The New College Football "Alliance" Is Not One
At the end of July, Texas and Oklahoma shattered an uneasy peace in college sports when they unveiled plans to bolt the Big 12, a conference they founded together, for the SEC. It was a pure money move that will effectively kill their old league. There’s no need to weep for the rest of the Big 12, a league that itself was the product of two leagues chasing maximal television dollars in the 1990s, but there’s no doubt that the eight remaining teams in that conference are in a world of hurt. Whatever they salvage without their conference’s two biggest brands and best football programs, it will be something less than they had with the Longhorns and Sooners. The SEC, on the other hand, has only further entrenched itself as the nation’s best college football league.
The other three conferences that comprise the Power Five—the Big Ten, ACC, and Pac-12—do not seem especially affected. The Big Ten is still rich, with schools making well north of $50 million per year from their own TV deals with ESPN and Fox. The ACC’s schools have granted their TV rights to the conference until 2036, a long enough period that the league of the Bojangles Belt should not have to worry about poaching for a while. The Pac-12’s problems—chiefly bad football and a conference TV offering with poor distribution—are the same with Texas and Oklahoma in the SEC as they were with them in the Big 12. These three conferences now face more urgency to max out their next TV deals to keep up with the Joneses in the Southeast, who have a heavy bag on the way from Disney, but again: They were already going to chase top dollar no matter what. Their objectives have not changed.
But this is college sports, and the people in charge have to do something to make it look like they are always doing something. And the Big Ten, ACC, and Pac-12 have new commissioners who have been in their posts for somewhere between a few weeks and a little more than a year, and those men face an even greater obligation to Do Something to counter SEC hegemony. So we are getting “a historic alliance” (their words) between the three remaining powers.
The thing is: The alliance does not technically exist, because the leagues did not sign any kind of contract. (Big Ten commish Kevin Warren says that if you need to go back and check contract language, well, you’ve gotten into business with the wrong people.) It is also not “a reaction to Texas and Oklahoma going to the SEC,” Warren says, “but to be totally candid, you have to evaluate what’s going on in the landscape of college athletics” (such as, specifically, Texas and Oklahoma going to the SEC). What the alliance will do is not clear. The leagues say they’ll have a scheduling arrangement in football and basketball but acknowledge that that won’t start at any particular time because of existing game contracts. (The Big Ten and ACC also already have a hoops scheduling deal, but I guess the Pac-12 can now hang out with them too.) The three conferences will likely work together to stall College Football Playoff expansion for a few years. They’ll put out press releases about their commitment to “student-athlete mental and physical health, safety, wellness and support,” which is the first bullet point in their press release about this new arrangement.
https://slate.com/culture/2021/08/college-football-alliance-acc-big-10-pac-12-conferences.html
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