Realignment 2023: Whither the Pac12?
- Thread starter Zososoxfan
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Florida State really wants out. They’re suing the ACC over GOR and exit fees. They estimate it would cost them 572 million to leave the ACC.
https://www.espn.com/college-football/story/_/id/39167937/florida-state-sue-acc-grant-rights-withdrawal-fee
https://www.espn.com/college-football/story/_/id/39167937/florida-state-sue-acc-grant-rights-withdrawal-fee
Why do you say that?
In general, where a contract stipulates a specific dollar amount as the penalty for breaching a contract, that provision is only enforceable if the dollar amount is a reasonable estimate (at the time the contract is made) of damages that would be difficult to calculate with certainty. I’ll buy that the ACC’s damages from FSU’s departure would be difficult to compute with certainty, but it’s not self-evident to me that the nine-figure exit fee is a reasonable estimate of those damages; it feels more like a punitive amount designed to deter breach. In most jurisdictions, that’s void as against public policy.
So FSU’s lawsuit doesn’t strike me as obviously meritless, but I don’t know much about the particulars.
The orphans of the PAC-X, Oregon State and Washington State, are joining the WCC for two years in pretty much everything other than football.
https://wccsports.com/news/2023/12/22/general-west-coast-conference-adds-oregon-state-and-washington-state-as-affiliate-members.aspx
https://wccsports.com/news/2023/12/22/general-west-coast-conference-adds-oregon-state-and-washington-state-as-affiliate-members.aspx
Looking at what's still homeless, WSU says:
https://wsucougars.com/news/2023/12/22/wsu-athletics-ten-wsu-programs-join-west-coast-conference-as-affiliate-members.aspx
While Oregon State says:
https://osubeavers.com/news/2023/12/22/general-oregon-state-athletics-enters-affiliation-with-west-coast-conference
I'm guessing "continue competing as members of the Pac-12 Conference" is code for independent, effectively?
Curious what the plan is for the baseball programs, since the WCC does in fact have the sport. Maybe they're thinking Big West would a better schedule?
Why not the ACC in baseball- a couple southern swings covers most of the schools? Those baseball programs that have to go to the West Coast every year or two for Stanford & Cal can make another stop.
Unless something's changed, OSU plays baseball on a very high level.
Is there any real threat to all this consolidation leading to the death of many non-revenue sports at the schools that are left behind?
Missouri State to CUSA.
https://footballscoop.com/news/missouri-state-to-join-conference-usa-conference-realignment
https://footballscoop.com/news/missouri-state-to-join-conference-usa-conference-realignment
As I shared in this post some time ago, http://sonsofsamhorn.net/index.php?threads/lawsuit-against-the-ivy-league.39051/post-5462854
St. Francis (NY), as it used to be known in the chryon score scrolls to distingiush it from its NEC sister school St. Francis (PA), just nuked all of its athletic programs. These were nothing special - they had some hoops tradition, as you’d expect from a big city Catholic school, and oddly were the only East Coast school to feature in the national water polo rankings, due to a strong presence of Croats and Serbs - I guess water polo is the bees knees in that part of the world. And they had the usual batch of Olympic and team sports.
Just cancelled them all. No more sports. The Terriers fight no more.
It’s a topic of its own- some colleges are going to fold entirely- there is overcapacity and superfluity. A school could go one of two ways. It’s interesting to compare them to Quinnipiac, a school of roughly the same stripe in college athletics at one time, but with a bigger endowment and student body. Quinnipiac invested big time in its hockey program which got it a national title and lots of visibility. Hockey is a very expensive sport but it’s yielded dividends for the school. St Francis is fighting to stay viable as a school, period, and it pulled the plug. More money spent on sports might have hastened the schools death spiral.
we’re going to see more cuts.
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Richmond is moving their football program from the CAA, where they've been a member since 1986, to the Patriot League.
https://patriotleague.org/news/2024/5/14/patriot-league-announces-university-of-richmond-to-join-league-as-associate-member-for-football.aspx
https://patriotleague.org/news/2024/5/14/patriot-league-announces-university-of-richmond-to-join-league-as-associate-member-for-football.aspx
This is the first realignment move that has me utterly surprised and confused. The Patriot League was a no-scholarship then a partial scholarship league not too long ago. I guess the CAA defections to FBS combined with supersizing the league had Richmond looking for a better fit or a better path to an AQ bid.
