Good stuff. Long. Plenty of Big 12 talk.
Five scenarios for the future of college conference realignment
By Stewart Mandel 5h ago
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Ask nearly any active college administrator to predict the next wave of conference realignment and you’ll get a predictably measured answer — as in, there’s not going to be one.
“The answer used to be (expansion) is on the backburner,” said SEC commissioner Greg Sankey. “My answer now is it’s been placed into the kitchen cupboard. It’s not even on the stove.”
“Whoever said there were going to be four 16-institutions conferences was wrong,” said Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany. “ … I think (the conferences) are pretty stable.”
When it comes to realignment, history reminds us that things never stay stable for too long.
Since 1990, the longest college football has gone without at least one major conference reconfiguration was the six years between 2005 (when the recently raided Big East brought in reinforcements Louisville, Cincinnati and USF) and 2011 (when Nebraska joined the Big Ten, and Utah and Colorado spawned the Pac-12).
If we consider the most recent benchmark to be 2014 — the year Rutgers and Maryland entered the Big Ten and Louisville joined the ACC — then the six-year mark is fast approaching. This time, things should stay calm for at least a couple of years beyond that, what with all five of the power conferences currently locked into Grant of Rights agreements. That’s where schools surrender their individual TV rights so that the conference can negotiate deals on their behalf.
But several key dates loom not far beyond that. The Big Ten’s contracts with ESPN and FOX come up in 2023, followed by the Pac-12’s in 2024 and the Big 12’s in 2025. The latter two leagues’ Grant of Rights agreements expire in conjunction with their TV deals. Also of note, the College Football Playoff’s current contract runs through the 2025 season, by which point many believe there will be some sort of expanded field.
If there’s going to be a major conference shakeup, it’s likely to coincide with that 2023-25 window.
Most power figures within college athletics won’t speculate publicly, because they know any comment could spark a frenzy. But outside experts who study sports business and media rights believe the next round of movement is inevitable, and could be even more dramatic than the last.
“The impediments to realignment are diminishing,” said Jeff Nelson, president of Navigate Research, a sports marketing firm that has worked with conferences like the Big 12, Big Ten and Pac-12. “ … Conferences won’t be as geographically restricted in a media landscape that continues to unwind with mobile and streaming consumption surging.”
“You used to talk about geographic footprints,” said Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby. “It’s really almost an electronic footprint now. You can be any place. Notwithstanding the travel challenges, you could have Hawaii.”
The driving factor behind every recent realignment shuffle was television revenue — which has soared ever and ever higher as live events became a premium for broadcasters. When Miami, Virginia Tech and Boston College joined the ACC in 2004-05, the league celebrated a new deal with ABC/ESPN worth $37 million a year. By 2017-18, the now 15-school league’s TV value had spiked all the way to $280 million annually. As recently as 2016, the Big Ten was making around $100 million a year from ABC/ESPN for its Tier 1 rights. Its current deal with FOX and ESPN nets an average $440 million annually.
For years, the prevailing thought was this bubble would eventually pop. Today, there’s no sign of that. Instead, the emerging interest of streaming services like Amazon, Netflix, Hulu and a few only now about to launch have conferences drooling over the prospect of new players driving up prices come their next negotiations.
“When you see an organization like Disney invest billions on streaming (content) — they’re in it to stay,” said Bowlsby, whose conference recently struck an extensive deal with streaming service ESPN+. “You see the Amazons getting in, and you see a long list of others you suspect might be players down the road. The good news for us is there’s likely to be a dense bidding environment.”
All of which leads to speculation that come the next round of negotiations, schools and conferences will want to put themselves in the best possible position to attract the highest possible bids. The Big Ten, SEC and ACC, with their conference networks and long-term Grant of Rights deals, may feel they’re plenty attractive as is. But the Big 12, still sitting at 10 teams, and the Pac-12, currently lagging behind the others in revenue and on-field success, may be more restless.
And in a brave, new world with innovative media companies and potentially a new generation of conference commissioners (Delany, the Big Ten’s boss of 30 years, is retiring Jan. 1, 2020), the next wave might be more radical than one or two conferences adding a couple more schools. Especially as forces both internally and externally continue pushing the NCAA to loosen its rules around athletes earning a share of those lucrative rights fees.
“Legal developments started (conference expansion), and legal developments will continue to influence it,” said David Carter, executive director of the USC Sports Business Institute. “What might happen is something new.”
“I don’t think it’s going to be tectonic, one conference exploding into another,” said prominent sports TV consultant Chris Bevilacqua. “But it could be more of a commercial partnership of conferences that follows the trend of what’s going on in the whole world across a variety of maturing industries — which is consolidation.”
“Consolidation” could take on any number of forms. No one can possibly predict today exactly what a new landscape might look like come 2026, but we can at least explore potential scenarios. Below, we’ll examine five of them — from least to most radical.
Scheduling alliances
In December 2011, the Big Ten and Pac-12 — longtime partners of sorts due to their unique Rose Bowl arrangement — announced an ambitious new venture akin to basketball’s ACC-Big Ten Challenge. All 12 schools in each league would play an annual game against one of their counterparts.
