Conference Soap Opera Is Driven by Cash, but Cachet Matters, Too

In deciding whom to align with, colleges consider institutional identity and student recruiting

The two-week-old saga of the Atlantic Coast Conference and the Big East

Conference goes far beyond athletics. Governors do not call each other to lobby for their universities to get into, say, the Association of American Universities. But the ACC? That’s big.

At present, it is still unclear whether Boston College, Syracuse University, and the University of Miami will leave the Big East to join the ACC, in search of more football revenue and a stronger East Coast league. But while the last round of conference shopping is mostly about money for athletics departments, the situation also raises questions about what a sports league does for a college beyond its courts and playing field.

In many cases, a conference provides an identity. Everybody knows what a Big Ten university or an Ivy League college is. The University of Texas at Austin has much more of a national presence since it left the Southwest Conference and joined the Big 12 Conference in 1996, says Texas’ president, Larry R. Faulkner.

“I think any school gets a certain amount of identity from its conference affiliation because a large fraction of the public’s news about an institution comes from sports reporting,” Mr. Faulkner says. “That means there is an identity by association.”

One of the more interesting twists in the ACC-Big East saga has been the rumor that Miami would not make a move unless the ACC induced Boston College and Syracuse University to make the jump. Miami’s vice president for enrollment did not return phone calls seeking comment, but the argument is that the university needed to preserve its ties to Boston and New York because so many of its students and alumni live in those areas. According to the university, 569 of 13,411 students come from New England. Another 1,940 come from the mid-Atlantic states, including 741 from New York and 456 from New Jersey.

If the ACC -- which needed to invite exactly three teams because of the convoluted economics of college sports -- invited Virginia Tech, the deal was off. Gov. Mark R. Warner of Virginia called his peers in North Carolina and Maryland to lobby for Virginia Tech, but to no avail.

With negotiations under way, the remaining Big East members and, indeed, the rest of the members of Division I are struggling to find new alignments that offer the most cachet at acceptable prices.

Bus Leagues to Business Leagues

Until about 15 years ago, conference affiliation wasn’t a big deal. With a few exceptions, colleges belonged to “bus leagues” composed of regional rivals grouped together for proximity as much as for prowess. That has changed as colleges have begun looking at sports as a marketing tool to fans, alumni, and potential students.

“Your conference affiliation can be closely related to your brand image,” says William Bradshaw, athletics director at Temple University. “So conference affiliation can be very important in areas like fund raising, enrollment management, marketing and promotion, corporate sponsorships, and a myriad of other areas that are so essential to the lifeblood of the university.”

Until the mid-1980s, conferences sent only one team to the Division I men’s basketball tournament per year. A smattering of bowl games attracted a smattering of football teams. A handful of basketball and football games were televised every week through national contracts set up first by the National Collegiate Athletic Association, and after 1984 by the College Football Association. (In 1984, the NCAA lost an antitrust case before the Supreme Court challenging its monopoly on football television.)

The growth of cable television created a vast need for cheap programming, and college basketball and football fit the ticket. The breakup of the football association gave conferences the power to negotiate their own television contracts. The expansion of the basketball tournament to 64 teams, as well as the proliferation of bowl games, gave greater access to teams in stronger leagues. And as the landscape changed, colleges accelerated their spending on sports to try to keep up not just with regional rivals, but with national ones.

The desire for more visibility and more money through access to championships and television contracts created a mad dash for conference affiliations. First, the Big East began play in football in 1991. Second, the Southeastern Conference added the Universities of Arkansas at Fayetteville and South Carolina at Columbia in 1992. Then, the Big Eight Conference and the top tier of the Southwest Conference merged in 1996, creating the Big 12 Conference.

That stabilized the pecking order for most colleges with truly big-time athletics departments. Some were forced to bring along second-tier programs: Most notably, Texas state officials, including then-Gov. Ann Richards, threatened appropriations for the University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M University at College Station if they did not allow Baylor University to join them in the Big 12.

Regardless, the ACC, Big East, Big Ten, Big 12, SEC, and Pacific-10 emerged as the top dogs in college sports, dictating bowl bids and television terms to the rest of Division I, especially after the Bowl Championship Series was established in 1998. The rest of Division I was forced to scramble for new alignments, creating and reshaping leagues like Conference USA, the Mountain West Conference, and the Western Athletic Conference.

