The Pac-12 Conference appears to be disintegrating, and much of the focus has been on the on-field effects of the exodus of several big-time college sports teams to other conferences. But the radical change could also carry consequences far away from the stadiums.
In the past week, the Pac-12 has dwindled to only four member institutions, with two of them — Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley — reportedly in discussions to join the Atlantic Coast Conference. Last Friday, five formerly Pac-12 colleges left the group. The Universities of Arizona and of Utah, and Arizona State University, announced plans to join the Big 12, while the Universities of Oregon and of Washington are joining the Big Ten.
As the remaining colleges plot their next moves, the world of intercollegiate athletics is getting used to a new level of uncertainty.
“We woke up this week, and the conference of champions, a 115-year-old tradition with so many NCAA championships, great academic schools on the West Coast, is suddenly gone,” said Jordan B. Acker, a member of the University of Michigan Board of Regents. “And there’s nothing left to replace it.”
The moves are the latest in a long line of conference realignments that have colleges aiming for higher-paying media deals. The University of Colorado at Boulder announced plans in July to move to the Big 12, and the University of California at Los Angeles and the University of Southern California decided last year to leave the Pac-12 for the Big Ten. The teams are set to join their new conferences in 2024, around the same time the Pac-12’s media-rights deal with ESPN and Fox Media ends.
You committed to go to school in Eugene, and all of a sudden, instead of playing in Corvallis or Seattle or the Bay Area, you’re playing in central New Jersey.
College-athletics experts said the realignments further professionalize the supposedly amateur sports and resonate in other ways that may not be readily apparent. Here are a few:
Effects on Athletes
Athletes are already experiencing a mental-health crisis, especially as they balance classes and competition, said Victoria Jackson, a sports historian and clinical associate professor of history at Arizona State University. Many students often break the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s “20 hour rule,” which requires athletes to devote no more than 20 hours a week to athletic activities, Jackson said. The rule also doesn’t include travel time, she said.
Now, students who were used to traveling only a few hours for games may have to take a five- or six-hour flight every other week, Acker said.
“Nowhere else would you be told you committed to go to school in Eugene, and all of a sudden, instead of playing in Corvallis or Seattle or the Bay Area, you’re playing in central New Jersey,” Acker said. “That’s not something a lot of students signed up for, but it’s something they have to do if they want to continue to be a student-athlete at a school like Oregon.”
Traveling across the country will only continue to harm athletes’ mental and physical health, said Jackson, who was also a collegiate track-and-field athlete. They’ll have a harder time healing from injuries and catching up on school work, she said.
With less time on campus, athletes will also miss out on normal college experiences, such as internships, extracurriculars, or guest speakers, Jackson said.
“Isn’t college supposed to be a place where we’re encouraging young people to explore all the things that they want to potentially be and achieve in their lives?” Jackson said. “These moves have really put guard rails around the ability of athletes to imagine their future is beyond sport.”
Following the realignments last week, several softball players from colleges that are leaving the Pac-12 spoke out on social media about how the changes will affect their mental health, as well as the burden it places on families wanting to watch their games in person.
“The idea that football has dragged along all the other sports feels like the biggest mistake here,” Jackson said. “The people who are entering into these sports teams aren’t seeing it as a professional sports experience. They’re seeing it as a pathway to a degree.”
‘Naked Hypocrisy’
To Acker, professionalizing conferences is hypocritical — and may make myriad legal cases more difficult to defend.
The NCAA continues to face several lawsuits challenging the organization’s ban on direct pay for athletes (the association was forced to relent a few years ago to allow athletes to earn money from their names, images, and likenesses). If the number of conferences continues to decline, the case for paying athletes will gain strength, said Michael McCann, director of the Sports and Entertainment Law Institute and a law professor at the University of New Hampshire.
“When we’re seeing this open courtship by universities to make the most money possible, it’s rational for them to do that, and it’s legal for them to do that,” McCann said. “It makes it harder for them to turn around and say, ‘the athletes are just students.’’’
Many athletic programs struggle to balance their budgets, which will only become tighter with more travel, Acker said. This will make traveling more difficult for regional colleges or those that are farther away from major metropolitan airports, he said.
Conferences can’t continue to expand while also claiming that they don’t have enough money and are unable to pay their athletes, Acker said.
“The naked hypocrisy of it has gotten too big to bear for me,” Acker said. “That is not a business model that should survive.”
Who’s in Charge?
Conference realignments may also shake up decision-making at the administrative level, experts in college sports said.
In the past, college presidents have left athletic oversight and management to athletic directors, said Acker. But as college athletics continues to expand, sports teams have become key to many colleges’ brands, which might lead presidents to be more involved, he said.
“For a very long time, it’s been the province of the athletic director, with a little bit of input from the president,” Acker said. From successful institutions, he hopes to see “better governance, better alignment from their boards, from their presidents.”
On a broader level, though, major conferences may also start setting the tone for decision-making, said Brendan Cantwell, a professor of higher, adult, and lifelong education at Michigan State University. (Cantwell is also a contributor to The Chronicle.)
During the pandemic, colleges in athletic conferences were conflicted on when to restart competitions, Cantwell said. But following the Big Ten’s decision to resume the football season in the fall of 2020, many of the other conferences followed along, he said. If there are only a few major conferences left, college presidents will have less overall influence, he said.
Presidents have a say formally, “but in reality, they may have a few degrees of freedom in terms of steering the kind of decisions that the conferences make,” said Cantwell. “The bigger, more powerful — tied in with bigger and bigger media deals — the conference has become, the less oversight of them university administrations have.”
