Warren Grimes
When the decision was made that UCLA and USC would bolt the
Pac-12 to join the Big Ten, imagine a candid telephone conversation between the
two women’s basketball coaches: Cori Close (UCLA) and Lindsay Gottlieb
(USC). It’s hard to see how either coach
was ecstatic about this realignment.
The tradeoffs for the two women’s programs are largely
negative. The LA schools were already
part of the top women’s basketball conference in the country. Although the Pac 12 didn’t do so well in the
most recent NCAA tournament (Stanford did make the final four), the case for the
conference’s elite status is compelling.
Look at national rankings, look at the previous year’s Final Four
(Arizona and Stanford played for the championship) and look at the list of
incoming recruits (the Pac-12 was easily the favored conference for players in the
McDonald’s High School All America game).
So leaving the Pac-12 for the Big Ten cannot improve the
competition. And there are other
downsides. Travel time and expenses
become bigger factors. Yes, the Big Ten
will place the LA schools in the western division, but travelling from LA to
Nebraska, Iowa, Minnesota, or Wisconsin is a major undertaking. And basketball teams play at least double the
number of games that football teams play, so the travel burden is
substantial. If schools are serious
about players’ ability to attend classes and study, these are non-trivial
matters.
There are lots of stresses on a student athlete’s life. For the LA schools, the realignment just made
all of these worse. And the impact is
not limited to women’s hoops. Think of
all the other non-football sports where hundreds of athletes compete in the
Pac-12 because the conference is either the best, or one of the two or three
best, in the country. Among others, these
sports include men’s and women’s soccer, men’s and women’s swimming, men’s and
women’s track and field, men’s and women’s tennis, and women’s volleyball.
Coaches and athletes in the non-football sports will have
varied reactions to realignment. Some
may welcome the additional television revenues that flow to the athletics
programs, but one thing is clear. They
were all secondary actors. The
controlling factor was television revenues – mostly from football. No
matter your sport, you must pay homage to the money flow.
The Pac-12 and its remaining members cannot ignore the
revenue issue, but they are still in a position to do something to protect the
interests of their non-football programs.
There are options.
A key feature should
be divorcing football league alignments from the rest of the athletic programs. The conference can keep the integrity of
non-football programs while allowing flexibility for football-only scheduling that
enhances revenues. For example, the
Pac-12 could consider a merger with another conference only for football,
leaving the rest of the conference sports unaffected. Or, in a more extreme option, the conference
could cut loose its restless members to make separate arrangements for football
scheduling. Either of these approaches has costs and will
require working around existing or possible future television contracts, but
they should allow enhanced television revenues for the schools with leverage
without the same deleterious effects on non-football programs.
In addressing the current challenge, athletic directors
should be made aware that loyal fans of the non-football programs do not want
to see football-generated television revenues dictate how their favorite sport
is played. At least before the Southern
California schools departure, the Pac-12 could accurately market itself as the
premier non-football conference in the country.
That now is at risk. The options
confronting the conference all have downsides.
But doing nothing will likely be worse, perhaps resulting in a total disintegration
of the conference that further degrades both football and the non-football
sports.
