The final nail in the coffin of the modern Pac-12 came from the golf course, as Oregon Board of Trustees chair Steve Holwerda conducted a board meeting via Zoom. He couldn’t be bothered to cancel the round, or even stop playing, as the meeting progressed.
This will be one of the lasting images of the end of the old Pac-12, a fitting one to sum up the state of college sports. Oregon had a chance to grab more money and security, so it moved forward unabated, not even stopping a golf round.
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College sports long ago hitched its entire wagon to the money train. It wasn’t any one move that led us to this realignment round, in which a second major conference is collapsing in the span of a decade. Everyone has played a domino since the Supreme Court’s landmark 1984 decision in NCAA vs. Board of Regents, which opened the door to school and conference TV deals. It was the resulting all-out drive for every last dollar that sent us down the path to end college sports as we know it (while keeping money away from the players, of course).
But college sports is about to learn, if it hasn’t already, that when you’ve sacrificed everything at the altar of money, you no longer control where things go, and you might not like where it ends. The big brands will be fine, but a lot of fans will be left behind, and this isn’t the end of it.
Big Ten commissioner Tony Pettiti and SEC commissioner Greg Sankey said at their respective media days last month that they weren’t interested in expanding. Big Ten sources leaked to media last week that they didn’t want to be the ones to deliver the death blow to a conference with which they’d held a close relationship for a century. Within a day, they did exactly that.
What changed? The money, of course. Fox ponied up just enough to convince Oregon and Washington they had to jump and convince the Big Ten the adds were worth making. Fox now owns the four largest college brands on the West Coast, alongside USC and UCLA.
Meanwhile, a good number of SEC schools wanted to move to nine conference games earlier this year, as did Sankey. But the group couldn’t get the votes in May, in part because ESPN reportedly wouldn’t pay any more for the additional conference games. Texas A&M didn’t really want Texas in the SEC. USC doesn’t really want Oregon in the Big Ten. But they don’t control things anymore.
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Television controls college sports, as much as everyone involved tries to deny it. It has for a long time and it will into the future. And with that television future as uncertain as ever, nothing holds in place for long.
This is my third annual Realignment Sucks column, and there’s no reason to think The Great Consolidation I warned about two years ago will stop. Don’t be naive: That process could very well lead to the superconference bottom-feeders getting kicked out. If TV money is worth killing a century-old conference and older in-state rivalries, what’s to keep the next shift from kicking out the schools that don’t bring as much value as the big brands? If I’m Indiana, Purdue, Maryland, Rutgers, the Mississippi schools or anyone on that level, I’d be very worried about the end of the path I’m speeding down.
Oregon and Washington had to take the Big Ten offer. The “Four Corners” Pac-12 schools had to leave for the Big 12. Florida State has to find a way out of the ACC, even if that means partnering with private equity. In the world they’ve all created, being tens of millions of dollars behind your biggest competitors isn’t tenable. Not in a future that probably involves schools paying players. Or a future that removes time limits on the coaching players receive. You need money to survive.
Maybe it’s a future that sees college football break away from college itself, into semi-professional leagues that license school names and logos. It’s an idea I found laughable a few years ago when it was floated by some administrators. Now anything seems possible.
It didn’t have to be this way. It’s not hard to imagine a world in which years ago conferences decided to distribute television revenue to athletes, or allowed players to make NIL money (this world would have also kept the EA Sports video game alive). That could have warded off the wandering eyes of state governments and the courts and built toward a more equitable model. But no. They wouldn’t budge an inch. The NCAA spent millions on lawyers all to see the entire landscape come crashing down, sitting back as conferences blew each other up with increasing urgency as the money became even more important.
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Maybe we were destined to be here. The foundational Big Ten and SEC schools simply have a lot more fans, and that may have always pointed toward this fracturing.
I just don’t want to see another college administrator begging Congress for help reining in NIL or tampering with the idea that it would protect college sports. They’re the ones who killed the model they wanted to protect.
The television world plays just as much of a role in this. The collapse of the old college model came alongside the parallel downfall of linear television, which may go down as one of the most self-destructing moves an industry has made.
As Netflix rose from DVD rental company to streaming company, investors saw a new world with only one major player. With the approval of Wall Street, media companies poured billions and billions into streaming to give us apps like Disney+, Peacock, Paramount+ and more services. For viewers, it was great. Everything was available — including more college games — if you were just willing to buy in at a low price. It didn’t matter that these services were losing billions of dollars, as long as they were adding subscribers, because yada yada yada the future.
Then, in summer 2022, Netflix lost subscribers in a quarter for the first time, and Wall Street freaked out. That result and concern about the direction of the economy led to a new directive from investors to media companies: Make your streaming operations profitable.
They had sped up the demise of their massive profit-making machines on cable for a big-time risk that no longer paid off (similar to newspapers that gave away their content online for free). Yes, streaming is the future, but they didn’t realize that future might not include them, and they had raced toward it for the sake of the stock prices, which have since fallen.
Now, streaming prices have gone up, passwords have been limited and libraries have been cut. Mergers and consolidation are coming, you can be sure.
A larger College Football Playoff contract is coming up, and Fox wants in. ESPN can’t pay for everything anymore. Disney CEO Bob Iger is publicly considering investing partners for the network. What happens when linear TV continues to decline and revenues follow? You drop dead weight.
Profits at the biggest entertainment companies fell almost 90% over the last decade (from $23.4B to $2.6B).
Revised numbers from the last newsletter (cc @DKThomp)https://t.co/GFNnHgCbZm pic.twitter.com/Ys2idoZnM4
— Lucas Shaw (@Lucas_Shaw) July 5, 2023
The Pac-12 and commissioner George Kliavkoff walked into the worst possible time to negotiate a new TV deal. The Big 12 and commissioner Brett Yormark realized the landscape and took the life raft when the Pac-12 didn’t know it needed one.
College administrators are right when they say college sports are different than the pros. It’s a different connection for fans. A different viewing experience. Whom you beat matters as much as the win, because rivalries matter. Now we may be losing Bedlam, the Apple Cup and the Oregon Civil War indefinitely.
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The people who make these decisions won’t deal with the long-term consequences. The Big Ten commissioner who added USC and UCLA last year — the beginning of the end of the Pac-12 — bailed on college sports less than a year later. Most of the commissioners who created the CFP a decade ago have left. More commissioners, athletic directors and other administrators are just passing through to their next job, blowing up the sport to make money and put something on the resume. It’s not their fault. It’s what they were asked to do.
What made college sports different wasn’t that the players weren’t paid. It was that so many of us had that unique connection to so many different schools, each with regional quirks, and we were all in it together. Nothing in the world, not even the NFL, can match the number of fans college football puts in stadiums on Saturday. But TV pays the most bills.
As we shrink at the top, the big brands will survive. I fear for everyone else. Nothing in the history of sports has shown that shrinking your product helps it, yet it’s happening to the No. 2 sport in the country. What happens to the fans you leave out? Are they supposed to change school allegiances? Are their kids?
It was fun when college football fans could argue about who was better on the field. Now we spend each offseason arguing about who has the better television deal. I can’t blame fans for that. Because the industry’s leaders have been yelling for years that the only thing that mattered was money. The supposed apocalyptic future they feared for years has arrived by their own hand, and it won’t stop here.
(Photo: James Black / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)