Yeah, it's pretty surprising. The CAA is just a mess and I think Richmond was over it. Fans aren't happy though. I think the big question is if any of the other football affiliate schools (Villanova? URI?) are going to follow -- that would help it make more sense, imo.
Q started raising serious cash about 20 or so years ago and it’s still going on. I don’t remember the full history but that arena was something like fifty million bucks.
But the hockey has given Q a national profile that dozens of similar schools don’t have. The trade off must be worth it.
Maybe this has been brought up in another thread, but I haven't seen it.
Landscape of college athletics about to change forever in light of today's agreement.
https://www.cbssports.com/college-football/news/how-historic-house-v-ncaa-settlement-will-impact-college-athletics-on-and-off-the-field-for-years-to-come/
One quibble that I have (that maybe many of you will disagree with): "The entire system of college athletics was built on the idea of an unpaid labor force."
While this may be true in terms of *salary*, there's no way you can say that a Syracuse football player on full scholarship, for example, isn't getting "paid". It may not be what he'd get if this was a true free market, but the value of room, board, tuition, tutoring, clothing, per diem, and more, comes to way over $90,000 a year. Which isn't bad at all for a 19 year old fresh out of high school. If your employer furnished you with all those things, you can bet that the IRS would consider those things as income for tax purposes. So no, the system isn't built on "unpaid labor". Schools are paying out a lot of money in those ways; but not in salary.
Landscape of college athletics about to change forever in light of today's agreement.
https://www.cbssports.com/college-football/news/how-historic-house-v-ncaa-settlement-will-impact-college-athletics-on-and-off-the-field-for-years-to-come/
One quibble that I have (that maybe many of you will disagree with): "The entire system of college athletics was built on the idea of an unpaid labor force."
While this may be true in terms of *salary*, there's no way you can say that a Syracuse football player on full scholarship, for example, isn't getting "paid". It may not be what he'd get if this was a true free market, but the value of room, board, tuition, tutoring, clothing, per diem, and more, comes to way over $90,000 a year. Which isn't bad at all for a 19 year old fresh out of high school. If your employer furnished you with all those things, you can bet that the IRS would consider those things as income for tax purposes. So no, the system isn't built on "unpaid labor". Schools are paying out a lot of money in those ways; but not in salary.
I think the problem developed as more and more those players were recruited to play sports and not really to pursue a degree. For sure that has been the case in the "one and done" or "two and done" years in basketball. And while I think they still have to stay three years in football, some of the student-athletes have been directed into majors intended more to protect their eligibility than to further their intellectual interests. I recall former Vikings running back Robert Smith talking about how he almost left Ohio State because at the time he wanted to take pre-med courses and the program advisors tried to discourage him from doing so because they thought he'd have a hard time maintaining his eligibility if he did. Tuition and tutoring are fine, but of what value is that really to a student athlete if the only purpose of their studies is to keep them eligible to perform their main job of playing their sport so the college can make money off of them?
(Edit--Dopes, I think this discussion should be split off to a thread titled NCAA 2025: The League Where They Play for Pay.)
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One quibble with this post. The "value" isn't anywhere near $90,000 per year, that's the sticker price. The value is far, far lower. This is how college athletics has gotten away with this terrible system for so long, but the courts have rightly seen through this charade.
And this is not just a power 4 conference thing. A URI football player left the team because he felt like he had to choose between football and pursuing an engineering degree. Next time you watch a football or basketball game and they show the players' majors take a look at which ones most of them are in and which ones don't seem to be represented.
The IRS would see it as worth $90,000 (thereabouts), I'm pretty sure. That's what SU charges, so if they give it to you in exchange for you playing football for them, the IRS would count it all as income.
If you're not an athlete or don't have any other scholarship, you're being charged the $80,000 for tuition and room/board, plus athletes get about ten grand in other things (gear, tutoring, per diem, etc) that normal students don't get.
Every time this subject comes up, someone feels compelled to defend the status quo by pointing out the “value” of a scholarship.
It is absolutely true that the IRS would value the scholarship at some level. It is equally true that non-cash compensation for someone who is not attending school for the purposes of receiving a degree is meaningless.
The vast majority of athletes in revenue-generating sports are/were there to compete for “their school.” For decades, they have risked their health and generated tens of millions of dollars for the institution while receiving no monetary remuneration and no long-term health benefits for the injuries they suffered.
That morally indefensible feudal system has finally ended. Thank God.
