Today, Explained - From Pac-12 to Pac-2

Episode Date: September 7, 2023

The Pac-12 college football conference has lost nearly all its teams now that schools like USC and Colorado have announced they’re leaving for rival leagues. The Athletic’s Chris Vannini explains why fans are beleaguered. This episode was produced by Hady Mawajdeh and Siona Peterous, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard and Amanda Lewellyn, engineered by David Herman, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

College football is complicated. Chris Vanini covers college football for a living, and even he thinks it's complicated. College sports has always been built differently, run differently. It would be impossible to explain it to anybody outside of this country, I think. But on Today Explained, we're going to attempt the impossible. We're going to try to explain college football to people inside and even people outside this country.

But why, some say, explain college football? Why choose this as our goal? Why climb the highest mountain? Why does Rice play Texas? We choose to explain college football on today's show and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills. Because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win. And the others, too.

Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit Superstore.ca to get started. Today Explained! My name is Chris Vannini and I'm a senior writer for The Athletic who covers college football. And something is amiss in the college football world right now. Well, the season has finally started.

Welcome to Fort Worth, folks. This is the one the college football world has been waiting for. And it's kind of tail-ending what has been conference realignment the third summer in a row. The ACC just announced that they're inviting Stanford, Cal, and SMU to join the ACC. Yay! Where

geographic movement of teams within conferences has kind of upended the sport. People saying maybe the ACC should now be the ACPC. The Atlantic Coast and Pacific Coast. Yeah, yeah, ACPC. But then you have SMU. Moved schools that have never really played each other into the same conferences moving forward. Why would Oregon State play Oregon? I know. It's dumb. Washington, Washington State. Even dumber. I know. All in the name of television money, And it's created an uncertain future for basically everything beginning next year when a lot of these changes go into effect.

So while fans are excited that football is back and they can watch touchdowns and everything, a lot of fans are worried about the future of their school and their conference or where they sit. An uncertain future for basically everything piqued our interest. We asked Chris how much everything he meant by everything. Certainly college football realignment won't affect the price of blue heat Takis. Well, the SEC and the Big Ten have become the two most powerful conferences in the sport.

That's the Southeastern Conference and the Big Ten, which was once based in the Midwest, but is about to stretch from New Jersey to Los Angeles now. And as they have accumulated more money, more membership, there's a much more uneven playing field than we've ever had before. And so it's just uncertain of, will these conferences want to abide by the same rules as everybody else in the future? Will they want to stage their own postseason instead of competing with everybody else? It's a lot of unknowns, but these are some of the concerns and things that people around the sport are talking about because the talent on the football field and the money is

being consolidated more and more at the very top within these two leagues. If they eliminate divisions and you add Oregon, Washington, UCLA, USC, you know, what happens to the Wisconsin's? What happens to the Michigan State's? What happens to those teams that are really good programs, but they're just a notch below? Do they drop even further below in the conference now? But of course, that's not everything. It sounded a lot like conference realignment was mostly going to affect college football. So we asked Chris if people who don't follow the sport will notice. I don't think casual observers will notice.

And I think that's kind of the point. college sports have had conferences geographically based conferences for more than a century these were formed when you know your team traveled by bus and when your school worked with the nearby schools for academic purposes these conferences were largely geographically based but now they are not so much now you you have teams from Los Angeles joining the Midwest-based conference. The Atlantic Coast Conference is about to add Stanford and Cal from the Pacific Coast. And so it doesn't really make sense if you think about it. But if you're someone who doesn't really think about it, if you just want to watch the biggest games, if you just want to watch the teams you've heard of, this is probably good news for you because you're someone who doesn't really think about it, if you just want to watch the biggest games, if you just want to watch the teams you've heard of, this is probably good news for you because you're going to get more of those games. The concern is who gets left behind.

