II. Conference Realignment 2.0: A Case Study in Money Over Values
In the span of six days in August 2023, the Pac-12 conference—one of the most historically stable and tradition-rich conferences in college sports—ceased to exist.
The Big Ten picked off USC and UCLA, the Pac-12’s most prized assets in 2022, then raided the cupboard again on August 4, 2023, to claim Oregon and Washington. The same day, the Big 12—that lost Texas and Oklahoma to the SEC in 2021—finished off the Pac-12 by poaching Arizona, Arizona State, and Utah (Colorado made the Pac-12-Big 12 switch the week before).
In the multi-billion-dollar game of Power 5 football musical chairs, no school wants to be left standing when the music stops.
The Big Ten’s primary media partner (Fox) kicked in enough money to guarantee that no Big Ten school would see its annual revenue share decrease.
The Big 12’s new schools agreed to reduced shares in the short term.
The remains of the Pac-12—Stanford, Cal, Oregon State, and Washington State—became fire-sale merchandise.
The Atlantic Coast Conference bought Stanford and Cal for a song, redefining the geography of the American mainland in yet another Orwellian absurdity in college sports.
Adding to the irony, the ACC, Stanford, and Cal justified their merger in part on the alignment of their academic and educational interests.
Lost in the short-lived handwringing over the Pac-12’s demise was a meaningful discussion of the impact on athletes.
In all of these fundamental structural changes, athletes had no notice of or input into the secretive decision-making processes.
If the past is prologue, athletes won’t have a meaningful voice as Power 4 university presidents, conference commissioners, and their lawyers, lobbyists, and spin doctors sort through the wreckage of the latest pileup at the intersection of institutional self-interest and “student-athlete well-being.”
Conference Realignment and “New Normals”
For those who bore witness to Conference Chaos 1.0 (1990s - 2014), the recent consolidation of football power and market share is the logical endpoint of the Board of Regents lawsuit in 1984.
Board of Regents granted big-time football its’ financial freedom from the NCAA.
The SEC and Big Ten’s imperial march through neighboring territories is a natural consequence of Board of Regents—and it’s not over.
The Big Ten and SEC are positioned to create the most NFL-like college football product the market can bear.
If history is our guide, it won’t be long before the Pac-12 disappears from college sports’ collective consciousness, relegated to a trivia question along with the Big Eight and Southwest conferences (can you name one school from either?).
In the 1990s and early 2000s, the Big Ten, SEC, and NCAA powerbrokers sat behind microphones in Congress and claimed with certainty that a college football playoff would be the death of college football as we know it.
These same people now applaud the expanding College Football Playoff, which is being transformed into a month-long, March Madness-like football holiday that will likely rival in popularity any American sports product in history.
The big-time college football juggernaut won’t miss a beat.
Power 5 messengers and their vast array of media and corporate partners will seamlessly ease stakeholders and fans into a new normal they will soon wonder how they ever lived without.
Where Were the Power 5 University Presidents?
The presidents, who bear ultimate responsibility for the conduct and control of intercollegiate athletics under the NCAA’s principle of “institutional control,” sat in secret meetings with conference commissioners, media behemoths, lawyers, and financial experts, plotting the destruction of their own, or peer conference(s).
In their monomaniacal quest for prestige, power, social currency, market share, and money, university presidents and institutional governing boards lost their senses and their claimed values.
In the aftermath of the Pac-12 massacre, former Pac-12 university presidents who landed safely in the Big Ten or Big 12 had very little to say.
That, in the new wave of conference realignment, passes for “collegiality” in higher education.
Where Was the NCAA?
The NCAA did what it does best: ignore and misdirect.
On August 2nd, while Power 5 conference leaders held clandestine meetings that led to the Pac-12’s demise, the NCAA and its new president, Charlie Baker, released a “State of Business Review Key Findings” report described as an “agenda for growth [and] transformation.”