Seven months later, they called it off. It turned out a handful of Pac-12 programs like USC were not on board. The Trojans already play Notre Dame every year.
“It seemed like it would be expansion without expansion,” said Delany. “We were happy (with it). It didn’t happen.”
Perhaps that alliance was impractical and unrealistic. Or, perhaps it was simply an idea ahead of its time.
With schools increasingly concerned about declining attendance, and with the College Football Playoff selection committee placing an emphasis on schedule strength, major programs of late have been beefing up their future non-conference schedules. This year alone, Alabama announced home-and-homes with Notre Dame and Texas, Georgia with Oklahoma and Florida State, among others.
Interestingly, though, those matchups don’t necessarily add value to any television contract, because the networks don’t know precisely which games they’re getting until the spring before the season starts. Plus, schools back out of games all the time. When bidding on a conference’s TV rights, networks only know they’re getting those schools’ home games — opponents TBD.
What if two or more conferences carved out a separate deal for their non-conference games with a network, guaranteeing that Ohio State, Michigan and Penn State would all face USC, UCLA and Oregon over an X-year span?
It’s a modest but potentially lucrative strategy.
The Big 12 and/or Pac-12 expand
The very first topic Bowlsby got asked about at his Big 12 Media Days press conference last week? Realignment.
“That would be the seventh year in a row we have been asked that question first, so congratulations – you are setting records,” he joked. And then of course: “We have had no expansion discussion at any level.”
But he’ll likely keep getting asked that question every year for the simple reason that his 10-team conference is smaller than everybody else’s. The league’s presidents and ADs continually insist they’re happy with the more compact model. They prefer playing a round-robin conference schedule. And most importantly, each school received a league-record $38.8 million this year, not far behind the SEC’s $43.1 million. (The Big Ten towers over both at $54 million.)
And yet, it was only three years ago that the conference paraded nearly a dozen expansion candidates through Dallas for de facto auditions, before league presidents ultimately decided to remain at 10. Come the next TV contract in 2025, they might be wise to reevaluate that decision. Various metrics show that several top Group of 5 programs could potentially add more value to the conference’s media rights than a few of its current schools do currently.
For example, UCF boasts a larger social media following (a loose proxy for fan engagement) than Baylor, Texas Tech, TCU and Kansas State. Not to mention its football team has elevated its brand considerably by playing in three BCS or New Year’s Six bowls over the past six seasons.
Meanwhile, BYU has more living alumni than any Big 12 member but Texas. Houston sits in a larger TV market than all but TCU.
“The money is there,” said A.J. Maestas, Navigate’s founder and CEO. “But money is not the top driver for these institutions. The top decision-makers are the university presidents, and they are the leaders of a non-profit institution, where athletics is roughly 2-3 percent of their overall budget. Splitting up historical and geographic rivalries, the academic relationships of the schools they associate with — there is a long list of factors that are incredibly difficult hurdles even though they’re not all-important to the business of sports.”
Case in point, it’s widely believed that backlash from LGBT advocacy groupsin 2016 over policies in BYU’s Honor Code scared away some Big 12 presidents from potentially inviting the school. Not to mention the Big 12 has traditionally been reactive, not proactive, when it comes to realignment. In its 23-year history, the league has never added new members without losing others first.
By contrast, the Pac-12 under commissioner Larry Scott has a track record of doing things unconventionally, albeit not always to its benefit. (Opting to launch the Pac-12 Network without an established TV partner has largely backfired.) In an effort to close its widening revenue gap with the other Power 5 conferences, the league is currently soliciting bids from private equity partners in hopes of raising $750 million in exchange for a stake in the league.
Scott attempted to annex half the Big 12 in 2010. Come 2023, he or a potential successor may want to make another ambitious push. And that league would be more likely to target fellow Power 5 institutions than Group of 5 candidates. The conference has not shown even feint interest to this point in the likes of Boise State or San Diego State.
Knowing that, the Big 12 might be smart to strike first instead. It’s no secret there’s been internal strife within the Pac-12 the past several years. Would Arizona State and Arizona be tempted by what currently seems like the less dysfunctional conference? Could Colorado be lured back?
“It only takes one conference to decide it would rather be the lion than the lamb,” said Nelson, “and if everyone knows that, there’s motivation to be proactive rather than reactive.”
Bluebloods go independent
If we acknowledge that USC, for example, generates more TV revenue for the Pac-12 than any of the other members, it’s worth asking the question: Why not keep the money for itself? If you were creating the sport from scratch, without decades-old pre-existing relationships as a starting point, would the Trojans still be playing Oregon State and Washington State regularly? Would Oklahoma be playing Iowa State and Kansas every year?
Why not do it like Notre Dame — play a few annual rivals (in the Irish’s case, USC, Stanford, Michigan and Navy) but otherwise cycle through brand-name foes like Georgia, Clemson and Florida State. Especially if a school with national appeal could, theoretically, cut out the middleman and broker its own deals with big media and tech companies?
“You could ask the question whether individual institutions have the brand nationally to go it on their own,” said Bowlsby. “There might be some possibility for pursuing that that from a technological standpoint.”
