There is madness in the collegiate athletic landscape and we’re not talking about the annual National Collegiate Athletic Association’s college basketball tournament that is lovingly referred to as March Madness.
No, this madness is of a serious nature and it doesn’t appear that anything can be done to stop it. We are referring to the recent major shakeups of the NCAA’s largest athletic conferences. Teams that have been in leagues for 50 years or more are leaving their conferences for what they perceive as greener pastures.
Texas A&M, a longtime Big 12 school, officially signed a deal to enter the Southeastern Conference next season, again changing the landscape of the Big 12.
This continues a recent trend that is becoming disturbing.
Last week Syracuse, a basketball staple that has given the Big East a national championship in the past 10 years, announced it will leave that conference to play in the basketball rich Atlantic Coast Conference, which includes basketball bluebloods Duke and North Carolina.
The ACC was originally made up of schools located along the Atlantic Coast that were in North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland and Florida. Syracuse isn’t near the Atlantic Coast. It is located in upstate New York.
This decision doesn’t make sense, as the Big East is a power conference that generates a lot of money for Syracuse through television revenue. It would make sense for Syracuse to go to a larger league if it were a good team in a smaller conference such as America East. But it’s not. The Orange is a national basketball power that is already playing in a national power league.
This season, the Pac 10, which has been around for 50 years and consists of schools on the west coast in California, Washington, Arizona and Oregon, became the Pac 12 when the Big 12’s (another power conference) University of Colorado and the University of Utah from the Mountain West Conference joined the Pac 10.
The Pac 12 is now talking about expanding to the Pac 16 and adding Big 12 staples Texas, Texas Tech, Oklahoma and Oklahoma State. Two of these schools are in the heartland of America and the other two are in Texas ”“ no where near the Pacific Coast.
If these teams leave, then it will create a larger problem for the Big 12, which has been a power conference for decades with schools such as Nebraska in football and Kansas in basketball. If the Pac 12 adds the other four schools, then Nebraska and Kansas could be looking for new conferences, as the Big 12 would probably cease to exist.
In the past decade, the college basketball world has seen the gap between power conference teams and the so-called midmajors tighten with teams such as Gonzaga out of the small West Coast Conference routinely placed in the AP Top 25, and with Butler from the Mountain Valley Conference making it to the NCAA national championship game the past two seasons.
If the current trend of mega-conferences continues, it will hurt smaller conferences and kill the progress they have made to become more competitive. Megaconferences will be made up of glamour schools that are rich with history and can be easily marketed. This will create larger television deals, which will lead to more money in these schools’ coffers, which will lead to them building better facilities, paying top coaches more and increase the gap between the smaller schools that will be forced to stay in smaller conferences that won’t make as much money, and will not be marketed as well. Smaller conferences will essentially be left behind.
Bigger schools leaving can also weaken conferences that counted on the money that those schools generated. For example, in the mid 2000s, the University of Louisville and the University of Cincinnati, two schools that are college basketball powers, left Conference USA for the Big East.
It made financial sense for these two schools to leave, as they earned more money through television and media revenue. It hurt Conference USA, however, as that conference’s premiere school is now Memphis University, which really became a major national basketball power during the 10 years that John Calipari coached it. He now coaches the University of Kentucky. He left not too long after Louisvillle and Cincinnati left because Conference USA no longer stood a chance of being a major player in collegiate athletics, as its remaining schools do not generate as much money for the conference as when U of L and Cincinnati were in the league.
Conference shuffling also hurts natural sports rivalries such as Texas vs. Kansas in the Big 12, and Syracuse vs. Connecticut in the Big East. While members of the same conference, these schools would play each other at least twice per season and maybe more if they met up during the conference tournament.
It’s too early to tell where this will all end up, but if the current situation is a glass ball to the future, then it won’t be good for college sports fans or the smaller conferences. The rich keep getting richer while the little guys get left behind and the NCAA wouldn’t have it any other way.
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Today’s editorial was written by Sports Editor Al Edwards, on behalf of the Journal Tribune Editorial Board. Questions? Comments? Contact Managing Editor Kristen Schulze Muszynski by calling 282-1535, Ext. 322, or via e-mail at kristenm@journaltribune.com.
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