Who are the schools that are not among the biggest brands that will not be making as much money in the future. And as this game of musical chairs, as it almost feels like, as that winds down, there are schools, there are fans of those schools who worry about getting left behind and what it means not only for their athletic departments, but in some cases, the university as a whole. So a bunch of big, important college football teams are bailing on a bunch of other pretty big, important college football teams. And if this is a pattern that were to continue, it could throw the whole system into flux, leaving morale in American colleges at an all-time low. We asked Chris how we got here. Well, schools have changed conferences over the decades. You might have a South Carolina go from the ACC to the SEC or Tulane pulled out of the SEC

many decades ago because of academic reasons. But they were largely minimal type of moves. But in 1984, the Supreme Court decision between NCAA versus the Board of Regents changed the rules for television. The NCAA's argument that its television plan can have no significant anti-competitive effect since it has no market power must be rejected. As a matter of law, the absence of proof of market power does not justify a naked restriction on price or output. And as a factual matter, it is evidence from the record that the NCAA does possess market power. Instead of the NCAA doing the television deals, conferences and schools could now do their own television deals. And ever since then,

there's been a huge explosion in money directly with the conference and the schools that are making this money. There used to be many, many independent teams that weren't in a conference, Penn State, Florida State, Miami, they were football independents. But then it became more valuable to be in a conference because that's where the television money was. So everybody kind of retreated toward their geographic-based conferences. But as the SEC and the Big Ten, with their larger fan bases, with their larger alumni bases, with their larger TV viewerships, they're starting to

get more television money because they draw better ratings. And then you have schools who are not in those conferences want to get in those conferences. The Southeastern Conference said Texas A&M is set to join the league next year. That gives the SEC 13 members and its first edition since South Carolina and Arkansas in 1992. The Aggies who play Arkansas Saturday in Arlington give the SEC entry into major TV markets such as Houston and Dallas. And now the Pac-12 conference, the Pacific Coast-based conference, is on the verge of collapsing. There's only two teams left because everybody else has left.

And so it's getting consolidated. These conferences that used to be 10, 11 teams are now 18 teams. And it's really kind of a new frontier. How did the Pac-12 basically implode? Well, this started in 2021 when Texas and Oklahoma announced they would leave the Big 12 for the Southeastern Conference. These major brands that were stuck in the conferences that they were stuck in, getting shares that were going to be significantly lower than peers that were in the Big 10 and the SEC, they really didn't have a choice. And that threw everybody into a panic about what other big moves could come.

The next year, USC and UCLA announced they're going to join the Big Ten, the Midwest-based Big Ten conference. Both teams in Los Angeles, the closest school in the Big Ten to Los Angeles, Nebraska. That is how far away those two teams are from the rest of the Big Ten. That left the Pac-12 down to 10 teams. And at that point, you could either expand and try to backfill and get some spots, but the conference didn't want to do that. It decided not to add other Big 12 teams.

And instead, it went through its media rights negotiation in a very vulnerable position. The school presidents also believed that they could get more money than the market kind of determined. They passed on a deal last year with ESPN and Fox that would have paid them about maybe $30 million per year. And when the Pac-12 passed on that, the Big 12 conference jumped ahead of the line and said, basically, we'll do that deal. We'll take that contract. ESPN and Fox agreed to a media rights deal with the Big 12, finalizing the proposed agreement that will renew the partnership through the 2030 to 2031 season. And suddenly the Pac-12

was left without many suitors. It, a couple of weeks ago, presented an Apple TV-based media rights contract to its schools. It wasn't appealing enough to those schools. And so a few more of them, Washington and Oregon, went to the Big Ten. Arizona, Arizona State, Utah, and Colorado went to the Big 12, leaving only Oregon State and Washington State left in what is now a two-team conference. So are they going to change the name to the PAC-2? It's unclear what the future of that is.

They could backfill by adding a bunch of schools from the Mountain West Conference. They could just straight up go join the Mountain West Conference. It's unclear yet how much money is available in the leftover Pac-12 brand and what else they have. But there's not a lot of time because this all goes into place next summer and there's no TV deal in place for the pack two. So they need to move pretty hastily

to figure out what their plans are, either completely abandoned and finally end the conference or try to rally and pull some other people together. Clearly, this is all about money. Can you give us an idea, Chris, of how much money is on the table here? Yes, this is solely about television revenue. The Big Ten last year announced its new seven-year TV deal with Fox, NBC, and CBS worth about $7 billion in total. The individual schools could get upwards of $80 million per year or more. The SEC, the Southeastern Conferences deal with ESPN, could pay schools upwards of $70 million per year. That's a lot more than the Big 12 or the ACC, the Atlantic Coast Conference, where schools are making about

