As prolonged conference relocation dramas play out across the college sports landscape, I was frankly stunned by how quickly Syracuse and Pitt's move to the ACC became an official done deal. I saw a story that the two universities were talking to the ACC on Friday night, and then by Saturday afternoon, the move was confirmed by everybody under the sun. Like most of my fellow Orangemen and Orangewomen, I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, I don't like leaving behind so many of our traditional rivals. I'll especially miss our basketball battles with Georgetown and Villanova (I'd add UConn to the list, but they seem likely to eventually join the ACC as well.), and the Big East Tournament at Madison Square Garden. And playing in a predominantly Southern conference will take some getting used to.
However, the "traditional rivalry" and "geographic sense" ships sailed out of the NCAA's harbor years ago. In the current college sports world, football money and mammoth TV rights deals trump everything. Conferences must eat or be eaten, and colleges that aren't in one of the big money super conferences will lose millions of dollars and won't be able to compete with the "in" teams. Some media pundits, namely ESPN commentators Dana O'Neil and Gene Wojiechowski, have blasted their outrage guns at Syracuse and (to a lesser extent) Pitt, placing all the blame for the current regrettable situation at our feet. We're greedy, hypocritical sell-outs, etc. etc. But this rage is misguided, not to mention extremely hypocritical itself, as detailed here by Syracuse Blog Troy Nunes Is An Absolute Magician. Notre Dame Athletic Director Jack Swarbrick also attacked SU and Pitt for our lack of conference loyalty... which coming from anyone at Notre Dame (who has kept its football team independent in order to keep its exclusive national TV deal with NBC, and to avoid sharing its ever-dwindling bowl game payout revenue) is so hypocritical as to be funny.
In the words of my college graduation speaker, we didn't start the fire; and we-- SU and Pitt by ourselves-- don't have the power to extinguish it. In ideal world, moving to the ACC wouldn't be necessary, and everyone would still play in geographically-sensible conferences with long and tradition-rich histories. Oh yeah, and the "student athletes" would take their studies seriously and no one would ever get "improper benefits" from boosters. Har har har. But in the real world, college sports is a business, and a largely unregulated business at that. SU and Pitt are businesses, and they have to make the right business moves. In an unregulated marketplace, that means being proactive and joining the ACC. Hate the game, don't hate the playa. The real blame for this sorry state of affairs falls upon the NCAA and the massively corrupt system it oversees, not on individual universities.
As we did in the summer of 2010, it now appears we are standing on the brink of an alignment with four 16-team super-conferences. But conference realignment has traveled a long and winding road to get here. Let's take a trip down that road, shall we? Timeline style!
1987: The NCAA gives the "death penalty" to SMU Football, which ends all corruption in college sports (for about 7.2 minutes). This deals a major blow to the Southwestern Conference (SWC), and is cited by most as the beginning of the SWC's demise.
1990: Notre Dame negotiates its own TV deal with NBC for $38 million... which was a lot of money in 1990. This enables / encourages Notre Dame to keep its football team independent, but the Irish's other sports join the Big East in 1995.
1991: Arkansas leaves the SWC for the SEC. The SEC also adds South Carolina, giving the conference 12 teams. Meanwhile, previously independent Penn State and Florida State join the Big Ten and ACC, respectively.
1991: The previously basketball-only Big East starts playing football, with Miami (Fla.), Virginia Tech, West Virginia, Temple and Rutgers (*cue derisive laughter) joining the only 3 Big East basketball schools who played Division I-A football at the time-- Syracuse, Pitt, and Boston College.
1992: The SEC plays its first football season with 12 teams, and holds college football's first ever conference championship game, bringing in $324 gazillion in TV and sponsorship money.
1996: The SWC disbands. Texas, Texas A&M, Texas Tech, and Baylor join the Big 8 conference, transforming it into the Big 12. The Big 12 holds a conference title game, bringing in gazillions in TV and sponsor money, but not as many gazillions as the SEC. Other former SWC members are left to forage in dumpsters, AKA the Western Athletic Conference (WAC)...
1996: After absorbing TCU, SMU, and Rice from the SWC-- as well as adding UNLV, Tulsa, and San Jose State-- the WAC becomes the first 16-team conference, yet it's anything but super.
1999: Frustrated with the WAC's dilution of rivalries and the logistical difficulties of a 16-team conference stretching from Houston to Honolulu, 8 WAC members break off to form the Mountain West Conference (MWC). (The MWC's charter members were Air Force, BYU, Colorado State, New Mexico, San Diego State, UNLV, Utah, and Wyoming.) This proves to be the only example in the last 25 years of conference contraction, motivated by geography and tradition. Shockingly, it didn't last.
