Realignment Madness or, The Assassination of the Pac-12 by the Superconference Big Ten
A scattershot history lesson on college realignment, and other thoughts about its current wave
The Pac-12 is coming to an inglorious end. It is the most prominent of the college sports conferences to be shattered by the modern age of realignment. The short view of this is that the Pac-12 commissioner, George Kliavkoff, is not very good at his job; i.e., using the brand marketability of the college-affiliated sports programs in his conference to make a favorable deal for television broadcasting rights. College sports amateurism has always been a lie, but the deregulation of television in the 1990s led to the game increasing its national spread and the investment of capital into an alleged nonprofit sporting industry. In any case, it’s made up of nonprofit universities and governed by a non-profit entity so the billions of dollars generated must all be spent, optimally on supporting non-revenue generating sports, often on coaching salaries and facilities, increasingly openly on player-based marketing campaigns (which I think is some of the most honest money the game has ever seen spent, since they’re still not classifying the student-athletes as employees).
In 1992, the Southeastern Conference (or SEC, home to programs like the University of Alabama’s Crimson Tide and Vanderbilt University’s Commodores) pioneered the first conference championship game two years after pilfering the Arkansas Razorbacks from the Southwestern Conference (SWC) and the South Carolina Gamecocks from the Atlantic Coastal Conference (ACC). The richer schools (University of Texas, Texas A&M) and more well-connected schools (Baylor, which otherwise would have been left to flounder) of the defunct SWC combined with the southern Midwest conference (the Big Eight) to form the Big XII while their less well-connected compatriots were scuttled and scattered to conferences like the Western Athletic Conference (which recently resurrected football after a near-decade absence), Mountain West, and Conference USA. The Big XII would be the second major conference to launch a televised championship game (splitting the divisions north and south, where the SEC had done East and West). After picking up some schools from the Big East (like Miami) and the ranks of independents (like Florida State), the Atlantic Coastal Conference would follow suit, rejecting geographic sense in their divisions (naming them “Atlantic” and “Coastal”) in the hope of one day getting Miami and Florida State to play each other. This has yet to come to pass because, after several runs of success from the early 80s to the early 2000s, Miami fell off. Florida State has also had some down years, but won a national title in 2013.
The Big Ten was founded as the Intercollegiate Conference of Faculty Representatives in 1896. The original victims of sports media’s alleged “East Coast Bias,” it was known as the Western Conference until 1899, back in those days when the Ivy League was the premiere college sports league. Known as the Big Nine from 1899 to 1917 and 1946 to 1950, the northern midwestern conference had mostly stable membership of landgrant universities plus private Illinois school Northwestern, adding Penn State to bring them to eleven schools in 1990.
When the Big Ten was formed in 1895, the SEC’s predecessor, the Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Association was formed. The SIAA’s membership would fluctuate across 72 programs before its closure in 1942. Its coexisting successor, the Southern Conference, was formed in 1921, and teams within it would eventually join the SEC and ACC, though the Southern Conference still survives.
The Big Ten likes to beat its chest about amateurism, prestige, and the sanctity of college sport. When they invited Nebraska from the Big XII (a geographically if not culturally sensible expansion) and field a championship game, its divisions were initially called “Legends” and “Leaders.” Rutgers (the flagship university of New Jersey) and Maryland (the always sleeping giant) were expansions in the interest of television markets in 2012. Nebraska, which from the 1970s to 1990s was a pioneer of recruiting and development techniques and option offensive football, has had five winning seasons in the twelve years since they left the Big XII, all but four under coach Bo Pelini, who was fired in 2014 (Mike Riley went 9-4 in 2016). They have not won more than three games in conference play since then. Rutgers, famous for winning the first college football game back when the sport was somewhere between rugby and violent soccer, has had one winning season since joining the Big Ten (8-5 in their first year), has never had a winning record in conference play, and has gone winless in the conference three times. Maryland has had three winning seasons, including the last two, and may be on the upswing. They have never had a winning record in conference play.
During the 2010-14 realignment wave that the Big Ten started, the SEC took Texas A&M and Missouri from the Big XII. After playing in two SEC championships from 2013 to 2014, Missouri have had two winning seasons, though they were close the last two years. The Aggies have been good but not met expectations, averaging about 8 wins a season, on par for their historic average. Texas, the team with outsized influence in the Big XII and a big reason A&M and Mizzou left, is joining the SEC next year with archrival Oklahoma. The Big XII is calling up a geographically incongruous smattering of university athletic programs with some history of football success and national relevance to replace them – the Cincinnati Bearcats, BYU Cougars (1984 national champions), Central Florida Golden Knights (pretenders to a national title in 2017), and Houston Cougars (former SWC school).
The Big XII previously pulled former SWC member TCU from the Mountain West and pulled West Virginia from the old Big East. The Big East’s members that played at a lower level of football (like Villanova, who play football in the Colonial Athletic Association) but high-level basketball retained the name and have been a successful basketball conference (Villanova won the title in 2016 and 2018). The rest of the group joined some former CUSA schools to become the American Athletic Conference, left to join the ACC (like Syracuse), or both successively (like Louisville). The University of Colorado at Boulder (1990 national champions) left the Big XII for the Pac-12 in 2010 and is rejoining the Big XII next year. Arizona State and Arizona, which left the Western Athletic Conference to make the Pac-8 the Pac-10 in 1978, will join the Big XII next year. Utah, which left the Mountain West for the Pac-12, is joining the Big XII next year.
