The dissolution of the Pac-12 Conference last week hit me harder than I expected.
I grew up mostly in Southern California watching USC and UCLA and cut my teeth as a student journalist at Oregon, so, yeah, sigh. Feels like a favorite TV show got canceled – but much bigger. This isn’t a divot in my yard, it’s a crater you can see from just about anywhere in the western United States.
And I get why Oregon and Washington, and then Utah, Arizona and Arizona State, bailed and signed with other conferences with more-palatable TV deals, following the example set last year by UCLA, USC, and Colorado much more recently.
It’s about the money, of course. Business, not personal, more a matter of operating hundred-million-dollar athletic departments, less about what it’ll mean to individuals, to athletes or alumni, employees and fans of yours or anyone else’s.
I get it, but I hate it. And though I expect I’ll get used to this new world order in a few years, I’ve no clue what to expect college sports to look like then, and so maybe I won’t?
That’s what I’m stuck on.
Is this jarring wave of realignment just natural evolution in a free market? A predictable result of the American ecosystem of haves and have-nots? Winners and losers determined by an industry that’s motivated to deliver a product that will get us, as an audience, to pay to see?
Will we get new rivalries, however far-flung? And will those bring in new viewers and help increase the appetite for college football among a younger generation that really only does appointment viewing for the most high-profile of events?
Or will this departure from tradition be so disruptive it actually destroys the “inventory” that the TV networks were banking on selling us? How top-heavy can you make college football before it loses too much of the pageantry that differentiated it from professional football? Obviously, the networks and streaming services would love to have two versions of the reliably popular NFL to sell us – but do we want two versions of the NFL?
Please, someone get me a crystal ball – or even a Magic 8 Ball – because I’ve got to ask: Is this going to be a healthy disruption or a ruinous one?
“It’s a really good question,” said William Norton, director of McCormack Center for Sport Research and Education at UMass.
Yep, even he, an expert who spends his professional life pondering these issues is like: Reply hazy, try again.
Because we all get it now, if we didn’t already: College football is a TV show. And TV is an especially volatile place these days.
Well, no, college football is so much more than that, but to the people running it, it’s a TV show. Ratings over reverie and regional pride, right?
(And the Pac-12’s ratings didn’t help sell it; the conference’s highest-rated rivalry game last season not including USC or UCLA was Oregon vs. Oregon State, which drew 3.56 million viewers – almost 10 million fewer watched than Tennessee vs. Georgia and more than 13 million fewer than Michigan vs. Ohio State.)
Meanwhile, traditional network numbers continue to plummet, which Norton said leaves companies like FOX and CBS at a momentous crossroads, asking themselves: “How much does live sports hold together our entire content library?”
If they determine it is, in fact, the glue that binds everything else together while helping pull in subscribers to new streaming platforms, they’ll have to stay in on college football as long as they can – but they’re going to be discriminating shoppers.
Meanwhile, the deep-pocketed streaming companies like Amazon and Apple that have given the traditional TV model such a jolt, they haven’t been making money on those ventures. And now they, too, are starting to feel some heat, Norton said: “Wall Street is sort of hitting those streamers back, saying, ‘We’ve given you six years to tell us about how building viewership’s great. Now, you kind of have to show if it’s profitable.’”
And so Apple’s offer to the Pac-12 ($25 million per school, reportedly) wasn’t competitive enough to keep Washington and Oregon around. They weren’t about to turn down more money – reportedly about $32.5 annually to become the 17th and 18th members of the Big Ten – even if it meant turning their backs on Oregon State and Washington State, their in-state rivals for 120-plus years.
My question: How many more times is that going to happen? And what happens when, say, the Big Ten’s broadcast contract expires in 2030? How many more schools will be left standing when the music stops then?
“Is this a fragmented media landscape on top of a fragmented governance structure and will that just sort of break things?” Norton asked Wednesday morning. “I guess my instinct is yes …
“If we’re moving towards a world of have and have-nots, I think the halves are going to be 20-30% of the total college football market, and have-nots is going to be more like 60-70%.”
There’s a petty part of me that hopes the whole thing crumbles and those 20-year-olds in Norton’s classes at UMass – where the football program has been independent since 2016, when the Minutemen left the MAC over a dispute regarding joining the league for all sports – never feel enticed to sit down and watch Washington-Penn State or Oregon-Indiana.
Part of me hopes they’re forever satisfied getting all their snippets of action on social media for free. To hear the rest of us say: “Told you so, you greedy McDucks!”
But really, I hope not. I don’t want college sports to completely cannibalize itself, because it’s important – both football and all the other sports it helps support.
And it’s always been a work in progress, including in 1984, when the Supreme Court ruled that the NCAA’s control of football TV rights violated federal antitrust law and handed off control to the conferences. Or in 2011, when the Pac-10 was becoming the Pac-12 and well ahead of the pack nationally, announcing a new 12-year, $3 billion contract with ESPN and FOX. And then two years ago, when college athletes could finally start signing name, image, likeness endorsement deals.
Change is about the only thing we can bank on – besides maybe reorganization?
“I think people are getting very tired of that fragmentation,” Norton said. “And I could see this actually boomeranging, where we see this big fracture, with some schools getting left out in the cold. Then, maybe five to seven years from now, as the economy changes around media, we might see a sort of a reorganization.”
I like that idea. Let’s ask the Magic 8 Ball what it sees.