Money, not geography behind new college plan

AMERICA AT LARGE:The latest realignment of the inter-collegiate conferences has left people seriously baffled, writes GEORGE KIMBALL

THOSE OTHERWISE knowledgeable sorts who view America’s unique system of inter-collegiate athletics bizarre in concept and downright confusing in practice should not regard their ignorance as a reflection on their credentials as a well-informed sports fan.

As a nation, we barely understand it ourselves.

This has never been an impediment to fellows who’ve never been near a university campus wagering a week’s wages on the outcome of a football or basketball game between teams purportedly representing two institutions of higher education.

Any attempt to draw a parallel to Irish sport here would be almost irrelevant. The GAA, for instance, can’t be meaningfully compared to the NCAA, if only because in the case of the former the dog actually does wag the tail instead of vice versa. If Kerry, for instance, abruptly threatened to go compete in Ulster it would be laughed off the island; in the world of American collegiate sport things like that happen all the time.

Even those whose livelihood depends on an essential grasp of how this stuff works – say, sportswriters – have found themselves bewildered by events of the past week, in which the domino effect of collegiate conference realignment has created a landscape so unfamiliar one really does need a scorecard to keep track of the players.

Just the other day, for instance, I found myself trying to explain to my wife why the Big 12 Conference has only 10 members, the Big Ten has 12, and the Pacific 10 has 11. At least that’s where the latest round of musical chairs left it as of yesterday morning.

In the absence of Monday night’s 11th-hour deal that preserved the Big 12 (albeit as a 10-team league), at least one major football conference might have disintegrated entirely, with two others gobbling up the spoils while casting its less desirable components to the winds.

In an earlier era the conference concept seemed both logical and orderly. Colleges of approximate size and geographic location entered into a mutually beneficial affiliation, within the bounds of which they competed in major sports (football and basketball), whose revenue essentially funded as many as 20 minor sports.

Back in those comparatively innocent times, even the most well-heeled teams travelled primarily by bus or train, and with rare exceptions games, if they were broadcast at all, might air on two radio stations – those of the home and visiting schools.

Even after the advent of television, when national networks might show one collegiate “Game of the Week”, this framework remained essentially undisturbed. But over the past quarter century the explosion of cable TV and a concomitant adoption of the chartered flight as the preferred mode of transportation tended to make geographic considerations negligible.

This is not to suggest greed and perfidy are the only explanations for what has taken place, but they were certainly major factors.

Conference structure has never been wholly static. The modern-day Big 12, for instance, came 14 years ago when the Midwestern conference previously know as the Big Eight (Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Kansas, Kansas State, Colorado, Missouri, Iowa State and Nebraska) agreed to absorb four Texas colleges (Texas, Texas Tech, Texas AM, and Baylor) cast adrift by the break-up of the old Southwest Conference.

Whatever about the circumstances occasioning the establishment of the Big 12, at least those dozen schools were located in contiguous states, lending a logical geographic integrity to the new arrangement.

When Boston College, Virginia Tech and the University of Miami deserted the Big East to join the Atlantic Coast Conference five years ago, the conference scrambled to fill the gaps by adding Marquette, Louisville and DePaul, which is how teams located in Wisconsin, Kentucky and Illinois came to play in a conference still calling itself the Big East.

A similar situation gave rise to former SWC member Texas Christian joining the Mountain West conference, even though TCU is located in Fort Worth, hundreds of miles from the nearest significant peak.

The latest round of defections was occasioned just over a week ago when, almost simultaneously, the Big Ten poached Nebraska away from the Big 12, and the Pacific 10 made Colorado an offer it could not refuse.

In both cases, the motive was money-driven: NCAA rules require a conference to have at least 12 members to stage a post-season championship game, and television rights to a championship game can add millions to the coffers of both the conference itself and the programs of each of its members.

Nebraska actually gave the Big Ten its 12th member. For the past two decades Penn State has been a fully-invested member of that conference, meaning that it has functioned over that time as an 11-member league, even while retaining its original Big Ten designation.

The Pac 10 might well have become the Pac 16 had the other shoe dropped. The plan on the drawing board had been that the defections of Nebraska and Colorado would leave the Big 12 in such disarray that Texas might be tempted to jump ship for the west coast-based conference. So eager was the Pac 10 to add Texas that it was willing to absorb Texas AM, Oklahoma and Oklahoma State as a condition of that merger.

This in turn would have left Kansas, K-State, Missouri, Iowa State and Baylor – none of them particularly noted as a football powerhouse – on their own. Too small to form the nucleus of a new conference, those five colleges would have been left trying to beg their way into existing ones.

The arrangement was staved off at the last minute when Big 12 commissioner Dan Beebe negotiated a revised television contract favourable not only to Texas, but to the other nine schools, each of which figures to profit by an additional €14 million annually.

Of course, had Beebe negotiated a similar arrangement, say, two months ago, he might have been able to maintain his grip on both Nebraska and Colorado.

Someone overburdened with logic is bound to ask why the conferences don’t simply change their names to reflect their current membership. ie, the Big Ten could become the Big 12, the Big 12 could become the Big Ten, and the Pac 10 could be the Pac-11-and-counting.

The simplest explanation is that the conference names are each trademarked, and the people in charge of administering them, correctly or not, are persuaded that there is a certain inherent brand-name recognition.

“Big Ten Football” probably conjures up a certain image that remains fixed no matter how many teams actually compete under that banner.

And it would probably be foolish to assume that this process has ended with the latest round. Having absorbed Colorado, which the last time we checked was located 1,000 miles from the Pacific Ocean, the Pac 10 still has to add one more team if it hopes to stage a championship game.

The most likely suspect becomes the University of Utah, representing yet another landlocked state.

Which leaves the Big 12 a 10-team league with several unpalatable options. If it doesn’t opt to forego the several million in revenue represented by a championship game, the conference might challenge the NCAA’s 12-team requirement, which has never been tested in court and might not survive the challenge.

Or, having itself just survived the process, it can try to poach two teams from some other conference to bring its number back to an even dozen.