Mandel’s Mailbag (realignment edition): What to make of college football’s chaos
In a normal week in the offseason, I put up the submission form for Mailbag questions late afternoon on Monday and you guys post around 30-50 responses. This week, I had more than 300 in the first 12 hours.
Realignment for the win (again).
I want to get to as many as I possibly can, so this week’s Mailbag will be a little different than usual: More questions, shorter answers.
It’s still super-sized, though — much like college conferences.
Note: Submitted questions have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Why hasn’t the Big Ten added Cal and Stanford already? It seems like a no-brainer from both sides. The schools get a very cushy landing spot as their conference collapses around them, and the Big Ten gets to add two very highly regarded academic institutions with pretty good top-to-bottom athletic departments. — Nathan J., Whitefish Bay, Wis.
Since Stanford and Berkeley apparently are two of the four most unattractive athletic programs in the Pac-12, can we put to rest this curious notion that academics matter in the world of sports? — Mike C., Blaine, Mich.
Mike, thanks for answering Nathan’s question. But I’ll add a few thoughts.
The Big Ten hasn’t added them because Fox probably doesn’t think they’re valuable enough to merit paying the Big Ten even more money. And as much as presidents claim to care about academics, that goes out the window if it means their share of the pie gets diluted from $75 million a year to $70 million a year.
There’s a degree of recency bias in realignment, and I wonder if this would be a different story had the Pac-12 imploded around 2016 when Stanford had Christian McCaffrey and Bryce Love and was coming off three Rose Bowls in four years. It had no problem garnering eyeballs then. But if you’re a TV network looking at the broader picture, that was more an aberration than the norm for Stanford, which has since regressed to 4-8/4-2/3-9/3-9 and faces an uphill climb in the transfer portal era.
I don’t think those schools’ hopes are dead. They are surely lobbying the Big Ten hard right now, and the conference may decide it makes sense to have a full pod of six West Coast schools and/or find it appealing to get two schools that produce a whole lot of Olympians and national titles in the non-revenue sports. But they could also come in and be two more Rutgers’ in football.
If Florida State can find a way to get out of the ACC grant of rights without having to pay the equivalent of the fortune of a small nation, how many of the other ACC schools would follow suit? Would that lead to the fall of the ACC similar to the Pac-12? — Griffin M.
If I’m the ACC, I’m pretty nervous. As the Pac-12 found out, none of these leagues besides the SEC and Big Ten are too big to fail.
There’s no obvious solution to the ACC’s revenue gap. Some people think Florida State is bluffing. I believe the school is dead serious about bolting, though probably not in time for 2024. And the only known way to get out that GOR cleanly is for the majority to dissolve it. If FSU only convinced, say, Clemson and Virginia Tech to follow suit, and it turns out none of them can get out of it, they could all owe hundreds of millions to the ACC.
This might help explain why the conference appears to be seriously considering adding Cal, Stanford and even SMU despite what seems like a logistical nightmare for very little upside financially. If the conference is guaranteed a pro-rata from ESPN for adding new members, then hey, the more you add, the harder it’s going to be to build a majority, right? In the meantime, they could bring in those schools at a half-share and use the other half to show Florida State and Clemson their utmost appreciation.
Whatever the case, the climate inside the ACC is unhealthy. It’s not good for business when one school is openly threatening to leave the conference and others are publicly voicing their frustrations. It feels very similar to the eight years or so of angst that preceded the Pac-12’s demise, the big difference being the Pac-12’s GOR had an approaching end date, the ACC’s does not.
Isn’t the inevitable next step in all this consolidation getting rid of the teams that provide no value? How long until the TV execs order the Big Ten to axe a Northwestern or have the SEC kick Vandy to the curb? — Dan in Los Angeles
It’s absolutely the inevitable next step.
The Big Ten is a TV property now. Fox, which owns 61 percent of the Big Ten Network, now controls the conference’s entire TV rights. Fox had a big hand in getting USC and UCLA out of the Pac-12 and into the Big Ten. And when Oregon and Washington found themselves in flux last week, Fox kicked in the necessary money to make it happen — mostly so they could have more Friday night and late-night Saturday games.
The Pac-12 died so that a TV network could get a 1.0 rating for a Friday night Oregon–Minnesota game.
Fox is a for-profit business. It doesn’t care about preserving rivalries or kicking Oregon State and Washington State fans in the stomach. It cares about ratings and ad dollars. And if it really wanted to maximize both, its dream scenario would be a world where Ohio State plays its entire schedule against Michigan, Penn State, USC, Oregon, and never Rutgers, Northwestern, Indiana or Purdue.
The last barrier of defense is university presidents, who I want to believe would not cross that line. But as I’ve said many, many times, the likely end game here is not the Big Ten or SEC acting alone, but an outside entity with a few billion dollars to play with — be it the networks, be it Apple, be it a venture capital firm — putting together an English Premier League of college football with the top 24-32 brands across the sport (most of whom now reside in the Big Ten or SEC).
I’d recommend reading the book “The Club,” about the 1990s origins of the Premier League. You’ll see how eerily similar the circumstances that led to its creation were.
