College sports realignment: TV over tradition
In December of last year, the Washington Huskies won the final PAC-12 football championship game with a thrilling 34-31 comeback win against the Oregon Ducks, 107 years after their maiden win in the first conference championship.
Mascots from all 12 conference schools danced and celebrated every play behind the endzone in a funeral of sorts for the West Coast institution of college football.
The lineup of colorful characters was reminiscent of a group of college friends all moving to separate corners of the country. Some of them will see each other again, but they’ll probably never all be together in that same way.
This is just one of many seismic shifts approaching the world of college sports as longstanding conferences realign themselves in the coming months.
Big 12 schools Texas and Oklahoma are making the move to the SEC for a major change in the South and somewhat strangely, PAC-12 schools California and Stanford will play in the Atlantic Coast Conference while UCLA, USC, Washington and Oregon will join the Big Ten, traditionally the conference of the Midwest.
This means that West Coast teams will have to travel the entire way across the country to places like Penn State and Rutgers, drastically increasing travel requirements for student athletes.
These changes are primarily driven by the need for top universities to secure the biggest possible TV deal or risk being left in the wake of their rivals, somewhat antithetical to the amateur values of college sports.
The moving schools haven’t made this decision lightly with it often being driven by pragmatism rather than the desire to leave their original conferences as University of Washington athletic communications director, Jeff Bechthold explains.
“After the PAC-12 was unable to make an acceptable television deal for the coming years, Washington was in a position where they had to make a move, or be left behind. Accepting the Big Ten’s invitation was the only real option.”
Although Bechthold admits that the move was done out of necessity for Washington to stay in the top tier, he believes that the bumper TV deal offered will improve the university’s athletic program in the future.
“In time, the added revenue will definitely benefit the program. Over the past several decades, additional staffing and materials have been dedicated to improving the lives of student-athletes”, he said.
“Nutrition, apparel, academic support, medical care and many other day-to-day areas of campus life have grown by leaps and bounds. In order to remain competitive at the highest level of collegiate athletics, that sort of investment will inevitably continue”, he added.
Washington and other movers have secured their future with new conference agreements, however not all schools have been so fortunate.
While most of the PAC-12 schools have found new homes in other Power Five conferences, Oregon State and Washington State remain as the only two members of the beleaguered Pacific conference.
Unable to get revenue on par with their old rivals these programs now risk falling behind. Oregon State faces a $40 million budget shortfall in 2024-25 without the usual PAC-12 TV income, the beginning of a tiered system in college sports as those who don’t make the cut in the developing super-conferences are left to fight over the scraps.
“I think it’s just part of the further decline of college football, it’s being condensed more and more into a couple of leagues which don’t make geographical sense at all, it’s bizarre”, said lifelong Oregon State fan Kyle Jones.
“I don’t think Washington State and Oregon State will be able to keep the PAC-12 alive, it’s done for. Without a big TV deal like the conference offered, I think the university’s athletic program will take a downward shift.
”It’s unfortunate, but that’s the reality of it”, they added.
While these changes are firmly driven by the behemoth that is college football, all sports are going to be impacted by conference realignment.
The negative effects of cross-country travel will be minimal for well-funded football programs who only play once a week, but for less supported sports with multiple games a week like soccer, softball or volleyball, the ramifications for their studies and campus experience will be felt much more deeply.
The combination of increased expectations on student-athletes, and the abandonment of tradition and geographical proximity may spell danger for college football and college sports in general, as founder of Deadspin Sports, Will Leitch explains.
“If you take away the reasons people care about college football—tradition, history, rivalries, logic—you basically only have minor league football. And no one cares about minor league anything. College football is making itself into a semi-pro league. Down that path disaster lies,” he said.
“When football is the only priority, other sports are shuffled to the side and forced to follow the logic of football, which is how a track team that doesn’t make money anyway now has to travel from Nebraska to Washington state twice a year.”
“Sports has always been about the delicate balance between athletics and finance. Now that balance has been exploded”, he concluded.
Football has ended for the school year, but many other sports are reaching the climax of the last season in their current conference.
The scene of the final meeting of the PAC-12 mascots is set to be mirrored all over the country as traditions and rivalries are played out for the last time, all being exchanged for TV revenue in a move that may damage college sports in the long run.
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