It’s time for Congress to end college football conference expansion
Conn Carroll
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The Pac-12 conference, an iconic institution that has been a pillar of college football for over 100 years, is dead.
The University of Southern California and the University of California at Los Angeles announced their departure for the Big Ten last year. The University of Colorado announced its return to the Big 12 just last month. And today, news leaked that the Big Ten will accept the Universities of Oregon and Washington into their conference too.
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Assuming existing talks between Arizona, Arizona State, Utah, and the Big 12 are successful, those schools will soon leave also, leaving just Washington State, Oregon State, California, and Stanford.
That’s not a viable conference.
Many people blame greed for the demise of the Pac-12, but the schools that left are no more or less greedy than the ones left behind, and the Big Ten is no more or less greedy than the SEC or ACC.
No greed isn’t to blame. A failure to coordinate is.
The force driving the implosion of college football is television money, both from each conference having its own network and each conference selling its own television rights to other networks separately. The result is chaos which is destroying value.
Imagine if instead of one unified league, each NFL division was its own separate television rights-selling entity. Instead of working together to maximize league revenues overall, each division would be in a race to maximize revenues for their division.
As a unified group, it makes no sense for the NFC East to steal the Chicago Bears from the NFC North or the Los Angeles Rams from the NFC West. But as its own entity, becoming a nationwide division with the Chicago and LA markets would make tons of sense.
But what would then happen to the other three NFC North teams or the other NFC West teams?
Who cares? That’s not the NFC East’s problem.
What about the rivalries between the San Francisco 49ers and the Rams? Or the Bears and the Green Bay Packers?
Again, who cares? The NFC East is now way more valuable, and the Rams and Bears can now make more money as part of the NFC East. Who cares about history and tradition?
The NFL overall would be immensely less valuable and entertaining if the divisions bargained separately and the league turned into two super divisions and a bunch of has-beens. But that is exactly what is happening to college football. Value is being destroyed, and no one has the power to step in and stop college football from destroying itself.
Except someone does have that power.
Congress could easily step in and restore a conference structure that makes geographic and traditional sense.
The federal government has no business interfering in college athletics, you say? Well, guess what? Congress already does.
The NFL doesn’t refrain from playing games on Saturdays because they’re nice. They do so because Congress passed a law in 1961 saying they couldn’t. Yeah, Congress is already on record saying the tradition of college football is important enough for us to step in and regulate television contracts.
The NCAA is already lobbying Congress for new regulations on players’ name, image, and likeness revenue. There is no reason the legislative solution to that issue couldn’t also include new guidelines for preserving the regional identity and tradition of college football conferences.
Anything would be an improvement over the existing conference structure, but an ideal solution could look like this:
ACC
Maryland, Virginia, Duke, Wake Forest, North Carolina, North Carolina State, Clemson, South Carolina, Georgia Tech, Florida State.
Big East
Syracuse, Boston College, Notre Dame, Rutgers, Penn State, Pittsburgh, West Virginia, Cincinnati, Virginia Tech, Miami.
Big Ten
Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, Northwestern, Purdue, Indiana, Michigan State, Michigan, Ohio State.
Big West
BYU, Utah, Colorado, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Kansas, Kansas State, Missouri, Iowa State.
Pac-10
Washington, Washington State, Oregon, Oregon State, California, Stanford, USC, UCLA, Arizona, Arizona State.
SEC
LSU, Ole Miss, Mississippi State, Alabama, Auburn, Vanderbilt, Tennessee, Kentucky, Georgia, Florida.
Southwest
Texas Tech, Baylor, SMU, TCU, Texas, Texas A&M, Houston, Arkansas, Memphis, Louisville.
If the Big Ten wants to keep its network, it can bargain with other conferences, as a whole, to form a partnership. Maybe they could work out a deal to carry Pac-10 games for a decade. Same with the SEC and its network. A partnership with a Southwest conference would be a natural fit.
But no more poaching individual schools and leaving the others to scramble for a new home. We have now seen where that leads: to the destruction of valuable rivalries and ridiculous scheduling hassles for other sports that play more than one game a week.
Congress has stepped in to save college football before, and it should do so again.