$30 million per year. So that Big 10, that SEC number, that has risen dramatically over the last decade. And it's why those conferences have become the place you want to be if you're a school, because you're just getting so much more money. And that money is more important than the legacy of your college football team, the standing you have in a league that you've established over decades. The feeling is if you're not finding ways to make more money, your competition is. It's just like anything in business. And instead of these schools and conferences viewing themselves as business partners, they view themselves as competition. And as a result, it gets extremely cutthroat.

And you have these century-old rivalries like Oklahoma versus Oklahoma State, Washington versus Washington State, Oregon versus Oregon State, that are going by the wayside now. And it's ultimately because they believe it's a game of musical chairs and you just want to have a seat at the table whenever that ends. Because college sports is going through some major upheaval right now. We may be in a few years in a spot where college athletes are getting paid from the schools. And if the schools have to pay the players,

you want to be in a spot where you have enough money to do that. So the bigger television revenue, the bigger television spotlights on the weekends and having the money you need for the future, that's leading these teams to basically throw all kinds of tradition out the back just for the sake of money. Remind us who's losing here? Well, the biggest losers right now are Oregon State and Washington State, who no longer really have a conference to compete in right now. And they're going to be making far less money in whatever they end up doing. That's less money that can pay off facilities debt. That's less money that can go to benefits for the athletes. And

it's difficult for their fans who want to watch their teams play in bigger games. Now they won't be in as many of those big games. They won't have their rivalries with Washington and Oregon State. Other victims, so to speak, are the athletes. The Pac-12 student athletes now are going to be traveling across country to New Jersey, to Boston, to Orlando to play conference games. That becomes very difficult for their families to come watch them. And so it's all of these changes are being made around the athletes and they're the ones who are impacted the most, yet they're not really receiving any of the benefit of it. Okay, so Chris, if the fans are losing, and the teams are losing, and the players are losing, and their families are losing, and the schools are losing, that kind of sounds like if you just go to the wrong school, literally everyone in your orbit is losing. Is the system just broken? Well, college football is not broken. And that's the biggest, I think, frustrating point out of all of this is that it didn't need to be changed.

Attendance went up last year for the first time in a long time. Ratings are spectacular. College football is the number two most popular sport in the country when you look at all these different kinds of metrics. And so the sport's not broken, but it's going to look dramatically different next year. And you do start to wonder if fans get turned off. OK, so college football isn't broken, but money is threatening to make bigger winners out of the winners and something akin to losers out of the lesser teams. Let's just call them the losers here for short. When we're back on Today Explained, we're going to ask Chris if what we're seeing in

the Pac-12 is going to happen everywhere else. Support for today explained comes from Ramp. Ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time at the end of every month. And now you can get $250 when you join Ramp. You can go to ramp.com slash explained, ramp.com slash explained,

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And you're also going to walk out of here with a degree from the University of... Today Explained is back with Chris Vanini from The Athletic. The Pac-12 has been gutted. We asked him if other college sports conferences can look forward to a similar fate. Well, these big movements

always come at the end of television deals. That's when you're free and more able to move to another conference. And the next time a lot of these deals are going to start coming up is the early 2030s. So while realignment probably pauses for a bit here, it's going to come back. And it's going to come back in the early 2030s when these television deals come up again. Of course, we don't know what the television world is going to look like at that time. That is a big part of this as well. Cable subscribers are going down. Streaming is not exactly filling it up at the level that it was. ESPN is making dramatic cuts. You know, does Apple buy Disney at some point? You know,? We don't know what that future is going

to look like, but that's the next time stuff is going to happen. People wonder, will the Big Ten or the SEC or those schools break away from the NCAA? Will they go do their own thing? Will they create their own league, their own conference separate from that? Could college sports separate from college itself and become semi-professional where they're simply leasing the identity and the markings and brandings of these schools? Everything keeps changing. The world is changing. The television world is changing. So we'll see in seven, eight, nine years how different everything is.