It might raise some eyebrows to hear Bowlsby of all people throw out that scenario given two of his conference’s own members, Texas and Oklahoma, may be the best-suited to do it. It’s no secret the Red River rivals essentially hold the Big 12’s entire existence in their hands. They were the linchpins in Scott’s 2010 attempt to create the Pac-16, after which Texas and ESPN launched the Longhorn Network and then-Oklahoma president David Boren declared, “I don’t think OU is going to be a wallflower when all is said and done.”
When the Big 12 made its recent $40 million ESPN+ deal, which includes hundreds of live events, eight of the 10 schools surrendered their Tier 3 rights, including one non-conference football game each that schools previously aired regionally or on pay-per-view. Texas (which has LHN) and Oklahoma (Fox Sports’ Sooner Sports TV package) were notably exempt.
“Texas already tried a variation of (independence),” said Carter, “which maybe was met with mixed results because they did it too early, before all these (media) trends took hold.”
“ … Right now you’re trying to broker entire conferences,” he said. “If you took away that business model, maybe Amazon might want to do USC and Boise State, but they say no to Colorado State. Maybe it’s, people who subscribe to Netflix are in the Southwest, so we only want USC, UCLA, San Diego State and the Arizona schools. Or they may say, we’ve had trouble penetrating the Northeast, so we just want Syracuse and UConn.”
All that being said, more schools going independent would run reverse to the forces behind 25 years of realignment. In 1990, there were 26 Division I-A schools competing as independents, including powers like Penn State, Florida State and Miami. Today, there are just six, of which all but Notre Dame and Army are essentially doing it due to lack of a better option. (BYU went independent in 2011 when the Mountain West lost Utah and TCU.)
Notre Dame, with its national cachet, has proven the rare exception that can still put together a schedule of mostly Power 5 foes, though now its partial membership in the ACC guarantees it five ACC opponents a year. It’s also been an independent its entire history. Could a Texas or Oklahoma pull it off? Or would potential opponents’ dance cards already be full come October and November?
“USC used to talk a lot, ‘Oh we may just think about going independent,’ ” said Bowlsby, who served as Stanford’s AD from 2006-12. “And I said to (former USC AD) Mike Garrett: ‘Hey, knock yourself out. Try and put a schedule together in football and basketball.’ Because none of us are going to play them.”
A Power 5 coalition
The ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12, SEC and Notre Dame collectively earn about $2 billion a year in regular-season and postseason TV revenue. That’s a lot of dough. And yet, it still lags behind the NBA’s $2.7 billion annual haul, despite the fact polling shows college football is a far more popular sport. And though the NFL, with its $8 billion annual revenue, is the unquestioned king of TV sports, the disparity probably should not be four times as much.
Excluding the NFL, college football accounted for six of the 11 most-watched sporting events in 2018.
“If you look at the affinity ratings for the sport and then associated revenue, they’re still not getting what they should relative to the NFL and the NBA,” said Navigate’s Maestas. “That’s because their system is disjointed. It’s not as behind as it used to be, but they’re leaving money on the table by fragmenting their rights.”
In other words, the 65 schools across those five conferences would probably rake in far more if they were able to sell one collectively negotiated TV package. Media companies would only get one shot at landing any major college football properties, thus driving up demand.
“I absolutely believe it will happen. It has to happen,” former Oregon AD and major donor Pat Kilkenny recently told CBSSports.com about a similar idea for a 100-school collective. He cited mounting athletic department deficits. “With the digital age that we’re in and the way people get their media and people like Larry Scott and Bob Bowlsby will make it happen.”
The Power 5 leagues banding together to sell their football TV rights would not necessarily endanger their respective conference networks. They all air far more studio programming, basketball games and Olympic sports events than they do football games. That limited inventory could either be held back from a larger collective deal or folded into it.
Nor would it necessarily require those schools to “break away” from the NCAA, as many have theorized as a possibility ever since the five major conferences and Notre Dame were granted “autonomy” in 2014 to propose and approve their own NCAA legislation in areas like cost of attendance, insurance benefits and paying for families’ travel to events.
The reality is, Ohio State, Alabama and the rest of the bluebloods still depend on their 300-plus Division I colleagues for several reasons, most notably to preserve the $19.6 billion enterprise known as March Madness. In 2016, the NCAA extended its contract with CBS and Turner to air its signature basketball tournament through 2032. It’s not going anywhere. And in many other sports, programs far outside the Power 5 — think Minnesota-Duluth hockey or Coastal Carolina baseball — rank among the top competitors in the country.
But by forming a football collective, the Power 5 schools could not only consolidate their media rights but standardize scheduling, perhaps even achieving Nick Saban’s dream of P5 schools playing exclusively against other P5 schools. Imagine the ratings for the sport in September if there were no more Penn State-Idaho or Arkansas-Portland State season openers.
“If (the Power 5) could all get on the same page, they could create a superconference with balanced scheduling,” said Maestas. “Right now it’s like each division of the NFL negotiating its own TV contract in competition with one another. The centralized control and timing of NFL rights gives them leverage and selling power.”
Group of 5 schools would unquestionably be harmed by it, given many of them depend on the big paydays from guarantee games to help fund their athletic departments. But the reality is, most of those schools’ TV values are a fraction of the Power 5 schools. The AAC recently celebrated a new deal that pays its schools around $7 million a year. Purdue, just by being a member of the Big Ten, makes more than four times that.