2004: The Big East expels Temple (a football only member) for chronic suckage.
2004: Miami (Fla.), Virginia Tech, and Boston College announce they will leave the Big East for the ACC. Originally, the ACC wanted Miami, BC, and Syracuse; but the Virginia state government intervened and pressured UVA to veto any ACC expansion unless Va. Tech was included. Miami and Va. Tech join the ACC's 2004 football season, and BC enters a year later. Once at 12 members, the ACC begins holding a conference championship game, and money flows in like Niagara Falls.
2005: The Big East poaches Cincinnati, Louisville, and South Florida from Conference USA (as well as DePaul and Marquette in basketball) to replace those who departed for the ACC. The Big East becomes a 16-team basketball behemoth, perhaps the deepest basketball conference in history. But football-wise, this was rather like replacing Peyton Manning with Kerry Collins.
2005: The Mountain West (remember them?) adds TCU.
2010: The Big 12 begins to collapse. Nebraska leaves for the Big "Ten." A blockbuster deal that would have sent Texas, Texas A&M, Texas Tech, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, and Colorado to the "Pacific" 10 falls through. The Pac-10 instead adds only Colorado from the Big 12 and Utah from the MWC. Unlike its math-challenged brethren, the Pac-10 changes its name to the Pac-12. However, the Big Ten conference now features 12 teams while the Big 12 has 10, a fact that confuses drunk people everywhere. The Big 12 survives and exacts a pound of flesh in relocation fees from Nebraska and Colorado, but it loses its lucrative conference championship game.
2010-11: One step forward, three steps back for the poor MWC. The conference adds Boise State, only to see charter member Utah bail for the Pac-12. Fellow charter member and arch rival BYU becomes independent for football and moves its basketball teams to the West Coast Conference (WCC). And, to complete the MWC gut punch, TCU announces it will leave and join the Big East. Because nothing says "Big East" like Fort Worth, Texas. The MWC replenishes its ranks by raiding Fresno State, Nevada, and Hawaii (football only) from the WAC, to begin in the 2012 season.
And that doesn't even include the constant shifting that has taken place in lower tier conferences like Conference USA, the Mid-American Conference (MAC), and the (post-MWC split) WAC over this same time period. I will now briefly pause to allow your head to stop spinning...
At every step of the way, the NCAA stood idly by as powerful conferences became more powerful at the expense of less powerful conferences, and as universities sought ever greener pastures in a twisted version of European football's (the other football, AKA soccer) promotion / relegation system. At every step of the way, TV networks continued to shell out more and more millions and billions of dollars in rights fees. And at every step of the way, for every football program that climbed a rung on the conference prestige / money ladder, there were dozens more who would have killed to take its place.
The NCAA was unable or unwilling to do anything to protect the interests of smaller universities and/or universities with less lucrative fan bases and media markets. Not to mention the interests of non-revenue sports and academics. Har har har. What could the NCAA have done to prevent some of the conference expansion and raiding?
1) Allowing smaller conferences to hold conference title games might have done the trick. The ACC's first raid on the Big East in 2004 was motivated solely by the ACC's desire to reach the magic number of 12 teams needed to hold a title game.
2) Of course scrapping the antiquated and corrupt bowl system for a playoff would have considerably leveled the playing field.
3) Or, in an extreme case, banning "raider" conference's teams from participating in bowls / postseason tournaments would have been a massive deterrent. Extreme? Yes, but at least one of these three options is what would have been required to save small, geographically sensible conferences and to stop the snowball rolling toward the universe of four 16-team super-conglomerates.
Expecting individual universities to exercise self-restraint and voluntarily surrender millions of dollars is as ludicrous as expecting someone to pay more taxes than they owe. In an unregulated marketplace, it's eat or be eaten. If Syracuse and Pitt didn't jump to the ACC, then UConn, West Virginia, and/or Rutgers (*derisive laughter) would have. If the ACC didn't expand, it risked losing teams to the SEC (and it still might). The Big East didn't act to save itself-- it didn't eat, so it's getting eaten. The Big 12 is collapsing because there aren't enough television sets in its territory, outside the state of Texas / Longhorn Network Country.
As long as the marketplace remains unregulated, this will continue, and the Kansas States and Boise States and TCUs of the world will continue to get screwed. The only actors capable of regulating the college football business market are the NCAA and the federal government. I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for either.
So in the meantime, those of us who are privileged to root for teams on the inside of the super-conferences will get to make the best of the situation and embrace the potential benefits and new rivalries. Those on the outside can only fight for survival, and hold out hope than one day someone or something will step in and change the system to allow them to compete. That's terribly unfair, but so is life.
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