Why do we have this system? Why is it so complicated? Why isn't this just like the NFL where there's like, you know, one league, two conferences? Nobody runs college sports, and that's been a good thing and a bad thing. But when you're facing crises like you are now, it's very much a bad thing. Conferences were formed a century ago when geography was the most important thing. You know, when college football wasn't on television coast to coast, and what was more important is getting fans to your games. You wanted to have games against schools where your

fans could travel to and the other team could travel to so you could fill up your stadium. As television got bigger, as college football became televised coast to coast, it opened up the doors where that wasn't needed as more. Now, Alabama recruits players from California to come play football. And it's just, it's a thing. Like, transportation is a lot easier than it was in 1905, you know? So it just, the world has shrunk. And as a result, these conferences are now losing their original identity and kind of their original purpose. They still exist.

And the NCAA exists really as a heat shield. You know, the NCAA has the insurance. The NCAA is kind of just protects the conferences. The conferences then protect the schools. If schools were to break away or if conferences were to break away, they would still need to create their own organization. They need somebody to enforce the rules. They need somebody to cover liability and all these different things.

And so it's a lot harder to simply break away because you also have conferences and schools that very much do not agree with each other. This crisis, though, as you explained, it really affects more than anyone these two teams that are left in the Pac-12. Is that going to be a big enough stink to promote change in this system? Well, the change would come from the schools, just in the NCAA,

and the schools are the one making these deals. The NCAA has no power, no control, no influence over what the conferences do. And the court system has implied recently that the conferences may be the ones with all the power anyway. And so that's where a lot of the decisions are being made. That's where the power lies. It's just, it's a very messy structure of governance because of how college sports was formed. It wasn't formed as a professional league and you had 10, 15 teams and then two leagues merged into a 30 team conference.

It was always, you had people over in the Southeast, you had people in the Northeast, they played different amounts of games. College football for a century didn't have a true national championship. It was determined via a sports writer poll. That's how we determined it because there's so many teams you can't play everybody.

Only in the last 20 plus years have we developed a real post-season, a real playoff, a real structure to how some of these things work. So college sports has always been built differently, run differently. It would be impossible to explain it to anybody outside of this country, I think. Oh no, we're hoping to do that right now. But that's also the charm of it. For anybody who has gone to a university, like universities play such a different role in this country than they do everywhere else

from research, from camaraderie, from pride. Like you go to a college and most people, you go to a big state school and you've got a sports team and you want your college team to win. And then you graduate and maybe you go back for homecoming and you just, you keep that connection there. And it's always been very, very unique

in the entire world of sports. But as television money has become so big as coaching salaries have become so big, it has felt inevitable that we are inching closer and closer to a professional model because there's so much money and very little of it is going directly to the athletes. So the future of college football is more and more money everywhere. As long as the television money is there. And that is kind of uncertain with the way that world is going with ESPN making cuts with mergers potentially happening down the road. It feels like there is a bubble that is going to burst as it relates to TV rights. The thing is, sports is the only thing keeping cable alive. But I think college sports and sports in general have a major problem with the next generation of

fans. You're not going to create the connection that previous generations had when all you had was a cable bundle and you could watch your local team every day or every Saturday when they came on. Well, I got to say, it's been a minute since I've watched a college football game, but I'm about to become the biggest Pac-2 fan this world has ever seen. They are going to be America's darlings this year. Oregon State in particular should have a pretty good team. They look like a top 20 team. And I think if the season plays out in a way where one of them has a chance to win what is in its final year as the Pac-12, you're going to have a lot of college football fans rooting for the Beavers and rooting for the Cougars. Go Beavers, go Cougars. I'm all in. Chris Venini, TheAthletic.com.

Our show today was produced by Hadi Mawagdi, who was a Division I third-string linebacker back in his day, and Siona Petros, who wasn't. Hadi and Siona had help from Laura Bullard, Amanda Llewellyn, David Herman, and Matthew Collette, who once made an entire podcast about college football. It's called The Season. There was only one season. Check it out. I'm Sean about college football. It's called The Season. There

was only one season. Check it out. I'm Sean Ramos from This One's Today Explained. you