“To think about putting such a complex media rights agreement that would incorporate 65 schools — my own opinion is that will be looked at seriously in the future,” said recently retired Sun Belt commissioner Karl Benson.
However, before forming what would plainly be a financially driven collaboration, he believes colleges first need to get clarity over what the future of athlete compensation might look like. Both the state of California and a U.S. congressman are pushing bills that would allow athletes to profit off their name, image and likeness, and the NCAA for the first time is actively exploring the issue.
There’s another considerable impediment to his scenario. Because the conferences have always operated independently of each other, their existing TV contracts don’t synch up. Yes, the Big Ten, Big 12 and Pac-12’s deals with ESPN and FOX as well as the SEC’s with CBS all come up between 2023-25, but the SEC and ACC’s deals with ESPN (which both include their conference networks) both run for a decade beyond that — the SEC’s in 2034, the ACC’s in 2036.
Unless ESPN can be incentivized to fold the latter two leagues’ rights into a larger package, a Power 5 collective might not be possible until a still-distant realignment wave that doesn’t come until after this next one.
The College Football Premier League
Traditionally, we think of the delineation between the “haves” and “have-nots” in college sports as the Power 5 and everybody else. In reality, there’s arguably as big or bigger a divide within those five conferences themselves.
According to USA Today’s database, Texas, the highest-grossing athletic department in the country, generated $214 million in revenue in 2016-17. Fourteen others made at least $140 million. On the flip side, 21 Power 5 public schools made less than $100 million, with the lowest, Washington State, making barely more ($64 million) than Group of 5 schools like Cincinnati ($60 million).
And that’s despite earning the same roughly $31 million share of Pac-12 revenue as other conference schools like USC and Washington, whose brands unquestionably generate higher television value.
“There are a substantial number of bottom feeders in the Power 5 conferences where, if not for the notoriety of their conferences, would really struggle,” said Carter.
From a purely business standpoint, the most profitable move the biggest brand-name programs could make is to divorce themselves from the lower-tier brands in their own conferences that they are essentially subsidizing. Break off from the NCAA — in football only — and form a Premier League of sorts with the bluebloods from the other power conferences.
“It wouldn’t surprise me if somewhere down the road, there would be hay made about a football-only organization that was outside of the NCAA entirely but under the umbrella of the five current (power) conferences,” said Benson. “What would it take to pull something like that off? There’s a lot of moving pieces to ever get there, but it wouldn’t surprise me if one day the names of the universities would still be on the uniforms, but it might be a different set of rules.”
I first proposed this concept three years ago, as it became apparent both that a small handful of schools would likely dominate the College Football Playoff (so far just 10 programs have accounted for 20 berths over five seasons) and that the traditional linear cable model was rapidly unwinding (ESPN has lost around 15 percent of its TV subscribers since 2011).
“Whereas the last round of realignment was driven by inventory — bundle together as many schools from as many markets as possible to command the highest possible subscriber fees — the next round will be more about content,” I wrote at the time.
Well, how’s this for enticing content: Picture an exclusive league of the 24-32 most recognizable programs — Alabama, Clemson, Oklahoma, et al. — competing only against each other in what would unquestionably become the most valuable U.S. sports property outside of the NFL.
One media analyst suggested that a property where Ohio State played all 12 of its games against similarly high-profile programs, rather than a schedule that this year includes FAU, Cincinnati, Miami (Ohio), Northwestern, Maryland and Rutgers, the Buckeyes’ games alone would be worth exponentially more than they are when folded into the Big Ten’s package.
And to top it off, this new league would become the exclusive feeder league to an expanded, eight-team CFP, which is not under the purview of the NCAA and is only bound by its current arrangements for another six years.
“All of a sudden, like the NFL, you end up with some configuration of 32 major teams that have a season that culminates in a ‘real’ playoff structure with no controversy and nonsense,” said Carter. “That might make some sense.”
To be clear, if schools ever went this route, they would be forming a de facto professional league only loosely connected to the universities themselves. Without the NCAA affiliation, there would be no way to justify treating the athletes as amateurs. And that would come with its own set of complications.
Would a sizeable portion of the public be turned off by this wholly commercialized version of the sport? Would the athletes become full-fledged employees, complete with employer taxes and worker’s compensation rights? Would they still count toward universities’ Title IX requirements?
“It sounds interesting to look at,” said Carter, “but then you start to peel back the layers, and while still possibly attainable, there would be a lot of pushback.”
And as enticing as all those dollar signs might be, would college presidents ever be fully on board with such a drastic change? Would college football still be college football if Notre Dame never plays Navy and USC and UCLA no longer play Stanford and Cal?
Actually … we kind of know the answer already. Texas no longer plays Texas A&M, Oklahoma-Nebraska is no longer a rivalry, and yet the sport’s popularity has not waned.
Whatever the next big shuffle, it will likely be just as jolting, disruptive and controversial as the ones before it. The only certainty about realignment is there will always be more of it.
“Right now, things seem pretty calm,” said Delany. “They’re calm until they’re not calm.”
