P11
March 2013
Being in more homes in more major markets in more
states means more money in TV revenue. And since
only a handful of athletic programs in the country are
actually profitable, that money goes a long way.
So the Pac-12 broadened its base to include Colorado
and Utah; the SEC added Texas A&M and Missouri;
the Big Ten recruited Nebraska, Maryland and
Rutgers; the Big 12 went after West Virginia and TCU;
the Big East added Memphis, SMU, Temple, Tulane,
Houston and Central Florida; and the ACC brought
in Louisville, Pitt and Syracuse. And that’s not counting
Boise State and San Diego State, which accepted offers
to join the Big East only to reconsider and return to
the Mountain West.
Suddenly, 10-team BCS conferences became 12- and
14-member super conferences – and maybe even 16
before all is said and done.
All that movement created a trickle-down effect, as mid-
major conferences that had been raided by wealthier
BCS conferences in turn started plucking teams from
one another or smaller leagues in order to stay relevant.
NCAA President
Mark Emmert
called the massive
conference realignment a “market shakedown” during
the Big 12 spring meetings last year.
“What we’ve got is the conflict between the collegiate
model and the commercial model,” Emmert told
reporters. “Universities need revenue. Everybody
thinks everybody is making (a) gazillion dollars in
college sports. You know that's not true. ... All (of a)
sudden, somebody is dangling some resources in front
of you. It's tempting.”
WAC expansion, subtraction
Once upon a time, the Western Athletic Conference
was the one adding teams and broadening its footprint.
After the collapse of the old Southwest Conference
in 1995, the 10-team WAC brought in Rice, San Jose
State, SMU, TCU, Tulsa and UNLV, giving it 16 teams
stretching from Oklahoma to Hawai‘i.
At the time, however, the revenue wasn’t sufficient to
split 16 ways and cover travel costs. So by 1999, eight
WAC members – Air Force, BYU, Colorado State, New
Mexico, San Diego State, UNLV, Utah and Wyoming –
left to form the Mountain West Conference.
Over the years, other schools followed suit, with Boise
State, Rice, Tulsa, Fresno State, Hawai‘i and Nevada
among them. After this year, Louisiana Tech, Utah
State, San Jose State, Texas State, Texas-San Antonio
and Texas-Arlington are departing. And Idaho has
announced its intention to leave in 2014.
The exodus has been so great that, just to survive, the
WAC next year will become a non-football-playing
conference, ending a 50-year history of football
that included a national champion (BYU) in 1984, a
Heisman Trophy winner (
Ty Detmer
) in 1990 and two
undefeated Boise State (2006, ’09) teams that made
national headlines.
Among the nine schools that will comprise the
remodeled WAC in 2013-14, including GCU, none
was part of the league prior to 2005. Three members
(Texas-Pan American, Chicago State and Missouri-
Kansas City) have been added since GCU was invited
in November.
“It’s still a very, very fluid situation among conferences,”
interim WAC Commissioner
Jeff Hurd
said of the
NCAA shuffling. “One of the primary differences today,
compared to two years ago, is it has trickled down
to what many people call the non-football-playing
conferences. I think we’ll see more movement take
place (in the next year) that will affect the landscape
and affect conference makeup across the board.”
Hurd hopes to increase WAC membership by one
school (two once Idaho leaves) to create a 10-team
league. He said it’s important to look five years ahead
to maintain stability in a conference.
“From our standpoint, GCU has a number of things
attractive about it,” Hurd said. “One is geography. One
is ease of access to the city, another is the multisport
sponsorship it has, another is the expansion of its
campus and its academic programs. It has shown
enormous growth potential.
“When you look down the road and look at programs
and institutions, those are some of the items you try
to target.”
Forecast remains cloudy
As Hurd pointed out, the conference shuffling
isn’t complete.
But will it quiet down once the SEC and Big East
complete their television contracts and the dominoes
finish falling from expansion of the BCS conferences?
Will those conferences look to get even bigger,
expanding to 16 teams?
