By Paige Albright
Boston University News Service
Collegiate sports fans witnessed one of the winningest swan songs last year, watching the clock run out on the PAC-12 conference. Once dubbed the “The Conference of Champions,” the team pool now sits at two, making the PAC-12 the smallest conference in the NCAA with two years to get up to the required eight members.
The PAC-12 used to be home to the “biggest winners,” as it had universities with many national titles to their names, such as UCLA, Stanford and Arizona. The conference, in its final year among the stars, shined the brightest, collecting 24 champion titles across all NCAA D1 sports. The PAC-12 teams finished their final year cementing the conference’s title as the champion of all conferences.
Most of the former PAC-12 teams departed in favor of larger broadcasting deals promised by other Power Five conferences, including the ACC and BIG10. However, the poaching of teams by these now-conglomerated conferences threatens the existence of the smaller teams in the field.
With large and powerful conferences continuing to consolidate and increase their membership numbers, the leftover media market and attention will not be sufficient to keep smaller leagues, like the Horizon League or the Sun Belt Conference, in competition. With big-name schools joining high-profile conferences, is the true ethos behind college athletics being lost? And what will become of these now abandoned conferences like the PAC-12, which was the original conference of the NCAA?
The PAC-12 is playing this season with only two member universities, Oregon State and Washington State, creating one of the oddest matchup schedules for their teams’ conference play. While the PAC-12 has already recruited four new schools to their conference next season, all of the incoming teams come from the Mountain West Conference. Now the Mountain West Conference, like PAC-12, will not have the minimum of eight members next season, creating a cycle of panic and poaching.
Aside from making more money, what is the benefit of joining a new conference? There doesn’t seem to be one, and this could be the most glaring issue with the new practice of conference consolidation.
The NCAA regulates all sanctioned collegiate sports and conferences, with the guiding mission to “provide a world-class athletics and academic experience for student-athletes that fosters lifelong well-being.” How does a university like Stanford in California, for example, joining the ACC, a predominantly East Coast conference, benefit their student-athletes with now treacherous travel days? The regular season schedules will cause more missed days of class and less recovery time, creating less time for being the student in “student-athlete.”
By how much is travel increasing for teams? Oregon and Rutgers, now both in the Big Ten Conference, will experience a seven-hour travel day, covering 2,400 air miles with a three-hour time zone change for athletes to weather, and that’s only one way.
For athletes in sports other than football, who have multiple games a week, the travel commitment they signed up for has become something of a nightmare. Administrations ensuring their student-athletes can perform their best in the classroom and on the field is imperative as less than 8% will move on to professional sports. So for the other 92% of college athletes, the promise of the NCAA to “provide a world-class athletics and academic experience” must be upheld.
This is not to mention the effect conference realignment will have on fans of these beloved schools. Some predict that the novelty of these new matchups will fade, and the displeasure with realignment could grow. Beyond the price to travel to far away games, fans could miss out on age-old rivalries, as teams like Stanford and USC or UCLA split up to join different conferences.
With the start of fall sports underway, many are holding their breath to watch the new landscape of college athletics unfold.
