Why the college conference realignments are bad for athletes and fans

Every step in the recent conference realignment drama that has engulfed college sports and destroyed the Pac-12 makes sense in its own narrow way. Oregon and Washington have joined the Big 10, Colorado, Arizona, Arizona State, and Utah have joined the Big 12, and four other schools remain without a home. Sequencing is everything. It made sense for USC and UCLA to seek better money elsewhere; it made sense for Colorado to return to the Big 12; it made sense for Oregon and Washington to insulate themselves by joining the Big 10; it made sense for Arizona and Utah and Arizona State and the rest of the Pac-12 schools to desperately seek some kind of safe harbor, even if that harbor could end up being (for Cal and Stanford) the Atlantic Coast Conference.

But the accumulation of small, sensible decisions has led to wildly irrational outcomes. The longstanding system of building college athletics around geographic rivalries made its own kind of sense. Oregon and Washington, or Michigan and Ohio, will always resent one another more than USC and Rutgers. More importantly, regional proximity had the real and practical effects of allowing fans to attend road games and cutting down on the travel times that all athletes incur. We are now embracing a reality in which student athletes, already under intense pressure, will be stretched even farther by the demands of travel and practice.

Student Athletes

Contra many depictions of student athletes in the media, the vast bulk of Division I athletes across all sports are in fact interested in doing well in school, in earning their degrees, and in building careers in nonathletic fields. There’s obviously a great deal of variation from sport to sport and from athlete to athlete, but most athletes are fundamentally like other students, trying to navigate the demands of pursuing a college degree while having the equivalent of a full-time job along with plenty of travel. We should resist the assumption that even elite players in revenue sports like football and basketball don’t belong on a college campus; many of them are less academically prepared than the median student, but most of them are smart and all of them are very hard-working.

Modern athletic departments have displaced a fair amount of student class time online, a practice that is more convenient for athletes and enables them to make progress towards degrees, but has uncertain long-term effects on the quality of education. The new NCAA Name-Image-Likeness (NIL) regulations have offered significant financial advantages to athletes in revenue sports, while also creating a new set of obligations on their time.

The New Travel Reality

Realignment will compound the “only so many hours in a day” problem for student athletes. Air travel has long been a fact of life (Pac-12 schools aren’t particularly close to one another by the standards of the Midwest or the Southeast), but it’s about to get worse. The Big Ten now spans three time zones, meaning that students need to navigate onerous time differences between the coasts. A flight from Seattle to Columbus isn’t that much longer than the Seattle to Los Angeles leg, but the time zone change makes it more physically demanding. At least in the Big Ten the West Coast schools will have the opportunity to schedule one another; if Cal and Stanford join the ACC they will effectively commit their athletes to virtually endless cross-continental travel.

And of course nonmonetary sports (which make up the balance of all student athletes) are at the mercy of football. Gymnasts, rowers, runners, and a whole host of other athletes will now need to account for travel between the Midwest, the Atlantic coast, and the Pacific coast. It is possible to do academic work in an airport, somewhat less so on an airplane, and not at all after a series of exhausting flights culminating in an elite-level athletic competition. And this is to say nothing of the impact of additional air travel on climate change, a difficult to calculate but very real consideration.

A Way Forward?

As someone who has worked in higher education for twenty-six years, I have some personal experience with elite student athletes; I tutored football players and other athletes at the University of Washington, and I teach in a graduate program at the University of Kentucky, which has enrolled current and former NCAA athletes, including football players at the very apex of the sport. Of the athletes I tutored, some were not faintly prepared to be in college courses, and some were smart but uninterested in college beyond athletics, but the vast bulk were smart young people who found it difficult to navigate both a college career and their extremely demanding job, technically limited to 20 hours per week but in practice often much longer. Of my graduate students I can say that most have gone on to highly successful careers in private business and public service. These are good students, and the best of them weather the demands of athletics successfully. But every additional travel demand makes their juggling act more difficult and complex, and even good students will find themselves pressed to the absolute breaking point.

The benefits of a college football team to a community are real. In Lexington, Kentucky, for example, football sets the terms of community engagement; football games are weekend-long events that change traffic patterns, attract visitors from all over Kentucky, and provide millions to local business. Football (and other sports) also provide a connection between local communities and the university system, an underrated service during a time of polarization about the importance and contribution of higher education. But we have arrived at collective insanity when we determine that Oregon needs to play Rutgers once every three years or so in order to satisfy the demands of television. Part of the answer is undoubtedly detaching football from the rest of the college sports universe. Football is the primary revenue sport in college athletics, and creating a football-only set of conferences will at least spare the rest of the student athlete cohort. Even men and women’s basketball, the other primary revenue sports, will suffer from additional demands of cross-continental travel.

In the long run the connection between minor league football and the American system of higher education is becoming tenuous and difficult to maintain. The money is pouring in, but the system is stretching fans and athletes to the breaking point. As long as schools and conferences are allowed to chase the money on their own, with no kind of central direction, the problems will only get worse.

Robert Farley, PhD, is a senior lecturer at the University of Kentucky’s Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce.  His most recent book is Waging War with Gold: National Security and the Finance Domain Across the Ages.  He is also a founder and senior editor of Lawyers, Guns, and Money.