The WAC experienced a lot of attrition between the late 1990s and early 2010s, leading to their cancelling football until reviving it in 2021 with members of the Atlantic Sun Conference on the FCS level (Division 1 subdivision under the level you mostly see on TV). In the 2010s, some of its most prominent teams joined the Mountain West (perennial mid-major power Boise State, Utah State, and Hawaii, for example), the CUSA (Louisiana Tech), or dropping a level (Idaho, which tried and flailed at football independence).
Geography, numbers, names. They often make little sense in college sports. It is all led by college football, the largest revenue generator, followed, not especially closely, by men’s and ten women’s basketball. The continued search for a competitive edge in sports is understandable. Killing off old rivalries to keep a sport sustainable is sometimes a necessary calculation. However, it feels sometimes like, as someone on Twitter joked a few years back, these institutions are football programs with academics on the side. Because college football and basketball are such captivating spectacles, they draw attention, which leads to formal investment. Sports teams being on TV means more people knowing about and then applying to those schools. Alums get, in some cases anyway, emotionally attached to and invested in those sports. Those with big coffers, be they car dealership owners, investment bankers, oil barons like the late T. Boone Pickens (late patron of Oklahoma State), apparel manufacturers like Nike co-founder Phil Knight (patron of the University of Oregon), get financially invested because of intra-industry rivalries (I recommend A Payroll to Meet on the SMU scandal of the 1990s) and wanting to be able to take some personal responsibility for the thrashing of a rival, the pride of a state or community. Just as pro teams are playthings for the super-rich, college teams are places for them to flex their might and cement their legacies on their schools.
What you feel college football is supposed to look like is probably based off of your memories of what it has been. The conference alignments of the 2000s feel like tradition to me, despite that the relative stability that existed among the biggest conferences didn’t extend to the WAC, the CUSA, the Sun Belt. I recognize that I am not an objective observer, but the SWC at least got a successor when combining with the Big 8. The Pac-12 is disintegrating.
For me, a USC fan the most important rivals have always been UCLA and Notre Dame, followed by Stanford and Oregon. When I first saw USC and UCLA announced last year as joining the Big Ten, I was certain it was a bad rumor. Pulling USC and UCLA (and now Washington and Oregon) into the Big Ten doesn’t make geographic or cultural sense. Historically the teams of the Big Ten are who we play (and usually beat) in the Rose Bowl. The Pacific Conference and the Big Ten have played against each other in the Rose Bowl game for over 100 years, though the formal agreement between the two conferences came just 64 years ago. The reason the NFL championship is called the Super Bowl is because of college football bowl games.
To some small extent, I understood. While a consistently decent conference between the mid-aughts and mid-2010s, the Pac-10 and then Pac-12 has not been dominant in the modern era. From 2002 to 2008, USC had two national championship wins, a national championship loss in the Rose Bowl, and then three Rose Bowl wins from 2002 to 2008. After the Trojans fell off, the only consistent team in the title race was Oregon, and the last time they were in that race was 2015. Washington was smothered in the conference’s only appearance in the new playoff structure. Stanford’s good-to-great era peaked over a decade ago and has been on a very slow decline since. Utah hasn’t won eleven games as a member despite their consistent ability to challenge and overturn the alleged powers. All of this works in cycle with a miserable television deal worked out by former commissioner Larry Scott, something current commissioner George Kliavkoff was not able to improve since taking over two years ago.
Depending on how you count the Pacific Coast Conference’s history, the Pac-12 is in the lineage of either the second or fourth-longest continually operating sports conferences. That could all end at the end of this coming season. What I might do in Kliavkoff’s position is try to call-up some geographically comparable or contiguous teams with notable sporting traditions, but Boise State and Fresno State are the only ones that come to mind.
Much more pressingly than the abstract concepts of legacy and tradition are the health, logistical, and academic considerations of student-athletes. Of course, it feels like this all comes on the shoulders of football players, but I doubt the softball and Olympic sports athletes at Stanford are especially excited about the prospect of traveling to the Carolinas multiple times a year. Most of these students, as the NCAA is keen to remind us in television commercials, will go pro in something other than sports. The hypothetical social contract around all this is that the students do good at sports and that allows them an opportunity to get a degree, to develop skills and accrue knowledge at a college or university. They use these skills and knowledge to better themselves as people and get a good job. Students don’t do well studying with exhausted bodies wrecked by jet lag. How is any of this feasible or sensible?
It's plausible that conferences are not a necessity, but they are not going to evaporate into thin air. It is possible we need strong legislation regulating this (as if, in this country, such a thing was in any way likely). It is likely that these upcoming conference configurations will not last forever. As environmental degradation and the sociopolitical effects of late capitalism continue, the world may require remaking in a way that makes all of this completely untenable or irrelevant. Still, even in present context, this all seems poor. College sports have never been fair, but the foolishness of it all has seldom been laid so bare. Cross-country games every week with the hope that the casual viewer will be enticed to watch more frequently, while the alums and longtime fans have less regular in-person access to the institutions they support.
What I have always loved about college football is not the abstract notion of “pageantry,” and certainly not the lie of “amateurism,” but the variety of the game. Yes, this includes the way cultural specificity leads to tradition, but also how regional identities of conferences are shaped by interstate and intrastate rivalries, and how styles of play and application of rules reflect those connections and divisions. At times when NFL football felt homogeneous, there was always something to see in college ball that I couldn’t see in the pro ranks. The variety of offensive styles, the teams I never heard of that are familiar with one another, the truly occasional nature of cross-country trips. That is all going by the wayside because there is more money alleged to be made.