The Big East, however, has never been stable. It was the first “made for TV” conference, cobbled together from mid-Atlantic basketball powerhouses and an odd assortment of universities with stronger football teams, such as Miami and Virginia Tech, along with regional powerhouses with traditions in both sports, notably the University of Pittsburgh and West Virginia University.

And beneath it, an uneasy and unstable set of groupings has formed among the remaining 261 colleges in the division. The Ivy League is the only other longstanding conference with a set of similar institutions in the same region that has remained stable for more than a decade or two.

Difficult Circumstances

What does that mean for colleges? It has devalued traditional rivalries and deprived colleges of much in the way of prestige when it comes to sports, but it has also opened new markets for institutions to tap for alumni support and recruiting.

“When Conference USA was put together, one of the things that really intrigued DePaul was that the cities involved were all cities that had large Catholic populations,” says Jean Lenti Ponsetto, DePaul University’s athletics director. “We have kids from Cincinnati, Louisville, Tampa, and pretty much every other city, so from that perspective, for the university to have that kind of visibility was important to us.”

The conference confusion also creates a number of questions for presidents and trustees who now have decisions to make in the wake of the ACC’s raid on the Big East. Should they look for another gerrymandered league that stretches across the country in search of television contracts and bowl bids? Can they find a like group of institutions that could come together as a more-permanent grouping strong enough to survive the machinations of college sports?

If Boston College, Miami, and Syracuse bolt for the Atlantic Coast, one possibility is that a new league could form featuring the basketball-proud remnant of the Big East, which includes Georgetown and Seton Hall Universities, Providence College, and Villanova University -- all Catholic institutions. Those colleges could reach out to DePaul, Marquette, the University of Dayton, Xavier University, and possibly even the University of Notre Dame to form a collection of parochial colleges.

With campuses mostly in urban areas and strong basketball programs, a league like that would have a very strong common identity and an attractive package for a television network. Athletics directors from the affected colleges had no comment on the idea.

Similarly, leftover Big East football institutions could find a reasonably strong conference composed of urban Division I-A programs, such as the Universities of Cincinnati, Louisville, and Memphis. Such a league wouldn’t quite have the identity of the parochial conference, but it would have a shot at competing for slots in the football Bowl Championship Series.

The soap opera of sports leagues is likely to take most of the summer to play out. When the final switch is made, it likely won’t mean tremendous changes in the economics or dynamics of college sports.

It will, however, push some colleges into a brighter public spotlight, and some colleges into a dimmer one.

A RAID ON THE BIG EAST?

The Atlantic Coast Conference made its bid this month to become the dominant college-sports league on the Eastern Seaboard. By offering membership to Boston College, Syracuse University, and the University of Miami, the ACC moved to become a 12-college “superconference,” which would effectively destroy the Big East Conference, to which all three now belong.

As of press time, the three invitees had not announced any decision. Any move could produce a major shake-up in the economics and affiliations of big-time college sports. The ACC and the Big East are both among the six conferences belonging to the Bowl Championship Series, which matches teams for and distributes money from the top tier of football bowl games.

Should Boston College, Syracuse, and Miami jump to the ACC, the five remaining football-playing members of the Big East would not be a viable conference by themselves. Furthermore, they would be hard put to find at least three other universities with strong enough teams to constitute a league worthy of being in the top six. That could cause a major restructuring of college football as colleges across the country scrambled for new affiliations to give them a better chance at good bowls and television exposure.

		ACC colleges Clemson U Duke U Florida State U Georgia Institute of Technology North Carolina State U U of Maryland at College Park U of North Carolina at Chapel Hill U of Virginia Wake Forest U
		Big East colleges invited to join ACC Boston College Syracuse U U of Miami
		Other Big East colleges Georgetown U Providence College Rutgers U at New Brunswick St. John’s U Seton Hall U Temple U (football only) U of Connecticut U of Notre Dame (except football) U of Pittsburgh Villanova U Virginia Tech West Virginia U at Morgantown

http://chronicle.com Section: Athletics Volume 49, Issue 38, Page A37