I mean…. My school (Syracuse) never has a prayer of winning a national championship but I am quite invested in them regardless. There’s still joy to be had when your school does well, even if it doesn’t amount to a championship.
Realignment 2023: Whither the Pac12?
- Thread starter Zososoxfan
- Start date
I literally cannot wait for Oregon and Washington to realize they are no longer top dogs (more than they already haven't been in the Pac-12) than when they now have to play Michigan, Ohio State, Penn State and USC.
Short term it might make sense financially, but I hope those schools fucking burn long-term.
Short term it might make sense financially, but I hope those schools fucking burn long-term.
With all the increased travel distances and sometimes having to go coast to coast, when do these players actually, ya know, go to class?
Yes. If market size was as important as it used to be; there'd be no possibility of BC being left in the dust.
Over the past 20 years, switching from one P5 conference to another hasn't been great for most of the teams who have done it. Some schools have initial success but then they seem to get lost in the mix.
ACC
Virginia Tech-Lots of early success in the ACC. They had eight 10 win seasons to start and won a few conference titles, but have fallen off in the last decade. One ten win season and have lost at least four games a year over the last decade.
Miami-Have never won an ACC title, only one 10 win season in their time in the ACC, a far cry from their dominant days in the Big East.
Syracuse: Sub .500 record since going to the ACC
Pitt: Has about stayed the same since joining the ACC, one conference title.
Louisville: 72-53 since joining the ACC, one division title
BC-Two ACC title game appearances in 07 and 08, since then 80-94 total record.
BIG 10
Maryland: 45-60 since going to the BIG
Rutgers: 29-66
Nebraska Pelini had them winning at least 9 games a year in their first four years of BIG play, but overall they're 75-72 since 2011.
BIG 12
WVU-73-63 since 2012, only really contended for a conference title once (2018)
PAC 12
Colorado 48-94, won their division once.
SEC
Texas A&M-First season was the 11-2 Johnny Football year where they beat Bama. But overall 90-48, not a bad overall record but only 3 winning records in SEC play in 11 years.
Missouri-Won their division twice in their first three years in the SEC. 75-61 since 2012, only a winning SEC record 3 times.
Other than Nebraska and Miami,, none are "premier" programs like USC, Texas, and Oklahoma so it will be interesting to see how they do when they switch conferences. But they've always been the top dogs wherever they've been (Big 8/12, Pac 10) and now they're not. How will they handle that?
If you're in the Power 2 (BIG/SEC) you're in a financially stable and powerful conference, but if you're not one the elites, competing for a championship just became harder than ever. Congrats Illinois and Minnesota, you're in the club, but now you have three more great programs to go through (UW, Oregon, and USC) on top of PSU, OSU, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Michigan State. Same thing in the SEC, Kentucky, Ole Miss Arkansas, South Carolina, you're in a great conference but you have to go through Bama, Auburn, LSU, Florida, UGA, Tennessee, Texas, and Oklahoma, good luck.
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Right. It’s European-style promotion and relegation in slow motion. Build a great program like TCU, Utah, and VT did and you can move to top levels from nowhere. Suck out loud for years and years at the top level and you are going to fall backwards.
Makes sense for Gonzaga to do that, not UConn. Unless it's legally challenged (always the possibility of that), the NCAA does not allow "basketball only" membership in a conference; whereas "football only" is allowed.
UConn would have much increased travel costs for all the rest of their sports programs and still have an independent football program.
Earning a playoff spot is useless for all but 2-5 teams (usually closer to 2) in a given year. Hooray we won the new AAC and now are in a playoff we have no chance of winning. An expanded playoff is dumb and viewing a sacrificial lamb playoff spot as a valid consolation prize is missing the 900 other very bad things that got you to that point.
I completely understand what he’s saying and I reject the premise that winning the shitty conference you got relegated to is any silver lining. Sure it’s better than not winning but there’s a whole host of other things I’d prefer than that outcome. And college football becomes less fun because you’re watching a much more inferior product on a weekly basis than before.
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Except that it’s not that at all. Lots of G5 schools have built strong programs and only a random handful have gotten bumped up to P5. And now that P5 is soon to be P2.5 some of those schools are going to get knocked down again.
Some schools have sucked for decades but are awash in TV dollars thanks to accidents of history (hello, Northwestern and Vanderbilt).
College sports is a cartel, not a meritocracy.
