College Football’s Power Brokers Are Destroying It

The kickoff to the college-football season is a few weeks away, but fans are already seeing 2023’s biggest showdown—one that pits the long-term interests of schools and conferences against their own insatiable greed.

When a major football power switches from one conference to another—disrupting existing rivalries in favor of new opponents less familiar to fans—it’s always controversial. But numerous recent conference changes have disrupted the landscape to an unusual degree. Amid widespread complaints that college players’ newfound ability to profit from endorsement deals is harming a supposedly amateur sport, what’s really chewing college football to pieces are conference realignments fueled by schools’ and conferences’ avarice.

At the moment, the biggest sign of trouble is that the Pac-12 is being gutted amid a massive scramble across the NCAA Division I Football Bowl Subdivision for broadcast revenue. The venerable West Coast league has been unable to attract a major-network television deal, and as it struggles, marquee teams are abandoning the Pac-12 for bigger fortunes elsewhere.

[Jemele Hill: College football is cannibalizing itself]

The Big Ten is reportedly exploring the possibility of adding Oregon and Washington to its conference, a year after the conference gobbled up University of Southern California and UCLA. Colorado doesn’t necessarily have the same national prominence as the two legendary California universities, but its announcement last month that it will return to the Big 12 after more than a decade in the Pac-12 is yet another blow for the latter.

The reason so many schools are on the move is that each member of a conference gets a share of its guaranteed television revenues. So the bigger the deal, the bigger each school’s allotment. Currently, the Big Ten and the Southeastern Conference (SEC) have the most lucrative television deals in college football. Disney, which owns ESPN, successfully landed all of the SEC’s media rights in 2020 with a 10-year, $3 billion deal that begins in 2024. The agreement will pay the SEC about $300 million a year—a huge bump from the $55 million a year that CBS was paying the conference. Especially now that Texas and Oklahoma are set to join the SEC in 2024, the conference appears to be set up for long-term success. So does the Big Ten, which last year secured a seven-year, $7 billion media-rights agreement with Fox, CBS, and NBC.

On some level, you have to sympathize with college-football fans as the conference-realignment version of Game of Thrones plays out. Traditions, history, and entrenched rivalries are what make college football so appealing. As these schools and conferences jockey for financial position, traditions and history become an afterthought.

The Big Ten and the SEC naturally have emerged as the most attractive destinations in college football, and schools aren’t shy about their willingness to abandon conference solidarity and tradition for a bigger paycheck elsewhere. The Pac-12 isn’t the only conference facing a harsh reality. As Sports Illustrated has reported, at least half of the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) schools are considering leaving.

Florida State University’s president, Richard McCullough, said this week that his school faces “a very difficult situation,” even “an existential crisis,” as schools outside the ACC score tens of millions of dollars more a year to build facilities, retain coaches, and maximize their recruited athletes’ ability to profit from their fame.

The imperative to take account of players’ needs is something new for colleges and conferences. For many years, college athletes could be compensated only with a scholarship, and their otherwise-unpaid labor became the basis of a hugely lucrative business. But when courts and state legislatures decided that college athletes should be allowed to make money off of their name, image, and likeness, the change added a new variable for colleges. In deciding where to enroll, athletes now consider which schools might offer them the greatest chance of landing endorsement deals and monetizing their social-media fame. (Signing with a Big Ten or SEC member school is a good way for athletes to get their face on TV.) These considerations rankle college-football traditionalists, who supposedly want to uphold the old ideal of student athletes.

“I am against anything that devalues education,” the Clemson University football coach Dabo Swinney told ESPN last year. “That’s what I’m against. I am for anything that incentivizes education. People will come after me because I’ve always said that I’m against the professionalism of college athletics, and I am. Kids don’t know what they don’t know.”

[Devin Gordon: America ruined college football. Now college football is ruining America.]

That’s brazen coming from Swinney, who is in the midst of a 10-year, $115 million contract extension that he signed in September 2022. And so much for sticking with the old ways: Clemson, a member of the ACC for many decades, is reportedly among the schools seriously considering leaving for more money.

That athletes can now make money from their likeness is largely irrelevant to the fundamental issue: The top conferences’ broadcast deals have simply become so lucrative that colleges can’t resist seeking their share.

“The old question of, ‘How long would it take TV money to destroy college football?’ Maybe we’re here,” the Washington State University coach Jake Dickert told reporters Thursday. “To think, even remotely, five years ago, [that] the Pac-12 would be in this position, it’s unthinkable to think that we’re here today. And to think that local rivalries are at risk … to me, is unbelievable.”

For so long, college-football power brokers spent a lot of time conjuring every excuse as to why a fair and equitable system for players just wasn’t feasible. Now colleges’ hypocrisy is being fully exposed. Athletes were simply seeking equity and fair market value, and they’re finally able to get it. Colleges have been beholden to money the whole time.