Contributing: Nicole Auerbach, Max Olson
Five scenarios for the future of college conference realignment
By Stewart Mandel 5h ago
Ask nearly any active college administrator to predict the next wave of conference realignment and you’ll get a predictably measured answer — as in, there’s not going to be one.
“The answer used to be (expansion) is on the backburner,” said SEC commissioner Greg Sankey. “My answer now is it’s been placed into the kitchen cupboard. It’s not even on the stove.”
“Whoever said there were going to be four 16-institutions conferences was wrong,” said Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany. “ … I think (the conferences) are pretty stable.”
When it comes to realignment, history reminds us that things never stay stable for too long.
Since 1990, the longest college football has gone without at least one major conference reconfiguration was the six years between 2005 (when the recently raided Big East brought in reinforcements Louisville, Cincinnati and USF) and 2011 (when Nebraska joined the Big Ten, and Utah and Colorado spawned the Pac-12).
If we consider the most recent benchmark to be 2014 — the year Rutgers and Maryland entered the Big Ten and Louisville joined the ACC — then the six-year mark is fast approaching. This time, things should stay calm for at least a couple of years beyond that, what with all five of the power conferences currently locked into Grant of Rights agreements. That’s where schools surrender their individual TV rights so that the conference can negotiate deals on their behalf.
But several key dates loom not far beyond that. The Big Ten’s contracts with ESPN and FOX come up in 2023, followed by the Pac-12’s in 2024 and the Big 12’s in 2025. The latter two leagues’ Grant of Rights agreements expire in conjunction with their TV deals. Also of note, the College Football Playoff’s current contract runs through the 2025 season, by which point many believe there will be some sort of expanded field.
If there’s going to be a major conference shakeup, it’s likely to coincide with that 2023-25 window.
Most power figures within college athletics won’t speculate publicly, because they know any comment could spark a frenzy. But outside experts who study sports business and media rights believe the next round of movement is inevitable, and could be even more dramatic than the last.
“The impediments to realignment are diminishing,” said Jeff Nelson, president of Navigate Research, a sports marketing firm that has worked with conferences like the Big 12, Big Ten and Pac-12. “ … Conferences won’t be as geographically restricted in a media landscape that continues to unwind with mobile and streaming consumption surging.”
“You used to talk about geographic footprints,” said Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby. “It’s really almost an electronic footprint now. You can be any place. Notwithstanding the travel challenges, you could have Hawaii.”
The driving factor behind every recent realignment shuffle was television revenue — which has soared ever and ever higher as live events became a premium for broadcasters. When Miami, Virginia Tech and Boston College joined the ACC in 2004-05, the league celebrated a new deal with ABC/ESPN worth $37 million a year. By 2017-18, the now 15-school league’s TV value had spiked all the way to $280 million annually. As recently as 2016, the Big Ten was making around $100 million a year from ABC/ESPN for its Tier 1 rights. Its current deal with FOX and ESPN nets an average $440 million annually.
For years, the prevailing thought was this bubble would eventually pop. Today, there’s no sign of that. Instead, the emerging interest of streaming services like Amazon, Netflix, Hulu and a few only now about to launch have conferences drooling over the prospect of new players driving up prices come their next negotiations.
“When you see an organization like Disney invest billions on streaming (content) — they’re in it to stay,” said Bowlsby, whose conference recently struck an extensive deal with streaming service ESPN+. “You see the Amazons getting in, and you see a long list of others you suspect might be players down the road. The good news for us is there’s likely to be a dense bidding environment.”
All of which leads to speculation that come the next round of negotiations, schools and conferences will want to put themselves in the best possible position to attract the highest possible bids. The Big Ten, SEC and ACC, with their conference networks and long-term Grant of Rights deals, may feel they’re plenty attractive as is. But the Big 12, still sitting at 10 teams, and the Pac-12, currently lagging behind the others in revenue and on-field success, may be more restless.
And in a brave, new world with innovative media companies and potentially a new generation of conference commissioners (Delany, the Big Ten’s boss of 30 years, is retiring Jan. 1, 2020), the next wave might be more radical than one or two conferences adding a couple more schools. Especially as forces both internally and externally continue pushing the NCAA to loosen its rules around athletes earning a share of those lucrative rights fees.
“Legal developments started (conference expansion), and legal developments will continue to influence it,” said David Carter, executive director of the USC Sports Business Institute. “What might happen is something new.”
“I don’t think it’s going to be tectonic, one conference exploding into another,” said prominent sports TV consultant Chris Bevilacqua. “But it could be more of a commercial partnership of conferences that follows the trend of what’s going on in the whole world across a variety of maturing industries — which is consolidation.”
“Consolidation” could take on any number of forms. No one can possibly predict today exactly what a new landscape might look like come 2026, but we can at least explore potential scenarios. Below, we’ll examine five of them — from least to most radical.
Scheduling alliances
In December 2011, the Big Ten and Pac-12 — longtime partners of sorts due to their unique Rose Bowl arrangement — announced an ambitious new venture akin to basketball’s ACC-Big Ten Challenge. All 12 schools in each league would play an annual game against one of their counterparts.
Seven months later, they called it off. It turned out a handful of Pac-12 programs like USC were not on board. The Trojans already play Notre Dame every year.
“It seemed like it would be expansion without expansion,” said Delany. “We were happy (with it). It didn’t happen.”
Perhaps that alliance was impractical and unrealistic. Or, perhaps it was simply an idea ahead of its time.
With schools increasingly concerned about declining attendance, and with the College Football Playoff selection committee placing an emphasis on schedule strength, major programs of late have been beefing up their future non-conference schedules. This year alone, Alabama announced home-and-homes with Notre Dame and Texas, Georgia with Oklahoma and Florida State, among others.
Interestingly, though, those matchups don’t necessarily add value to any television contract, because the networks don’t know precisely which games they’re getting until the spring before the season starts. Plus, schools back out of games all the time. When bidding on a conference’s TV rights, networks only know they’re getting those schools’ home games — opponents TBD.
What if two or more conferences carved out a separate deal for their non-conference games with a network, guaranteeing that Ohio State, Michigan and Penn State would all face USC, UCLA and Oregon over an X-year span?
It’s a modest but potentially lucrative strategy.
The Big 12 and/or Pac-12 expand
The very first topic Bowlsby got asked about at his Big 12 Media Days press conference last week? Realignment.
“That would be the seventh year in a row we have been asked that question first, so congratulations – you are setting records,” he joked. And then of course: “We have had no expansion discussion at any level.”
But he’ll likely keep getting asked that question every year for the simple reason that his 10-team conference is smaller than everybody else’s. The league’s presidents and ADs continually insist they’re happy with the more compact model. They prefer playing a round-robin conference schedule. And most importantly, each school received a league-record $38.8 million this year, not far behind the SEC’s $43.1 million. (The Big Ten towers over both at $54 million.)
And yet, it was only three years ago that the conference paraded nearly a dozen expansion candidates through Dallas for de facto auditions, before league presidents ultimately decided to remain at 10. Come the next TV contract in 2025, they might be wise to reevaluate that decision. Various metrics show that several top Group of 5 programs could potentially add more value to the conference’s media rights than a few of its current schools do currently.
For example, UCF boasts a larger social media following (a loose proxy for fan engagement) than Baylor, Texas Tech, TCU and Kansas State. Not to mention its football team has elevated its brand considerably by playing in three BCS or New Year’s Six bowls over the past six seasons.
Meanwhile, BYU has more living alumni than any Big 12 member but Texas. Houston sits in a larger TV market than all but TCU.
“The money is there,” said A.J. Maestas, Navigate’s founder and CEO. “But money is not the top driver for these institutions. The top decision-makers are the university presidents, and they are the leaders of a non-profit institution, where athletics is roughly 2-3 percent of their overall budget. Splitting up historical and geographic rivalries, the academic relationships of the schools they associate with — there is a long list of factors that are incredibly difficult hurdles even though they’re not all-important to the business of sports.”
Case in point, it’s widely believed that backlash from LGBT advocacy groupsin 2016 over policies in BYU’s Honor Code scared away some Big 12 presidents from potentially inviting the school. Not to mention the Big 12 has traditionally been reactive, not proactive, when it comes to realignment. In its 23-year history, the league has never added new members without losing others first.
By contrast, the Pac-12 under commissioner Larry Scott has a track record of doing things unconventionally, albeit not always to its benefit. (Opting to launch the Pac-12 Network without an established TV partner has largely backfired.) In an effort to close its widening revenue gap with the other Power 5 conferences, the league is currently soliciting bids from private equity partners in hopes of raising $750 million in exchange for a stake in the league.
Scott attempted to annex half the Big 12 in 2010. Come 2023, he or a potential successor may want to make another ambitious push. And that league would be more likely to target fellow Power 5 institutions than Group of 5 candidates. The conference has not shown even feint interest to this point in the likes of Boise State or San Diego State.
Knowing that, the Big 12 might be smart to strike first instead. It’s no secret there’s been internal strife within the Pac-12 the past several years. Would Arizona State and Arizona be tempted by what currently seems like the less dysfunctional conference? Could Colorado be lured back?
“It only takes one conference to decide it would rather be the lion than the lamb,” said Nelson, “and if everyone knows that, there’s motivation to be proactive rather than reactive.”
Bluebloods go independent
If we acknowledge that USC, for example, generates more TV revenue for the Pac-12 than any of the other members, it’s worth asking the question: Why not keep the money for itself? If you were creating the sport from scratch, without decades-old pre-existing relationships as a starting point, would the Trojans still be playing Oregon State and Washington State regularly? Would Oklahoma be playing Iowa State and Kansas every year?
Why not do it like Notre Dame — play a few annual rivals (in the Irish’s case, USC, Stanford, Michigan and Navy) but otherwise cycle through brand-name foes like Georgia, Clemson and Florida State. Especially if a school with national appeal could, theoretically, cut out the middleman and broker its own deals with big media and tech companies?
“You could ask the question whether individual institutions have the brand nationally to go it on their own,” said Bowlsby. “There might be some possibility for pursuing that that from a technological standpoint.”
It might raise some eyebrows to hear Bowlsby of all people throw out that scenario given two of his conference’s own members, Texas and Oklahoma, may be the best-suited to do it. It’s no secret the Red River rivals essentially hold the Big 12’s entire existence in their hands. They were the linchpins in Scott’s 2010 attempt to create the Pac-16, after which Texas and ESPN launched the Longhorn Network and then-Oklahoma president David Boren declared, “I don’t think OU is going to be a wallflower when all is said and done.”
When the Big 12 made its recent $40 million ESPN+ deal, which includes hundreds of live events, eight of the 10 schools surrendered their Tier 3 rights, including one non-conference football game each that schools previously aired regionally or on pay-per-view. Texas (which has LHN) and Oklahoma (Fox Sports’ Sooner Sports TV package) were notably exempt.
“Texas already tried a variation of (independence),” said Carter, “which maybe was met with mixed results because they did it too early, before all these (media) trends took hold.”
“ … Right now you’re trying to broker entire conferences,” he said. “If you took away that business model, maybe Amazon might want to do USC and Boise State, but they say no to Colorado State. Maybe it’s, people who subscribe to Netflix are in the Southwest, so we only want USC, UCLA, San Diego State and the Arizona schools. Or they may say, we’ve had trouble penetrating the Northeast, so we just want Syracuse and UConn.”
All that being said, more schools going independent would run reverse to the forces behind 25 years of realignment. In 1990, there were 26 Division I-A schools competing as independents, including powers like Penn State, Florida State and Miami. Today, there are just six, of which all but Notre Dame and Army are essentially doing it due to lack of a better option. (BYU went independent in 2011 when the Mountain West lost Utah and TCU.)
Notre Dame, with its national cachet, has proven the rare exception that can still put together a schedule of mostly Power 5 foes, though now its partial membership in the ACC guarantees it five ACC opponents a year. It’s also been an independent its entire history. Could a Texas or Oklahoma pull it off? Or would potential opponents’ dance cards already be full come October and November?
“USC used to talk a lot, ‘Oh we may just think about going independent,’ ” said Bowlsby, who served as Stanford’s AD from 2006-12. “And I said to (former USC AD) Mike Garrett: ‘Hey, knock yourself out. Try and put a schedule together in football and basketball.’ Because none of us are going to play them.”
A Power 5 coalition
The ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12, SEC and Notre Dame collectively earn about $2 billion a year in regular-season and postseason TV revenue. That’s a lot of dough. And yet, it still lags behind the NBA’s $2.7 billion annual haul, despite the fact polling shows college football is a far more popular sport. And though the NFL, with its $8 billion annual revenue, is the unquestioned king of TV sports, the disparity probably should not be four times as much.
Excluding the NFL, college football accounted for six of the 11 most-watched sporting events in 2018.
“If you look at the affinity ratings for the sport and then associated revenue, they’re still not getting what they should relative to the NFL and the NBA,” said Navigate’s Maestas. “That’s because their system is disjointed. It’s not as behind as it used to be, but they’re leaving money on the table by fragmenting their rights.”
In other words, the 65 schools across those five conferences would probably rake in far more if they were able to sell one collectively negotiated TV package. Media companies would only get one shot at landing any major college football properties, thus driving up demand.
“I absolutely believe it will happen. It has to happen,” former Oregon AD and major donor Pat Kilkenny recently told CBSSports.com about a similar idea for a 100-school collective. He cited mounting athletic department deficits. “With the digital age that we’re in and the way people get their media and people like Larry Scott and Bob Bowlsby will make it happen.”
The Power 5 leagues banding together to sell their football TV rights would not necessarily endanger their respective conference networks. They all air far more studio programming, basketball games and Olympic sports events than they do football games. That limited inventory could either be held back from a larger collective deal or folded into it.
Nor would it necessarily require those schools to “break away” from the NCAA, as many have theorized as a possibility ever since the five major conferences and Notre Dame were granted “autonomy” in 2014 to propose and approve their own NCAA legislation in areas like cost of attendance, insurance benefits and paying for families’ travel to events.
The reality is, Ohio State, Alabama and the rest of the bluebloods still depend on their 300-plus Division I colleagues for several reasons, most notably to preserve the $19.6 billion enterprise known as March Madness. In 2016, the NCAA extended its contract with CBS and Turner to air its signature basketball tournament through 2032. It’s not going anywhere. And in many other sports, programs far outside the Power 5 — think Minnesota-Duluth hockey or Coastal Carolina baseball — rank among the top competitors in the country.
But by forming a football collective, the Power 5 schools could not only consolidate their media rights but standardize scheduling, perhaps even achieving Nick Saban’s dream of P5 schools playing exclusively against other P5 schools. Imagine the ratings for the sport in September if there were no more Penn State-Idaho or Arkansas-Portland State season openers.
“If (the Power 5) could all get on the same page, they could create a superconference with balanced scheduling,” said Maestas. “Right now it’s like each division of the NFL negotiating its own TV contract in competition with one another. The centralized control and timing of NFL rights gives them leverage and selling power.”
Group of 5 schools would unquestionably be harmed by it, given many of them depend on the big paydays from guarantee games to help fund their athletic departments. But the reality is, most of those schools’ TV values are a fraction of the Power 5 schools. The AAC recently celebrated a new deal that pays its schools around $7 million a year. Purdue, just by being a member of the Big Ten, makes more than four times that.
