Is FBS Conference Realignment Ruining College Sports?

It’s happening again. Division 1 conferences are realigning. And that means that everything we thought we knew about college sports is about to change. USC and UCLA joining the big ten is probably the biggest warning shot we have ever witnessed that the college sports world is evolving. And I promise you that this is only the beginning.

But why do colleges realign in the first place? And what will this mean for everyone else, who doesn’t get moving? The solution is simple, the NCAA is headed to a world where there will be three types of conferences and schools in existence. Those that “Have A Lot”. Those that “Have a Lot Less”, and those that “Barely Have Anything at All”.

Those that “Have a Lot”

Instead of telling you, I’d rather show you. USC and UCLA are making the move to the Big Ten, for the same reason that other schools like Syracuse and Pittsburgh chose to join the ACC. It all comes down to money. College football is big business. The Big East was not known for much of anything as far as D1 football was concerned, and schools like Syracuse knew that. So jumping to the ACC where programs like Florida State, and Miami were historically national championship contenders made sense. More big name teams means more big name matchups, and that in return means more television money! This sets the precedent for major conference realignment.

But what we are seeing now is something different. And I know exactly who to blame. The SEC started this, a wave of realignment, that is unprecedented. Where a conference already widely considered the best in college football, kidnapped Texas A&M and Missouri from the Big 12, and later Oklahoma and the Texas Longhorns… So the Southeastern conference, which is what SEC actually means, is no longer even based in the southeast. The SEC has been building a super conference, and they’re not even doing it under the radar. When you grab the Texas longhorns, who have their own ESPN syndicate tv network, you are officially big game hunting. 

USC and UCLA to the Big Ten is their answer to the SEC. They started their own coup so the SEC wouldn’t get all the money. The Pac 12 has always had 1 major thing holding them back in tv ratings. The pacific time zone. An 8 pm start time for a game is 11 pm on the east coast… not much you can do about that, except put USC on a plane to play Penn State so everyone can watch the game during prime time.

I have apologize to everyone who doesn’t play football, because to be honest, that’s the only sport that matters when realignment comes to mind. And here in lies the problem. Mark Emmert who was the president of the NCAA for many years is reported as saying himself that the 3 division model of the NCAA needs to be updated. But realignment is essentially proving, that many schools got tired of waiting. Conferences like the Big Ten and SEC exist in their current form because the tv money is astronomical. The Big Ten just signed a new deal worth 7 billion dollars… read that again if you must. If that means that a UCLA volleyball team has to fly to Rutgers in New Jersey to play a regular season game on a weekday… so be it.

Those that “Have a Lot Less”

But there is a conference realignment trickle-down effect. Think of it like the aftershocks of an earthquake. Conference realignment happens in such a way where the rich get a whole lot richer… and everyone else is just trying to survive. And this is because when a team leaves a conference, they typically have to be replaced to promote competitive balance… but replaced by who?

 A nationwide game of capture the flag is what we end up with throughout FBS Football. Where anyone not named the Big Ten or SEC is now looking for whoever they can to simply have enough teams to compete. The Big 12 for example is in line to add BYU and UCF. No offense but that’s a huge drop-off in name recognition and marketability from Oklahoma and Texas.

And when UCF leaves the American “a conference that only exists because the ACC exterminated the “old big east”, the American itself has to turn around and grab teams like Florida Atlantic from Conference USA…. In fact, they are going to be adding 6 teams in total from Conference USA…. No disrespect but if that’s not decimating a conference I don’t know what is.

So conference USA gets desperate… and they grab whoever they can… basically whoever else didn’t have a date to the prom… like Liberty and new Mexico state, both D1 FBS independents… and later they end up pulling up 2 schools from FCS….

By now you should be able to follow how this works! Eventually the domino effect hits schools like Stonehill and Merrimack, 2 northeastern private colleges that are leaving D2 to join FCS. These schools are realigning for survival. The competitive landscape is shifting where the schools who have always had, now have a lot more. And the teams who have a lot less, don’t want to end up with nothing. They will sell whatever football product they can to get what’s left of the television money available.

Those that “Barely Have Anything at All”

Whatever the NCAA world is changing itself into, it will leave the D2 and D3 world to fall by the way side. There are talented athletes all across the NCAA. But the facilities and resources possessed by even a low level Big Ten program will now have more than 10 times the financial force of even an average D1 FCS program. The Division 2 and 3 world are so much of an afterthought, that they might as well be playing sports in a back alley somewhere for the purposes of television media. Is a football player at Northwestern 10 times better than one at nearby Division 2 Quincy University? Both will be playing football in college, but one will have access to NIL money, professional level facilities, and national television coverage. And the other will be have to be happy playing in all likelihood for a partial athletic scholarship, in front of a sellout crowd of 2,500 students and family! That’s actually how many people the stadium holds.

A D3 All American is normally at least playing football at the level of a starter on most D1 FCS programs. But the commodification of big time college sports has created such a gap, that you can hardly call D3 football much more than a slight step up from your average high school in terms of its resources. And at the top, watching the SEC and the Big Ten might as well be the same thing as watching the men who play on Sunday’s, the only difference is that they can’t get legally paid to play, apart from some well calculated NIL money, but that’s another story for another day.

The Bottom Line

The NCAA does have a mission statement. And it reads that they exist to “govern competition in a fair, safe, equitable and sportsmanlike manner, and to integrate intercollegiate athletics into higher education so that the educational experience of the student-athlete is paramount.” It is safe to say that conference realignment has run away from itself, so much so that this mission statement doesn’t really apply anymore to the Big Ten or SEC. One could argue it is wishful thinking for most of FBS. But it makes a lot of sense when you look at any school that is in D1 FCS on down to D3. There are only a few television channels to watch college sports. So TV money cannot go to everyone. And conference realignment has let big time football, make decisions that impact everyone. I don’t know what the future of the NCAA will look like, but if the gap between the haves and have nots gets any wider, we may not have anywhere near as many colleges interested in playing at all.

KNOW THE GAME. WIN THE GAME.

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