As the PAC-12, one of the five major collegiate athletics conferences, collapsed amidst the broader conference realignment this Fall, I realized an unfortunate truth. At the collegiate level, excellence matters more than competition — but there really shouldn’t be a difference between the two.
To understand the prioritization of excellence over competition, we need to backtrack. In college athletics, each school belongs to an athletic conference with about a dozen colleges who play each other consistently. At the end of each sport’s season, these colleges crown a conference champion in a final tournament or meet. Conference championships are the highest stakes of competition that all teams are guaranteed entry to. For example, Occidental’s soccer teams play in the Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference’s (SCIAC) championship tournament every year, but they have to win the SCIAC champs to automatically make it deeper into the postseason and play in the NCAA Division III tournament.
As delegated by the NCAA, or National Collegiate Athletic Association, all of the SCIAC’s member schools are Division III athletic programs. Division III schools can’t offer athletic scholarships, while schools in the NCAA’s two higher divisions, Division I and II, can. It’s a major distinction between the three levels that accounts for the distribution of talent between them.
As college athletics’ governing body, the NCAA sets rules for colleges and conferences, and administers national championships in each division. But the NCAA doesn’t manage colleges’ media rights (synonymous for television broadcasting) contracts. These contracts — which are instead negotiated between athletic conferences and media companies — are massive.
In 2022, the Big Ten conference, one of the five major DI conferences, announced the NCAA’s largest broadcasting contract ever — a seven-year, seven-billion-dollar agreement with Fox, CBS and NBC from 2023 to 2030. It’ll send a yearly payout of between 80 and 100 million to each of the Big Ten’s 18 member schools. (And yes, the Big Ten is a gross misnomer. Couldn’t the conglomerate push just a fraction of that seven billion into a rebrand?) Since some conferences have more lucrative media deals than others, schools will sometimes jump ship for more money.
With the PAC-12’s media deal expiring in the 2024-25 school year with negotiations for a new one stymied, some changes were expected. But the exodus that happened was not.
The PAC-12, which included West Coast powerhouses like UCLA, Oregon and USC, disintegrated with all but two members — Washington State and Oregon State — packing their bags in 2024 for three of the other four major conferences. Among them, Stanford and Cal made huge financial concessions to join the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC), avoiding being left in an unrecognizable, contractless PAC-12. To join the ACC (another great misnomer), they agreed to receive a payout of 30 percent that of other member’s shares for the next seven years.
It’s in every involved college’s best financial interest to get into the right conference to secure a good media rights payout, but turning media deals into athletic departments’ number one priority has changed the nature of athletic conferences. Conferences are no longer friend groups of similar schools using the cohort to measure their performance.
That’s what competition is — seeing how good you can be against someone else. Conferences, driven by media rights deals, have become like cliques. These cliques hurt most members who aren’t the group’s elites and exclude non-members completely. In college sports, the conference cliques have excluded lower-revenue schools with mainly regional fanbases, like Oregon State and Washington State. Their yearly media deal payouts might have peaked with the PAC-12, meaning that their athletic budgets and the quality of teams they’ll field will decline, or at best plateau. Schools like Cal and Stanford who managed to squeak into the ACC clique will at least be able to recruit an elite level of talent similar to what they have, but with the aforementioned financial windfall, this consistency will be in no small part due to the successful brands they’ve cultivated.
In addition to the relaxation of PAC-12 rivalries with the conference’s death, existing rivalries in the ACC and Big Ten will dissipate, too. Both new mega-conferences will have 18 teams by 2024, and colleges will simply play fewer games against any one school. This matters less for fans — because rivalry games still will happen — than it will for the teams themselves. By playing a less consistent, repetitive schedule, teams won’t have a benchmark of how good they really are within their conference. In a conference with only a dozen teams, there’s a tangible difference between beating the fourth best team in the conference and beating the seventh best team.
In an 18-team conference, the same wins are less conclusive. There’s more room to be average, and only a handful of schools will end up competing to be the very best. With less important conference play, the average quality of competition will be lower. But good competition wasn’t the aim with the formation of mega-conferences — it’s excellence. Creating one or two football juggernauts made for television, for media companies to tailor their marketing to, and ultimately profit from, is the goal.
This shouldn’t be what college sports is about at any level. I root for Oxy teams because they represent my school and have a chance to win close games against SCIAC rivals, not necessarily because they’re the best. We have professional leagues for absolute excellence, anyways.
If there’s any silver lining in the death of the PAC-12, conference realignment and its changes to conferences’ cultures, it’s that the NCAA inches closer to completely dropping the facade of “amateurism” for Division I student athletes. College athletics is a massive business, and athletes (especially football and basketball players) should be compensated fairly for what is, in reality, their profession. The PAC-12 diaspora has sent schools into conferences without a shared identity, lessening the ability for teams to tangibly improve by beating opponents whose skill level they know. The justifiable avarice of athletic departments, coupled with media companies’ exaltation of elite football teams, has inadvertently muddled the ability for college sports teams to know who they’re competing against. And if you don’t know your competition, it can be hard to gauge yourself and the ways you can improve.
Contact James Miller at jmiller4@oxy.edu