Huh? These new megaleagues are the very definition of cobbled together. I suspect AFC teams will play NFC teams FAR more often than some B1G schools play each other.
The problem with being “left behind” is that it denies more and more schools the opportunity to increase funding, improve coaching and compete at the highest levels. There won’t be more Baylors because the next generation of those schools won’t be allowed in the club.
This is like MLB deciding to go from 30 teams to 16. There’s no value in being exiled.
When SU is playing a schedule of irrelevant teams see how invested you are. National champ aspirations or not, they’ve played a big boy schedule forever. When the day comes that instead of Clemson, FSU, etc. headlining the schedule their premium opponents are Tulsa and Navy, it ain’t gonna be worth following. That’s the fate dozens of schools are facing.
I saw this first hand with UConn going to the AAC. Going from playing Syracuse, Villanova, etc. in conference to East Carolina and Tulsa really was a downer. Getting back in the Big East and playing relevant teams was obviously a huge factor in what happened this year for the Huskies.
I'll be interested ito see if they go back to divisions. One of the main benefits of going divisionless with "protected" games was that every team would have a home and home every couple years at most.
Yeah, if you are a historical member of one of these with lots of tradition but not much success in recent years (or ever), your program is hosed. The likes of Indiana and Illinois football are just boned.
I don’t think alignment even matters once a league gets to 18 teams, or whatever the B1G is going to be (I’ve honestly lost count!). Best you can do is have 2-3 annual games for each school, and then cycle through the rest. Which means there will be conference opponents that won’t be played for a decade at a time. Great stuff.
At this point why not form a breakaway football only league outside the NCAA for the top ~40 programs? Negotiate TV rights and payouts collectively and let the non-revenue sports stay in the more or less sensible configurations they are in. This is the real analogue to the Premier League - in the 90s the most popular teams just kind of forced it to happen.
It's a collection of cartels.
Maybe we have different definitions of a silver lining.
This is basically what's happening, just slowly.
We'll just have to see how everyone sorts it out, , but in a 16 team league, you can play three opponents annually and everyone else every other year in a nine game schedule. You'd visit every campus in the conference over a four year period.
If you could hit the reset button and freeze conference movement, what year would you want to time travel back to?
The program won’t matter anymore and I don’t think a random playoff appearance here and there will change it. Sure it’s a silver lining but it’s incredibly fleeting and will not sustain interest.
That's 100% what the ACC did/tried to do with the grant of rights. We'll see if FSU is bluffing or is serious about challenging that in court.
1996, when the Big 12 came together. Would love to see that and an 8 team playoff with the conference champion from the Big East, ACC, SEC, Big 12, Big Ten, Pac 10, and then the two highest ranked independents or non-conference champions.
Or 1995 with PSU in the B10 and the SWC still standing, though not sure if even in an idealized scenario the SWC would have lasted. I actually blame Arkansas and SMU for all this crap.
Lots of issues with a breakaway football only league. Do they have to comply with NCAA rules about eligibility, recruiting, practice time, penalties, etc. Would the NFL start to see this league as more of a threat than a partner?
The big relevant schools will want to play “mid majors” like Syracuse then in that case. So SU would likely still have a decent slate of games. But your point is well taken in any case.
I think the trouble with a super-league of top tier programs is their supporters are used to 10+ wins a season. In a genuinely competitive league of the top X schools without games against filler you’d have the likes of Bama, tOSU etc going 7-5, 8-4 etc. there will always be a place in the ecosystem for middling schools to provide 17 point underdogs for drubbings and the occasional shocker.
Yes that was the B1G plan before adding these two. With the top two teams playing in a championship game.
Tougher with 18 schools but doable if they want.
2002, the year before the ACC raided the Big East. Six major conferences that made geographic sense and weren’t so big. Lots of different styles of play, not just everyone running some version of the spread. Bowl games still meant something and personally I liked the BCS and for the most part they got it right. The product felt more organic too. Games didn’t feel like the NFL light version they do now.
I don’t know about that. All the schools that left the Big East have gone onto much greater success.
It’s a dwindling collection that’s likely to end at 2. And then the B12 will be a holding company for the land of misfit programs.
