It is that time of year again – time for the awaited games of the football business. All doubts about big-time college football and basketball being a business should have been dispelled by now.
College athletics (specifically men’s football and basketball) is a lucrative business disguised as a branch of educational institutions. The actions this summer of big-time athletic conferences underscore the accuracy of that statement.
Let’s review some of the college sports business dealings this year, specifically realignments of the Power Five conferences. UCLA, Oregon, USC, and Washington will leave the Pac-12 Conference and join the Big Ten Conference in 2024.
The Big 12 conference added Houston, UCF, BYU, and Cincinnati this year. They will add Colorado, Arizona, Arizona State, and Utah in 2024. But they will lose their biggest schools, Texas and Oklahoma, to the SEC in 2024.
In addition to UCLA, Oregon, USC, and Washington leaving to join the Big Ten in 2024, four more schools are leaving the Pac-12: Colorado, Arizona, Arizona State, and Utah. At that time, the Pac-12 will have only four schools, when previously there were 12.
Texas and Oklahoma will join the SEC in 2024. The ACC is not yet adding any schools in 2023 and 2024; however, rumors abound that the ACC is considering adding Stanford and Cal, which are looking for a home as the Pac-12 crumbles. Cal and Stanford are elite academic schools, giants in Olympic sports, and located in the populous and affluent Bay Area.
The conferences will no longer have geographic meaning. The Big Ten, which had ten schools in 1991 stretching from Pennsylvania to Minnesota, will have 18 schools stretching from the East Coast to the West Coast. The SEC will have 16 teams, and the ACC and the Big 12 will have 15 teams.
Why? These realignments are all about football and all that money. Money is the primary reason for conference realignment. Athletic programs want bigger revenue shares, and conferences hope more teams will lead to larger television contracts.
In fiscal year 2022, the Big Ten had $846 million in revenue and distributed $58.8 million to each school. The SEC earned $802 million and allocated $49.9 million to each school. The ACC collected $617 million and distributed an average of $39 million; The Pac-12 earned $581 million and disbursed $37 million to each school, and the Big 12 earned $481 million and disbursed between $42 and $45 million to each school.
Most of the revenue is generated from television, which the conferences pursue vigorously. The gap in income between the Big Ten and the SEC and the other three members of the Power Five will undoubtedly grow, as the SEC’s 2020 deal with ESPN totals an estimated $3 billion over ten years. In 2022, the Big Ten signed eight-year deals with NBC, CBS, and Fox Sports, totaling over $7 billion, probably the most lucrative arrangement in college sports history
Aside from the sham of presenting big-time football as an amateur activity, there are everyday adverse effects on the other sports and the so-called student-athletes. Football teams, the cause of the realignment madness, will be affected less than other sports teams as they play one game a week, usually on Saturdays. However, softball and baseball teams will have problems as they must travel across the country and play three-game sets, requiring much more travel time.
As one writer said, conference realignment means more work and less academic time for unpaid athletes. Big Ten athletes traveling coast to coast will get even less sleep and miss more classes while putting in more hours of unpaid work.
NCAA rules limit athletes to 20 hours of “sports activities” per week; however, many athletes report more than 40 hours weekly. This happens because some of their time is not counted toward the 20-hour clock – time getting treatment for injuries, attending team promotions, community service, and media obligations.
They keep squeezing these unpaid athletes to make more money for the college sports business, which keeps getting more and more by television contracts.
