I don’t know which years these PAC-12 departures become official, but at least in terms of the number of members in each conference —— there probably will be a point where the information in the tweet below is accurate.
It seems like the only schools that will remain in the PAC-12 will be Stanford, Cal, Oregon State and Washington State. Football is driving all these PAC-12 departures but there’s minimum conference membership requirements that must be met to retain a NCAAT guaranteed bid for your conference. It’s a reason why the NEC has added Merrimack, Stonehill, and LeMoyne in recent years.
So the 4 remaining PAC-12 teams either need to add schools to their conference in a way that satisfies NCAA eligibility for a conference guaranteed bid or dissolve completely and find conferences to join.
I don’t know which years these PAC-12 departures become official, but at least in terms of the number of members in each conference —— there probably will be a point where the information in the tweet below is accurate.
It seems like the only schools that will remain in the PAC-12 will be Stanford, Cal, Oregon State and Washington State. Football is driving all these PAC-12 departures but there’s minimum conference membership requirements that must be met to retain a NCAAT guaranteed bid for your conference. It’s a reason why the NEC has added Merrimack, Stonehill, and LeMoyne in recent years.
So the 4 remaining PAC-12 teams either need to add schools to their conference in a way that satisfies NCAA eligibility for a conference guaranteed bid or dissolve completely and find conferences to join.
Tradition of the PAC-12, a league that basically has been operating under different names for over a century, unfortunately has now been abandoned completely. And from someone that visits my friends near Portland most every year and has been to football and basketball games at many of that league's venues, this is a sad day. The modern collegiate landscape has changed so much and so quickly recently that what is now reality would be totally unrecognizable even a couple of years ago. And that's a shame IMO.
Interesting article in the Athletic chronicling why so many PAC 12 teams wanted to jump to other conferences this week. Unfortunately, I’m pretty sure the article is behind a paywall. Over about a decade, two consecutive PAC 12 commissioners made huge media rights mistakes in addition to other football related problems in the conference. (e.g. the PAC 12 went 1-8 in bowl games in 2017 and no Pac 12 team has been one of the college football playoff teams in the past 6 years) Here’s an excerpt from the article detailing one of 10 to 12 major errors the last two Pac 12 commissioners have made over the last decade which had so many member schools rushing to join other conferences this week.
… Kliavkoff hired a boutique firm, Sports Media Advisors, run by a guy named Doug Perlman. It just so happens Kliavkoff and Perlman were classmates at University of Virginia law school. Within months, the Big 12 and its schools, whose current contract runs a year longer than the Pac-12’s, managed to jump the line and secure extensions with ESPN and Fox that gobbled up potential time slots and put a target — $31.7 million per school — on the Pac-12’s back. Signs of trouble began leaking out last fall. Kliavkoff and his advisers reportedly opened talks with ESPN and Fox asking for an entirely unrealistic number — closer to the SEC’s than the Big 12’s. He naively held out hope the UC Board of Regents would block UCLA’s exit. And to the befuddlement of media consultants everywhere, he insisted on completing a deal before inviting potential new members, leaving San Diego State and others hanging in the wind.
Kliavkoff is the current commissioner but the author of the article states the situation was quite a mess when he took over the position from Larry Scott.
It’s fascinating to me that many schools are trying to become part of the B1G, SEC, or Big XII because those conferences have the best media rights deals, yet Rutgers has been in the B1G for 9 years and its athletic department is $265 million in debt.
It’s fascinating to me that many schools are trying to become part of the B1G, SEC, or Big XII because those conferences have the best media rights deals, yet Rutgers has been in the B1G for 9 years and its athletic department is $265 million in debt.
I received my MBA from Rutgers and have also been a season ticket holder for their football team over the years, so I am pretty in-tune with their issues as well. There has been a holy war between Rutgers athletics supporters and detractors for years. The infighting between professors (primary detractors) and the athletic department has held them back. The recent debt explosion at RU is due to upgraded facilities that have been neglected for decades and have been sorely needed to remotely reflect being a BIG10 member.
Truth is that sports benefit the academic profile and student experience of a school tremendously. Athletics (if done right) attract people to your school. Many students participate in them, and even more come to interact with them. The BIG10 invitation for Rutgers has already and will continue to pay massive dividends for the school, far beyond the performance on the court/gridiron.
Last Edit: Aug 7, 2023 15:32:15 GMT -5 by brokenboat
^There was also an article in the Athletic today which covered basically much of the same territory as the northjersey.com article did; but since there’s a paywall for the Athletic article —- I gave the link to the northjersey.com article instead. The Athletic article had more information on Rutgers’ need to upgrade many of its facilities to make them comparable to the facilities at other B1G colleges, which you mention as one of the causes of their current debt. The need to upgrade many of their facilities was apparent at the time the B1G was looking to add Rutgers, along with Maryland, back in 2014 as demonstrated by this quote from Jim Delany, who was commissioner of the B1G at that time.
“Rutgers had a good reputation, although they hadn’t lived in the big leagues,” Delany says. “In one moment, they thought they were Penn State. In another moment, they thought they were Bucknell. So they hadn’t made the investment…
So does the B1G add Stanford/Cal or UVA/UNC to become the B2G?
Tough call but I would add UVA and UNC to balance out the East Coast and West Coast with 4 teams each.
Story now is that ACC is pursuing both Cal and Stanford. That's what I call balance. Those road trips to/from BC and Miami will hoover up a lot of the athletic budget.
I think the travel and time away from school resulting from these mega geographically dispersed conferencs will become a competitive advantage and selling point for the small geographically concentrated conferences like the MAAC. Maybe not for football and basketball but it will be for other sports.
An article in today’s The Athletic indicates that men’s basketball coaches in the B1G are concerned about the way the increased travel will affect their team’s play now that 4 West Coast teams are being added to the conference.
No one could be expected to have answers in the here and now, considering how quickly the Oregon and Washington additions materialized. Concerns, though? Plenty of those. As one league coach put it: The Big Ten can’t schedule a long trip out West and then a home game to follow in a short order — because every coach will view the home game as more important, and a condensed turnaround might mean a group doesn’t have its legs for the night it really wants to be at its best. “This league is going to be so hard and so crazy, coaches just want a fair chance,” the coach said. “Don’t let some sort of scheduling take me out of a chance to win basketball games.” “Certainly the argument could be, hey, they’re young guys,” Holtmann says. “But any of us who’ve looked at sleep studies and travel and nutrition and how that impacts performance over a long period of time — it has a real impact. NBA teams will tell you that. College teams would tell you that. That’d probably be my only question for those of us outside of football.”
An interesting question now that the dust has momentarily settled for conference realignment: If football is driving conference realignment decisions and UConn football played in a bowl game last year, the men’s basketball team won the NCAAT, and any year that the women’s basketball team doesn’t reach their Final Four is considered a down year by their standards —— then why wasn’t the B1G or the Big XII interested in adding UConn to their conference. Now, UConn’s football team plays as an independent and their basketball teams are in the Big East. Ideally, their AD would like all three programs in the same conference. CT Insider has an interesting article detailing where UConn currently is in the conference realignment picture.
Don’t know if the article will be behind a paywall. If it is, someone please mention that and I’ll add more excerpts from it in this post.
An indication of how strong UConn’s athletic program is these days: UConn was one of eight Division I schools to make the NCAA Tournament in men’s and women’s basketball, a bowl game in football and the NCAA Tournament in baseball. The others: Alabama, Duke, Iowa, Maryland, NC State, Tennessee and Texas.
Absolutely no one cares about UCONN football what so ever. Its amazing to me they think they can still hang with even the medium sized boys. The northeast just does not care about big-time college football (Penn State is the exception), just ask BC or Rutgers. UCONN should drop down or drop the program entirely, its a complete money pit
From a December 2022 article in the Athletic: UConn had the third-largest percentage increase in attendance this season, according to numbers calculated by D1.Ticker (excluding two teams with a stadium change). The average attendance of 22,095 was a 50.4 percent increase, behind only Kansas and Duke, two similarly struggling programs that bounced back.
Granted, a 50% increase to 22,000+ average attendance indicates the program had been doing awful in the preceding years and I’m sure in Fairfield County UConn football attracts far less attention than their basketball programs but if Mora can put together a couple more bowl appearances (especially if one includes a victory) —- I think the northern part of the state will increase their support of the team. Which would put their AD in a bind —- to get the football team into a conference, the AD would need to pull the basketball teams out of the Big East.