After weeks of heated speculation and escalating momentum, another round of conference shakeups reignited in earnest this weekend, signaling the possibility of an imminent upheaval in the mercurial landscape of college sports.
Early Sunday, the Atlantic Coast Conference confirmed that it would add Syracuse University and the University of Pittsburgh, making it, with 14 members, the largest football conference of the six major Division I leagues. The ACC’s unexpected announcement was just one of several fast-moving squalls on the conference horizon that sped up over the weekend involving institutions from North Carolina to Texas.
Syracuse and Pitt’s decisions were a blow to the Big East, which was already mourning the loss of its founder and first commissioner, Dave Gavitt, who died on Friday. And the ACC’s commissioner, John Swofford, hinted that his league might not be finished with its search for more members: While the conference is “comfortable” with 14, he told reporters, it is not “philosophically opposed” to 16. (The league evidently has options: Syracuse and Pitt were reportedly two of at least 10 institutions to inquire about joining the ACC, Swofford told The New York Times.)
Meantime, Texas and Oklahoma are also getting serious about leaving their faltering league, the Big 12, possibly to join the Pac-12. Regents of both universities are scheduled to meet on Monday to discuss their conference affiliation, with action possible, the Austin American-Statesman reported. Texas has also reportedly reached out to the ACC.
Pac-12 Commissioner Larry Scott—who courted Texas last year but lost out to an 11th-hour rescue of the Big 12—is reportedly working on a deal that would allow Texas to join his expanded league and still keep its new Longhorn Network.
But the Big 12’s troubles aren’t limited to the possible loss of its two biggest programs. Texas Tech and Oklahoma State are reportedly pursuing the Pac-12 as well. And Texas A&M appears headed for the SEC.
The weekend’s upheaval comes at a time when conference affiliation has assumed unparalleled importance for many major-college programs. Media-rights contracts have driven much of the recent reshuffling: Leagues with expansive geographic reach can secure footholds in key television markets, and are able to bring in ever-higher sums from media companies with a seemingly insatiable appetite for college sports.
Hefty payouts to institutions in conferences with the richest deals—programs in the Pac-12, for instance, will eventually receive an average of $21-million annually from the league’s $3-billion media contract—have proven irresistible to many institutions.
“In all my years of collegiate administration, I’ve never seen this level of uncertainty and potential fluidity among schools and conferences,” Swofford, the ACC commissioner, told The New York Times. “Schools are looking for stability.”
The conference maelstrom troubled the NCAA’s president, Mark Emmert, who predicted that the reshuffling would have consequences for athletes and coaches forced to travel more than 1,000 miles from, say, Pittsburgh to South Florida.
“This is not about playing Monopoly and moving pieces around on the board,” Emmert told USA Today on Sunday, not long after the ACC’s announcement. “These are real institutions with real students and real coaches and real programs, and it’s much, much more complex than playing a simple game.”