Also, the B1G is already at 18 and likely to be at 22+ within 6-7 years (I suspect that’s when the financials start to work for ACC schools to break the GoR. The SEC sure ain’t stopping at 16 either. A Conference football slate is going to more resemble an NFL schedule pretty soon. Which is fine if that’s what schools want, but at that point these really aren’t conferences as we’ve come to know them. They’re leagues.
My hunch is that to justify these massive media deals schools are going to need to play more conference games per the demands of media rights holders. I suspect we’ll see far less OOC games in the future. Maybe 1 or 2 a year. I’d anticipate the have-nots schedules to look demonstrably worse a decade from now.
barring federal legislation, it ends with one, imo.
@8slim what’s the distinction between conferences and leagues that you’re drawing?
as a razorback fan playing Texas Texas atm okle most every year will be fun but it will get easier for the razorbacks to make a 12 team payoff because we will only play Bama auburn uga once every 4 years all the razorbacks have to do to make the 12 team payoff is go 9-3 on a hard sch 10-2 on a easy one
the ACC will still live because of espn now after 2035 schools like bc cuse pitt will be in trouble but maybe they can lay the grondwork with a West V ciny smu n tex mem s miss FAU FIU and go that route
u have to blame penn st as well without arkansas going to the SEC when they did we would been in the mtn west or c-usa in 1996 because texas and ann richardrs was not going to let arkansas in the big 12
its going to finish at 3 24 team Conf
SEC will add NCST V tech fla st miami clem louisvillie ND pitt here is why on Norte dame if fored to choose they will go sec because they have had a vow since the 40's to not join the big ten IF norte dame joins the big ten i couild see the SEC adding back tulane
Big ten N Car duke uva w forest stanford cal or norte dame stanford
big 12 boise st sdsu BC Cuse uconn memphis utsa and navy or FAU
SEC will add NCST V tech fla st miami clem louisvillie ND pitt here is why on Norte dame if fored to choose they will go sec because they have had a vow since the 40's to not join the big ten IF norte dame joins the big ten i couild see the SEC adding back tulane
Big ten N Car duke uva w forest stanford cal or norte dame stanford
big 12 boise st sdsu BC Cuse uconn memphis utsa and navy or FAU
That's very good, have NESN give them a call
Seeing that football is what is driving this nonsense, I don't understand why they can't see the obvious solution and have one set of conference alignments for football and one for all other sports. The non-football ones should be smaller, clustered geographically to cut down on travel costs, and keep or restore older rivalries. Then you have separate football power leagues and you could even do the top 64 schools in SEC, Big 10, and two other leagues and even throw in the promotion relegation concept with a second tier of 64 teams, where the top 4 get promoted from the second tier, replacing the bottom 4 in the upper tier. That would create some incredible drama each season.
True, but the Big East in the 90's was pretty good. You had Miami winning national titles, Syracuse went to some big bowls in the late 90's, VT played for a national championship in 99, WVU in 93 was right there in the discussion with Nebraska and FSU, I just picked 2002 because that was the last year before conference expansion really churned up college football. When it leaked that the ACC was going after some the BE schools, it rocked the sport and it hasn't been the same since.
I preferred the time when college football had a different feel. I enjoyed it when there were fewer bowl games, but they meant something. College football was unique, now the only thing that matters is the playoff, even if you make it to a big bowl game, you will feel let down because you just missed the playoffs and some of your best players probably won't play anyway. The college football regular season was the best thing going because every week mattered so much. Now, you have teams who don't even win their own division playing for a national title, and the regular season will get watered down even more with the expanded playoff.
Also prior to the mid 2000's it seemed like conferences were on more equal footing and it wasn't just the SEC and everyone else. If you look at the national title winners from 1988-2002, there seemed to be more balance.
Independent-1
ACC: 2.5
Big East: 2.5
Big 10: 1.5
Big 12 (8): 4
Pac 10: 0.5
SEC: 3
Today's game is all about the portal, NIL, the playoff, a school's brand or market value to a conference, and to me that is just not as fun.
Rutgers moved up to the Big Ten, but it's not been what they thought it was going to be like.
"Rutgers’ time in the Big Ten has been a competitive and financial nightmare, compounded by a few salacious scandals. Entering its 10th season in the conference, the football team has gone 13-66 in league play. Meanwhile, despite astronomical increases in shared Big Ten revenue, the athletic department has racked up more than $250 million in debt, according to financial documents obtained by The Athletic and first reported by NJ Media."