“To think about putting such a complex media rights agreement that would incorporate 65 schools — my own opinion is that will be looked at seriously in the future,” said recently retired Sun Belt commissioner Karl Benson.
However, before forming what would plainly be a financially driven collaboration, he believes colleges first need to get clarity over what the future of athlete compensation might look like. Both the state of California and a U.S. congressman are pushing bills that would allow athletes to profit off their name, image and likeness, and the NCAA for the first time is actively exploring the issue.
There’s another considerable impediment to his scenario. Because the conferences have always operated independently of each other, their existing TV contracts don’t synch up. Yes, the Big Ten, Big 12 and Pac-12’s deals with ESPN and FOX as well as the SEC’s with CBS all come up between 2023-25, but the SEC and ACC’s deals with ESPN (which both include their conference networks) both run for a decade beyond that — the SEC’s in 2034, the ACC’s in 2036.
Unless ESPN can be incentivized to fold the latter two leagues’ rights into a larger package, a Power 5 collective might not be possible until a still-distant realignment wave that doesn’t come until after this next one.
The College Football Premier League
Traditionally, we think of the delineation between the “haves” and “have-nots” in college sports as the Power 5 and everybody else. In reality, there’s arguably as big or bigger a divide within those five conferences themselves.
According to USA Today’s database, Texas, the highest-grossing athletic department in the country, generated $214 million in revenue in 2016-17. Fourteen others made at least $140 million. On the flip side, 21 Power 5 public schools made less than $100 million, with the lowest, Washington State, making barely more ($64 million) than Group of 5 schools like Cincinnati ($60 million).
And that’s despite earning the same roughly $31 million share of Pac-12 revenue as other conference schools like USC and Washington, whose brands unquestionably generate higher television value.
“There are a substantial number of bottom feeders in the Power 5 conferences where, if not for the notoriety of their conferences, would really struggle,” said Carter.
From a purely business standpoint, the most profitable move the biggest brand-name programs could make is to divorce themselves from the lower-tier brands in their own conferences that they are essentially subsidizing. Break off from the NCAA — in football only — and form a Premier League of sorts with the bluebloods from the other power conferences.
“It wouldn’t surprise me if somewhere down the road, there would be hay made about a football-only organization that was outside of the NCAA entirely but under the umbrella of the five current (power) conferences,” said Benson. “What would it take to pull something like that off? There’s a lot of moving pieces to ever get there, but it wouldn’t surprise me if one day the names of the universities would still be on the uniforms, but it might be a different set of rules.”
I first proposed this concept three years ago, as it became apparent both that a small handful of schools would likely dominate the College Football Playoff (so far just 10 programs have accounted for 20 berths over five seasons) and that the traditional linear cable model was rapidly unwinding (ESPN has lost around 15 percent of its TV subscribers since 2011).
“Whereas the last round of realignment was driven by inventory — bundle together as many schools from as many markets as possible to command the highest possible subscriber fees — the next round will be more about content,” I wrote at the time.
Well, how’s this for enticing content: Picture an exclusive league of the 24-32 most recognizable programs — Alabama, Clemson, Oklahoma, et al. — competing only against each other in what would unquestionably become the most valuable U.S. sports property outside of the NFL.
One media analyst suggested that a property where Ohio State played all 12 of its games against similarly high-profile programs, rather than a schedule that this year includes FAU, Cincinnati, Miami (Ohio), Northwestern, Maryland and Rutgers, the Buckeyes’ games alone would be worth exponentially more than they are when folded into the Big Ten’s package.
And to top it off, this new league would become the exclusive feeder league to an expanded, eight-team CFP, which is not under the purview of the NCAA and is only bound by its current arrangements for another six years.
“All of a sudden, like the NFL, you end up with some configuration of 32 major teams that have a season that culminates in a ‘real’ playoff structure with no controversy and nonsense,” said Carter. “That might make some sense.”
To be clear, if schools ever went this route, they would be forming a de facto professional league only loosely connected to the universities themselves. Without the NCAA affiliation, there would be no way to justify treating the athletes as amateurs. And that would come with its own set of complications.
Would a sizeable portion of the public be turned off by this wholly commercialized version of the sport? Would the athletes become full-fledged employees, complete with employer taxes and worker’s compensation rights? Would they still count toward universities’ Title IX requirements?
“It sounds interesting to look at,” said Carter, “but then you start to peel back the layers, and while still possibly attainable, there would be a lot of pushback.”
And as enticing as all those dollar signs might be, would college presidents ever be fully on board with such a drastic change? Would college football still be college football if Notre Dame never plays Navy and USC and UCLA no longer play Stanford and Cal?
Actually … we kind of know the answer already. Texas no longer plays Texas A&M, Oklahoma-Nebraska is no longer a rivalry, and yet the sport’s popularity has not waned.
Whatever the next big shuffle, it will likely be just as jolting, disruptive and controversial as the ones before it. The only certainty about realignment is there will always be more of it.
“Right now, things seem pretty calm,” said Delany. “They’re calm until they’re not calm.”
Contributing: Nicole Auerbach, Max Olson