The report comprised nine pages of meaningless graphs and charts that suggest the NCAA has adopted a forward-thinking business plan. However, the “trends” the NCAA identifies still operate within seventy-year-old regressive principles such as amateurism, the student-athlete, and the collegiate model.
Notably, the only reference to conference realignment was a single bullet point identifying realignment as a “trend” impacting member institutions, not athletes.
On August 14th, after the dust settled on the Pac-12’s extinction, Baker released a “letter” to NCAA Nation titled “A Pathway Forward.”
Baker did not mention the massive reordering of the college sports world that had just occurred.
Baker’s bottom line? Congress. Congress. Congress…and the federalization of the NCAA and Power 5’s regulatory and business models.
During recent congressional hearings (October 17th, 2023, in the Senate; January 18, 2024, in the House), Baker, Big Ten Commissioner Tony Petitti, and Power 5 athletics directors, including Notre Dame’s Jack Swarbrick testified at length about the pressing need for protective federal legislation without once mentioning the demise of the Pac-12 or the consequences of Realignment 2.0.
On January 10th, 2024, at the NCAA annual convention, Baker delivered his first official State of the Association speech and identified the top twelve issues facing college sports.
Football-driven conference realignment and its impact across the entire college sports landscape didn’t make the list.
Think about that for a moment.
The NCAA president didn’t include one of the most consequential structural changes in college sports history when drafting a list of the twelve most pressing issues for college sports in 2024.
Baker used the word “football” twice: (1) to highlight the popularity of a women’s volleyball telecast compared to an NFL game and (2) to express his “enthusiasm” for women’s flag football as a potential NCAA sport.
While Baker did make a vague reference to the “elephant in the room,” it wasn’t about the SEC and Big Ten’s hostile takeover of college football and the future of college sports.
Instead, Baker’s “elephant in the room” was that athletes at “higher resourced” universities (read: Power 4, or a subset of Power 4) deserved more economic benefits, which was a plug for his “D-I Project.”
But in addressing potential additional benefits for athletes, there was a catch: the NCAA could not move forward on benefits unless Congress passed a law making it impossible for athletes to be employees of their university, and perhaps other protections as well, such as preemption and antitrust immunity.
Additionally, Baker's speech made no reference to the recently expanded College Football Playoff, historic football-driven broadcast media deals, and revenues, or hundreds of millions of dollars in coaching buy-out payments and reserves that exceed what most schools spend on scholarships for all athletes combined.
These omissions were not accidental. Baker’s speech was influenced and vetted by the NCAA’s growing army of lawyers, lobbyists, and public relations experts whose primary mission is to disguise inconvenient truths in college sports’ regulatory and business models.
At the top of the list of inconvenient truths is that since Board of Regents, the NCAA is nothing more than a surrogate for big-time football interests.
Note: For more on post-Board of Regents regulatory dysfunction and Power 5 decision-making, see the NCAA Governance and Power 5 Secret Society materials accessible from the homepage.
The Real End Game
On February 2, 2024, less than a month after the convention, the SEC and Big Ten further isolated their interests from the rest of college sports, and importantly, the Big 12 and ACC, by forming the “SEC-Big Ten Advisory Group.”
The SEC and Big Ten created the Advisory Group before consulting the Big 12 or the ACC.
The Advisory Group’s cryptic agenda items include exploring settlement(s) of pending antitrust case(s) (with an emphasis on the House litigation), governance issues, and state laws.
These are crucial issues that impact the entire college sports world.
The day the story broke, mainstream and sports media outlets were abuzz with “breaking news” headlines on the Advisory Group.
The NCAA’s response?
A press release on a collegiate data analytics competition among universities in Indiana.
It’s unclear how the Advisory Group came together or the extent of NCAA knowledge, input, and support. We are left to wonder, looking at coded messaging from SEC and Big Ten leaders and silence from the NCAA.
Two months before the Advisory Group was announced, University of Georgia President and NCAA Division I Board of Directors Chair Jere Morehead remarked at a college sports forum that the SEC and Big Ten conference commissioners needed to be “reading from the same page.”
