But in some form or another now, those words are a guiding principle of how every institution interested in competing at the highest level of college sports must look at a scene fueled by broadcast rights and association.
About all we can know now is that the pivot points ahead all begin with the actions of the SEC and the Big Ten, each of which will be 16 strong when their new members join.
Those increasingly dominant conferences certainly needn’t be limited to that when trying to optimize the sweet spot of the power in numbers (of all sorts) vs. mouths to feed.
Might they expand to 20? 24?
And, by the way, what does that gathering force mean when it comes to the future of NCAA governance?
Stay tuned.
But much as we miss some elements of yesteryear, let’s remember that the difference between now and the past is more a matter of scale and degree and possibilities contoured to modern times than a philosophical shift in how college sports are trending.
To think otherwise is to cling to what’s known as the fallacy of the innocent past.
In the 1920s, for instance, the Big Six was formed when Kansas, Missouri, Kansas State, Iowa State, Nebraska and Oklahoma ditched the Missouri Valley just a year after Oklahoma A&M (now Oklahoma State) had left the Southwest Conference to join the Valley.
By 1932, the mega-Southern Conference then featuring 23 schools lost 13 members to the newfangled SEC. In 1953, seven Southern Conference members left to form the Atlantic Coast Conference.
The history of the now-Pac 12 (soon to be 10 or fewer … or more … or who knows what, exactly?) is flux. The Big Six became the Big Seven with Colorado in 1947 and the Big Eight when Oklahoma A&M joined in 1957 after a 30-year effort.
“We had to get in or die,” then-athletic director and legendary basketball coach Henry Iba told The Oklahoman in 1987. “If we hadn’t made that move, I don’t know what would have happened to Oklahoma State.”
Sound familiar?
And so on, including when the Big Eight effectively absorbed the Southwest Conference (only for Texas to run roughshod over the new league, the Big 12) in the mid-1990s, and when Arkansas left the SWC after 76 years for the SEC in 1992.
“I think the whole (realignment) concept makes you uneasy,” then-Orange Bowl executive director Steve Hatchell told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch as Arkansas prepared to move in 1990. “It’s one of those things where you’re not sure where it’s going to go. …
“The people that you know in the business that you rely on to visit with on this don’t know where it’s going to go.”
You could hear the same terms being used now by a number of longtime college athletics administrators I’ve spoken with in the last few days, most of whom consider the future unpredictable as traditional constraints of geography and time-honored associations dissolve.
It seems boundless now, symbolized by the coast-to-coast conference reach now with the Big Ten and perhaps soon others.
That harkens to the words of then-Great Midwest commissioner (and future SEC commissioner) Mike Slive in 1991. When he was asked just what area the Great Midwest planned to occupy, the ever-visionary Slive told the Chicago Tribune, “The Great Midwest is a huge (swath) of land between two oceans, boarded by Canada on the north and the Gulf on the south.”
Playful as that might have been, it also pointed to a vast expanse for the taking. One that has been catalyzed by a recurring key dynamic.
“Every time someone moves, it creates a vacuum,” then-Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany told the Tribune. “It’s like the chain of life where the big fish feed off the smaller fish until you get down to the minnow who is feeding off the plankton.”
You might say that Delany tested that theory in 2009 when he unleashed a tremor and then a mad scramble with the announcement the Big Ten was studying expansion.
But his words also spoke to what is more of the same now — more of what that makes everything today so uncertain.
And, to me, anyway, distasteful, as we wait for the next surprise domino to tumble and set off another chain reaction. One that links back through a century-plus of “the vested interests these forces have created,” and the collateral damage of unforeseen consequences.
