Greed, duplicity, betrayal and treachery.
Sounds like the plot of a summer blockbuster movie or a Robert B. Parker mystery novel. That and the latest chapter of “As College Sports Turns.”
In a breathtaking span of roughly 24 hours last Thursday and Friday, five schools, the universities of Oregon, Washington, Utah and Arizona and Arizona State University all bolted from their moorings in the Pac-12 Conference for new homes.
Utah, Arizona and Arizona State landed in the Big 12, an amalgam of schools scattered across the country from Morgantown, West Virginia southward to Orlando and westward through Texas and into Provo, Utah. Their migration follows, by a week, Colorado’s move to the Big 12 from the PAC-12. Meanwhile, Oregon and Washington, who were founding members of what was the Pacific Coast Conference in 1915, tossed 108 years of history aside to become the 17th and 18th members of the Big Ten.
That means that as of next August, college athletes from Seattle and Eugene, Oregon, will be playing games in College Park and Piscataway, N.J. And vice versa.
If none of this makes sense to you, welcome to the wonderland world of college sports, where down is up, left is right and longtime alliances can be dashed at the drop of a hat and at the pursuit of a penny.
And make no mistake: Every single move that has happened in college sports going back nearly 40 years to when the Supreme Court lifted the restrictions on the number of times a school can appear on television has taken place for two reasons: money and football.
Actually, those two go together like a horse and carriage, though it’s hard to know these days which drives the other.
Well, that’s not entirely true. Television and its zeal to present football, the biggest money maker in all of sports, to as many eyeballs as possible, are what has fueled this unholy and relentless move of schools to ignore traditional coalitions and basic geography.
This wave of conference relocations, which will bring Southern California and UCLA to the Big Ten next year is just the latest in a series of moves that included taking Maryland out its 60-year home in the Atlantic Coast Conference nine years ago.
In a cold cost-benefit look at the moves, it’s hard to argue that the universities are wrong. The passel of television contracts that will bring Saturday Big Ten football to FOX, CBS and NBC this fall will pay the league more than $1 billion annually. That comes out to between $80 and $100 million per school per year, giving Big Ten universities a tremendous advantage over the rest of the field. Indeed, officials at Florida State have talked to an investment firm about creating a private equity fund so that that school can keep up.
Lost in all this is what happens to non-football athletes, who will see their experiences, in and out of the classroom, debauched to provide television programming for zealous football fans. The future for them and for the schools left in the wake of this naked money grab feels less like a rom-com and more like a horror show.
And that’s how I see it for this week. You can reach us via email with your questions and comments at Sports at Large at gmail.com. And follow me on Threads and Twitter at Sports at Large
Until next week, for all of us here, I’m Milton Kent. Thanks for listening and enjoy the games.