Or is the endgame even more extreme, where those
major conferences leave the NCAA and form their
own federation, taking all their revenue with them?
Dodd doesn’t like the idea of 16-team conferences
– “Anything beyond 14 becomes a little too
unwieldy; you’re almost operating as a federation
instead of a conference” – but he’s not about to
rule out that possibility.
“The divide between the haves and have-nots, no one
is sure what form that will take,” Dodd said. “And there’s
technology that nobody even thought about that will
now be monetized. TV is everywhere, where you can
watch games on your phone, a tablet or a computer.
... I think the super conferences and the increase in
technology will really revolutionize college sports in
the coming years.”
Baker said an endgame in which big schools essentially
secede from the NCAA would be devastating to mid-
range schools, in essence relegating them to second-
tier status.
“It would seem farfetched,” Baker said, “but money
makes people do crazy things sometimes.”
■
Antelopes’ move to Division I
and WAC is sign of the times
– by Bob Romantic
In
the game of musical chairs that is NCAA Division I
athletics, Grand Canyon University now has a seat
at the party and a good idea of where it belongs.
Now all it needs is for the music to stop long enough
for the rest of the country to settle down and catch its
collective breath.
Since 2011, 70 D-I institutions have switched their
conference affiliation (or are in the process of switching)
as leagues and universities jockey for position to cash in
on revenue streams created by rich television contracts.
GCU, of course, benefited from that instability when it
was invited to make the jump to Division I and join the
depleted Western Athletic Conference beginning in
2013-14.
“For us, the key was to find our niche that we belonged
to, and the WAC seems to be evolving into that niche
as a non-football conference,” said
Keith Baker
, GCU’s
director of athletics. “In many respects, the timing has
been great for us to come in.”
But given what has transpired in just the last two years,
what will the rapidly changing landscape look like four
years from now, when the Antelopes complete their
transition period to Division I and become eligible for
postseason play?
Before looking too far into that crystal ball, it would help
to look at how we got here.
A perfect storm
The chaos of the last two years has been a perfect storm
that has its roots in a 1984 Supreme Court decision
(NCAA v. Board of Regents of University of Oklahoma),
which ruled the NCAA violated antitrust laws by
controlling the television rights of its member schools.
The resulting deregulation allowed conferences and
individual universities to negotiate their own TV deals,
and within a year the number of college football games
shown on television more than doubled. It also led to the
creation of the triumvirate of postseason configurations
known first as the Bowl Coalition, then the Bowl Alliance
and finally the BCS – all of which were monopolized by
larger universities in major conferences that levied their
power to cash in on progressively bigger and better
television deals.
“The age-old problem in Division I athletics is the rich
don’t want to fund the poor and drag them along,” said
Dennis Dodd
, a columnist for CBSSports.com who
covers the NCAA and wrote a series of articles in 2010
examining conference realignment. “Their mindset is
‘We’re the ones who established this tradition and made
most of this money.’”
That mindset, coupled with the growth of cable television
and the boom of the Internet, social media and mobile
technology, brought everything to a head in the past
two years, when each of the five major conferences
landed huge TV contracts.
To reap those kinds of rewards, power conferences have
had to expand their footprint and add more schools.
“
GCU has a number of
things attractive about it.
One is geography. One is
ease of access to the city,
another is the multisport
sponsorship it has, another
is the expansion of its
campus and its academic
programs. It has shown
enormous growth potential.
”
– Interim WAC Commissioner Jeff Hurd
On the opposite page: Thunder descends descends from the
rafters at the Arena rally on Nov. 27 announcing GCU’s
invitation to join the Western Athletic Conference. Photos
by Darryl Webb
Conference
Avg. annual payout
Payout per school
Pac-12 (12 teams)
$250 million
$20.8 million
Big Ten (12)
$248 million
$20.7 million
Big 12 (10)
$200 million
$20 million
ACC (14)
$240 million
$17.1 million
SEC (14)
$205 million
$14.6 million
Cashing in on TV rights
The five major conferences have signed lucrative
TV contracts with ESPN, FOX and/or CBS in the
past two years:
