Schools spend more and more money, and they need more and more money coming in. Media and related funds are a big chunk of what schools spend.
Plenty of universities have made lateral conference transfers, including Arkansas from the Southwest Conference to the Southeastern Conference in the 1990s and Maryland from the Atlantic Coast Conference to the Big 10 less than a decade ago. But we’ve never seen a mass exodus from one conference as we’ve seen over the last few days.
Six schools in—and then out—of the PAC-12, essentially ending the conference as we’ve known it. First, Colorado left for the Big 12, and then five more transfers happened in a single day (last Friday)—Oregon and Washington to the Big 10, and Arizona, Arizona State, and Utah to the Big 12.
In a flash, the so-called Power 5 conferences—the Big Ten, Big 12, Southeastern, Atlantic Coast, the Pacific 12 became the Power 4. The schools jumped conferences for one reason: to get a bigger slice of the media money pie, not for the favorite spin of college presidents and athletic directors, that is, “stability.” They didn‘t like PAC-12’s negotiated media contract (streaming-only deal with Apple TV), so now the PAC-12 (as I write this) is the PAC-4 of Cal, Stanford, Oregon State, and Washington State.
The search for more media money led to the undoing of the so-called “Conference of Champions,” the PAC-12’s non-hyperbolic attribution. Every year since 2000, save for two, Stanford has won the Learfield Directors’ Cup for overall outcomes of men’s and women’s sports. In those two years, Stanford came in second, and UCLA placed #2 seven times. Now, UCLA is Big 10-bound, while Stanford, ranked by Forbes as America’s #2 university (behind only MIT), faces an uncertain athletic future. Cal-Berkley does too, which Forbes ranked in a #2 tie with Stanford. Two of the best schools in the country are left out in the cold.
Amid the predictable responses–cheers from fans who love it and boos from those who don’t—it’s essential to understand that various forces were in play long before things unfolded over the past few weeks.
It’s easy (too easy) to look at near-term causes like Big 12 Commissioner Brett Yormack outmaneuvering the PAC-12’s George Kliavkoff in the media rights war. He did, of course, by beginning media rights negotiations before the PAC-12. But let’s also remember that West Coast teams are always at a media disadvantage nationally because of time differences with the East Coast. It means that fewer national eyes are riveted on late-starting PAC-12 games. Kliavkoff can’t change the time difference.
A more enveloping cause is related to college football’s governing body, the NCAA, which doesn’t govern much when it comes to regulating what the conferences can and can’t do. For example, the NCAA is doing nothing to reign in the financial arms race pervasive in major college sports today (e.g., there aren’t any caps as in the pros). When legislation was passed in 30+ states (starting with California) to afford compensation to college athletes for the corporate use of their Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL), rather than taking the bull by the horns, the NCAA leadership went to Congress asking for a national policy solution.
In truth, though, you can’t put all the blame on the NCAA leadership. That’s because it’s a membership organization, and the members (the powerful ones) don’t want that kind of leadership from the NCAA. They want to do their own thing, unencumbered by an overarching entity telling them what they can and can’t do.
It wouldn’t be an issue if there weren’t a financial arms race in play, but there is. It’s a straightforward equation: Schools spend more and more money, and they need more and more money coming in. Media and related funds are a big chunk of what schools spend.
According to the Knight-Newhouse College Athletics Database—a collaboration between the Knight Foundation and the Newhouse School at Syracuse University—the major football-playing public schools (only public universities are required to report) brought in about $10 billion in 2022. The largest chunk (30%) came from NCAA/Conference Distributions, Media Rights, and Post-Season Football. The figure was 35% in the PAC-12 but more in the Southeastern Conference (37%) and Big 10 (40%). The newly negotiated media contract for the Big 12 with ESPN and FOX will yield $2.28 billion over six years, and new conference members (the four PAC-12 schools) are guaranteed to each get the same cut as current conference members, about $32 million a year.
The proposed PAC-12 streaming deal with Apple TV couldn’t match those numbers, so in the words of Stephen Stills in his popular song, Love the One You’re With (1970), “If you can’t be with the one you love, honey, Love the one you’re with.” So, just like the guy who goes to a party with his long-time squeeze, meets somebody more attractive and desirable, and leaves with her, we have universities making the same move. That move says loads about the departing schools but also says a lot about the new partners.
Graham Couch, a Michigan State beat writer at the Lansing State Journal, put it this way about the Big Ten. “The Big Ten has become unlikable. Untrustworthy. A bully. It pillaged the Pac-12 a year ago, and then, this past week, as the Pac-12 collapsed — as a century of tradition went up in smoke, as thousands of student-athletes in dozens of sports saw the experience they signed up for in peril — the Big Ten stepped in and offered refuge … to the Pac-12’s strongest members. So unlikable. Perhaps that’s how you win in today’s college athletics landscape. But what transpired late last week didn’t feel like winning.”
The same can be said about the Big 12 because Couch is right: it is about how you win in today’s college athletic landscape. You must win the media rights battles.
If you’re like me, you love college football but hate what the college football industry has become and where it’s going. Frank A. Fear is managing editor of The Sports Column and FutureU: Conversations about Values and Change in Higher Education. He is also the author of the recently published book Band of Brothers, Then and Now: The Inspiring Story of the 1966-1970 West Virginia University Football Mountaineers.
