A few weeks ago, USC and UCLA announced that they will be leaving the Pac-12 Conference in 2024 and joining the Big Ten Conference. This move will destroy over 100 years of tradition, rivalries, and regional conferences as the primary organizing principal for college sports — to say nothing of leaving The Rose Bowl in tatters. It will also leave the Pac-12 financially wounded, and – without the conference taking some steps to strengthen its position in the college sports world – destined for permanent second-tier status, ongoing financial struggles, and eventual demise. Were the Pac-12 to do nothing in response to the departures of USC and UCLA, its members will eventually give up sports and replace them with some combination of video games and virtual reality.
All of the options open to the Pac-12 – standing pat, adding two smaller schools, merging with the Big 12 – written about by the scores of sports commentators who’ve piled on, are the product of small thinking. The SEC – driven by ESPN – went big by adding Texas and Oklahoma and becoming a super conference. The Big Ten – controlled by Fox Sports – went big by adding USC and UCLA and becoming a super conference. The Pac-12 – in conjunction with ESPN – needs to go much bigger than its two rivals by creating a super duper conference.
The Pac-12 is like the Democratic Party: It can just go along doing what it’s been doing for the last 100 years while disappearing into irrelevance, or it can throw out the rules and norms that we’ve lived by until now and save itself and the country.
The Pac-12’s only survival option is to blow up college football. If the future of college football is two super conferences – the Big Ten/Fox Sports and the SEC/ESPN – the Pac-12 needs to create a super duper conference bigger than them both. The conference to be created would be a football-only conference designed to secure the largest possible television contracts from primarily ESPN/ABC/Disney and to a lesser extent from Fox, CBS, and NBC. This new super duper conference would need to include schools in large media markets (Miami, Georgia Tech, TCU, Washington) and schools with unquestioned football credibility (Clemson, Florida State, Notre Dame, Oregon). Its geographic footprint would need to stretch from Miami to Seattle, and infringe where it can on Big Ten territory (Pitt) and SEC territory (Florida State). The Big Ten and the SEC will both have 16 members. The Pac-12/ESPN new super duper conference will need to have at least 20 members — or, even better, 32.
As I said above, this super duper conference would be a football-only, money-making-only conference. All other sports would remain within the current conference structure. So Duke would play football in the super duper conference but continue to play men’s and women’s basketball in the ACC. The ACC would be unchanged. It just wouldn’t any longer have football. (This is coming anyway. Even under the current structure of NCAA college sports, college football will by 2025 break away from the NCAA and become an independent professional sports league.)
Going back to my political-party analogy: The Democratic Party can be like the Pac-12 and vice versa. They can go along the way they are, following rules and norms, while being crushed and eliminated by, in one case, the Republican Party and, in the other, by the Big Ten and the SEC. Or they can throw out the rules and norms and save, in the first case, our democracy and, in the second case, the Pac-12, ACC, and Big 12. Although money drives both, the odds of the Pac-12 doing the smart thing are much greater than the odds of the Democratic Party doing the smart thing.
