The business nature of big-time college football is evident in the furious realignment of college athletic conferences. Realignment means that member schools are switching conferences.
As Deepthroat and the boys on the corner inform us, “It’s all about the money.”
“Big-time” means the five so-called power conferences—the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC), the Big 10 Conference, the Big 12 Conference, the PAC-12 Conference, and the Southeastern Conference (SEC). Currently, these conferences represent 65 universities.
The ACC Conference has 15 members in 10 states, mainly in the South and Northeast. For many years the Big Ten conference consisted of 10 member institutions in the Midwest, but no more. Realignment is changing the geography of conferences.
The Big 12 Conference currently has ten members in states from West Virginia to the Southwest. The PAC-12 Conference has 12 members in Arizona, California, Colorado, Oregon, Utah, and Washington. And the SEC consists of 14 members located in the South.
We are currently experiencing the third wave of realignments in the last two decades. The previous two were in 2005-2006 and 2011-2015. In 2005-2006, the ACC added three schools, and two conferences outside the Power Five had some major reshuffling.
In the second wave, the realignments intensified as the Big 12 took a big hit in the 2010-2013 realignments. They lost Nebraska to the Big Ten, Colorado to the PAC-12, and Texas A&M and Missouri to the SEC. To offset two of these four losses, the conference welcomed TCU and West Virginia.
The ACC added five teams in the second wave, including Notre Dame, for sports other than football and hockey. The Big Ten accepted four schools in the 2011-2015 period.
The third period, 2021-2022, started with a boom as Texas and Oklahoma announced plans in 2021 to leave the Big 12 and move to the SEC in 2025. Summing up the SEC move, one journalist argued that this was an all-time (college sports business) feat, setting up the SEC for its future TV contract and preparing the conference for the inevitable pay-for-play era.
In July this year, the Big Ten answered the SEC’s move by luring USC and UCLA from the PAC-12, sending a shockwave across the college football landscape. But, remember, it is about money. USC and UCLA represent TV markets, with Los Angeles being the Number 2 TV market in America, behind only New York City.
The revenue estimates are already being calculated. By 2029 the annual revenue for the SEC is estimated to be $117 billion, followed by the Big Ten at $101 billion. The other three conferences will be left behind but still flourishing, at around $60 billion each. This disparity is causing some observers to wonder if we are headed toward a Power Two situation.
One journalist tweeted that the best way to look at future expansion is that Vanderbilt in the SEC and Northwestern in the Big Ten will make around $80 million annually, while USC was receiving in the low $30 million in the PAC-12. Paraphrasing the late Senator Everett Dirksen, “A billion here, a billion there. This is adding up to real money.” Big-time college sports–football and basketball—are big business!