Apparently, now they are.
In response to criticism over the exclusion of the Big 12, ACC, and other stakeholders, Sankey said:
“Big problems are not solved in big rooms filled with people. You have to narrow the focus a bit. There may be raised eyebrows. We certainly called in advance to communicate what was going to be announced rather than do it in the shadows and have someone report on it. You might as well put things out there.”
In classic commissioner doublespeak, Sankey justifies operating in the “shadows” while professing to be “put(ting] things out there.”
The Advisory Group is a logical consequence of Realignment 2.0, which is a logical consequence of Board of Regents.
In their quest to create a tax-free NFL under the auspices of higher education, the SEC and Big Ten are indifferent to the damage it may cause.
The structural and equity implications of Conference Realignment 2.0 and the SEC and Big Ten’s raid on college sports governance and decision-making are as consequential as perceived “chaos” in the NIL market, antitrust litigation, or the possibility that athletes may be employees of their institutions.
The SEC and Big Ten are poised to impose their will on college sports and NCAA governance—including the Big 12 and ACC—just as the full Power 5 imposed their will in 2014 through Autonomy legislation and in 2021- 2022 through the Constitution and Transformation Committees.
The SEC and Big Ten are using the Autonomy playbook to create a duopoly that will dominate every aspect of college sports.
In 2014, the Power 5 explicitly threatened to secede from the NCAA if they did not get their way.
In 2024, the SEC and Big Ten are content to leave the possibility of their secession to media speculation.
The SEC-Big Ten duopoly also strengthens its leverage in CFP discussions over the structure of the playoff and payout allocations.
The Advisory Group's very existence is an affront to the NCAA’s claimed “representative democracy” governance model because it operates entirely outside of it.
If there was ever a time for institutional stakeholders to stand up for their governance rights, it is now.
Likewise, If there was ever a time for institutional stakeholders to speak up for athletes, it is now.
Their failure to do so on both counts is the ultimate “tell” on the values dissonance in college sports.
The absence of protest from the NCAA and other stakeholder groups exposes how weak and irrelevant the NCAA is as an association.
An unintended benefit for athletes is they now know with absolute certainty where they stand with those who profess to act in their best interests.
A Moment of Clarity and Opportunity for Athletes
Because of the unique circumstances currently in play, athletes have the most compelling case in college sports history for transparency and accountability from the NCAA, conferences, and institutions.
Before athletes can even begin an intelligent discussion on potential reform, they must have access to the same information as conference commissioners, university presidents, athletics directors, corporate partners, and, importantly, NCAA/Power 5 lobbyists.
Hopefully, all athletes can join forces on the unifying threshold issues of transparency and accountability that transcend whatever differences may arise in discussions on issues such as revenue-sharing or employee status.
It’s easy for in-system stakeholders to dismiss individual athletes or small groups of disorganized athletes. But a sea of well-informed, motivated athletes acting in concert would be impossible to ignore.
Athletes, institutions, and others who care about college sports face several critical questions at this historic crossroads:
1. Will we prioritize American values and economic freedoms for athletes or defer to NCAA and Power 5 economic restrictions that violate free competition laws and basic principles of fairness?
2. Will we require transparency and accountability from the NCAA, conferences, and institutions, or will we continue to permit them to operate as secret governments?
3. WHO SHOULD DECIDE THE FUTURE OF COLLEGE SPORTS?
4. What can athletes do to control their destiny?
Answering these questions requires an analysis of several key threshold issues addressed in the sections below:
1. A realistic assessment of where athletes are now. (Section III: THE “PENDULUM PROBLEM”)
2. An analysis of how college sports’ decision-makers truly see their interests. (Section IV: WHO GETS TO DECIDE?)
3. Acquiring access to information that will frame the problems and solutions. (Section V: TRANSPARENCY AND ACCOUNTABILITY)
4. A plan of action that may lead to intelligent solutions and fair relationships between athletes and institutions. (Section VI: A MODEST PROPOSAL)