"Of the Big Ten’s 13 public universities, nine athletics departments receive minimal or no funding from the university, state or from student fees. However, over eight years of data, Rutgers has received nearly $240.8 million in direct university or state funding or from student fees. Maryland ($128.3 million), Illinois ($55.9 million) and Minnesota ($20 million) are the other three Big Ten schools receiving funding from those sources over that eight-year period. Minnesota’s athletic department gave back more than $2.3 million, Illinois’ gave more than $1.3 million and Maryland’s gave $620,000 to their respective universities. Rutgers has transferred back zero."
"Beginning in 2020, Rutgers athletics has reported more than $69.8 million in combined losses to the NCAA, per financial forms obtained by The Athletic via state open-records laws. An NJ Media investigation in 2021 documented $265 million in total debt.
Before it became a fully vested Big Ten member in 2020, Rutgers borrowed $48 million from the league against future earnings. The payback schedule remains undetermined as university brass works with new Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti on a workable solution.
“There was a lot of propaganda about how the Big Ten was going to be our financial salvation that was going to make everything right,” Killingsworth says, “which even at the time, if you had a brain and a pencil and paper, and you could do basic math, the net increase in income, between leaving the Big East and arriving in the Big Ten, would not be enough to make up the deficit. And they just ignored that. They fell for their own propaganda.”
https://theathletic.com/4748780/2023/08/07/big-ten-realignment-rutgers/
"Rutgers’ time in the Big Ten has been a competitive and financial nightmare, compounded by a few salacious scandals. Entering its 10th season in the conference, the football team has gone 13-66 in league play. Meanwhile, despite astronomical increases in shared Big Ten revenue, the athletic department has racked up more than $250 million in debt, according to financial documents obtained by The Athletic and first reported by NJ Media."
"Of the Big Ten’s 13 public universities, nine athletics departments receive minimal or no funding from the university, state or from student fees. However, over eight years of data, Rutgers has received nearly $240.8 million in direct university or state funding or from student fees. Maryland ($128.3 million), Illinois ($55.9 million) and Minnesota ($20 million) are the other three Big Ten schools receiving funding from those sources over that eight-year period. Minnesota’s athletic department gave back more than $2.3 million, Illinois’ gave more than $1.3 million and Maryland’s gave $620,000 to their respective universities. Rutgers has transferred back zero."
"Beginning in 2020, Rutgers athletics has reported more than $69.8 million in combined losses to the NCAA, per financial forms obtained by The Athletic via state open-records laws. An NJ Media investigation in 2021 documented $265 million in total debt.
Before it became a fully vested Big Ten member in 2020, Rutgers borrowed $48 million from the league against future earnings. The payback schedule remains undetermined as university brass works with new Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti on a workable solution.
“There was a lot of propaganda about how the Big Ten was going to be our financial salvation that was going to make everything right,” Killingsworth says, “which even at the time, if you had a brain and a pencil and paper, and you could do basic math, the net increase in income, between leaving the Big East and arriving in the Big Ten, would not be enough to make up the deficit. And they just ignored that. They fell for their own propaganda.”
https://theathletic.com/4748780/2023/08/07/big-ten-realignment-rutgers/
If Rutgers plays their cards right, maybe BC and Syracuse will let them play in their new conference.
JMU, UNH, and Delaware want to move up to FBS?
BC
UNH
Syracuse
Pitt
Rutgers
Delaware
JMU
Maryland or WV want to leave B1G/B12?
(for football only)
Some details on Rutgers' spending in this 2022 N. Jersey report: https://www.northjersey.com/story/news/watchdog/2022/07/07/rutgers-athletics-spends-big-builds-debt-big-ten-conference/65367819007/. Love this part:
For more than a year, Rutgers University football players enjoyed a pricey perk that few other students had access to — free DoorDash food deliveries from restaurants, convenience stores and pharmacies, paid for by the university, and ultimately by taxpayers and students. And the costs piled up.
Football players ordered more than $450,000 through DoorDash from May 2021 through June of this year, according to a review of invoices and other documents obtained by NorthJersey.com. While Rutgers intended the service to provide players up to five meals for a total of $75 per week, some players rang up daily totals of $100 or more, some topping $200. One player placed three orders in Chicago on a single day totaling $200 after Rutgers had completed its football season.
Orders were placed to retailers that don’t provide meals — including businesses that sell pet food, housewares, and flowers and gifts.