I am very worried about non-revenue sports in light of this. Athletic departments are going to be on the hook for paying out millions of dollars to athletes, but do we really think that most of the pay will go to field hockey players or men's XC athletes and not football and basketball players?
I know that it's always been that schools have had non-revenue sports, which operate at a deficit. But they haven't ALSO had to pay football and basketball players millions of dollars in actual salary on top of it. I could easily see schools ditching non-revenue sports. Of course, it would have to work with Title IX, so you'd see women's and men's sports go to keep balance. At UConn for example (not that I have any inside knowledge on these discussions), I could see these programs on the chopping block:
- Men's golf (12 athletes)
- Women's tennis (9 athletes)
- Women's rowing (48 athletes)
- Women's XC (16 athletes)
Of course, to keep things equal, any drop in women's sports would require cutting equal numbers of men's spots, which would mean more than men's golf - it would also mean another sport that tends to draw well at UConn. Here are all the men's sports:
Basketball - uh, not cutting that
Football - uh, not cutting that either
Baseball - uh, not cutting that - they're always really good and draw pretty well
Golf - yeah, goodbye
Ice Hockey - always have one of the better teams out there...I don't see them cutting hockey, especially since they just built a new arena
Soccer - this one would be the tough one, right? they're traditionally pretty decent at soccer (with two national titles)
Track & Field - I could see this one going, but what D1 athletic department doesn't have men's T&F? It would be insane, right?
But something's gonna give. They can't afford to just pay out tons of $$ to football and basketball players in salary and not cut costs somewhere.
I know that it's always been that schools have had non-revenue sports, which operate at a deficit. But they haven't ALSO had to pay football and basketball players millions of dollars in actual salary on top of it. I could easily see schools ditching non-revenue sports. Of course, it would have to work with Title IX, so you'd see women's and men's sports go to keep balance. At UConn for example (not that I have any inside knowledge on these discussions), I could see these programs on the chopping block:
- Men's golf (12 athletes)
- Women's tennis (9 athletes)
- Women's rowing (48 athletes)
- Women's XC (16 athletes)
Of course, to keep things equal, any drop in women's sports would require cutting equal numbers of men's spots, which would mean more than men's golf - it would also mean another sport that tends to draw well at UConn. Here are all the men's sports:
Basketball - uh, not cutting that
Football - uh, not cutting that either
Baseball - uh, not cutting that - they're always really good and draw pretty well
Golf - yeah, goodbye
Ice Hockey - always have one of the better teams out there...I don't see them cutting hockey, especially since they just built a new arena
Soccer - this one would be the tough one, right? they're traditionally pretty decent at soccer (with two national titles)
Track & Field - I could see this one going, but what D1 athletic department doesn't have men's T&F? It would be insane, right?
But something's gonna give. They can't afford to just pay out tons of $$ to football and basketball players in salary and not cut costs somewhere.
I'm not really defending the status quo. I just don't agree that these athletes don't get "paid". As someone who has put four kids through college, I can assure you, to NOT have to pay those costs and yet have them get their degrees would be an enormous financial benefit.
But I get what you're saying about many/most of these athletes not really caring about their degree, or the schools not really asking them to be real students. At least in some sports.
Why not cutting football? You can practically save every other sport that way at Uconn, no?
Yes for sure. I think they probably should have done that a few years ago. But that's not going to happen. The AD absolutely values football here.
Yet Benedict was one of only 2 FBS AD's to cancel the season for Covid.
I would feel differently if they were P4, but they're not getting that sweet conference $.
I don't think track and field will be getting cut because so few of the kids are on full scholarships, that the huge rosters help with enrollment.
I don't really understand what the agreement yesterday means. Does it mean schools CAN pay athletes or schools HAVE to pay athletes?
I don't really understand what the agreement yesterday means. Does it mean schools CAN pay athletes or schools HAVE to pay athletes?
I'm not sure. And I think it means the players get a portion of the revenue, even if their sport actually is a net *negative* cost on the athletic department. So for example, UConn football absolutely takes in legit revenue through ticket sales, advertising, and merchandise. But they operated at a $14 million deficit in Mora's first season. So are the players getting a cut of the revenue even if their program is a net negative on the athletic department budget? I'm guessing....yes.
People still get paid even if the business they work for loses money that year, so I guess yet. The question will be how long the school could continue the program with that added expense. But if they swallowed a 14 million dollar deficit, I doubt whatever the student-athletes will be making will make much of a difference.
One thing to remember when doing the calculus with UConn football is that the current P4 paradigm is not permanent. Another set of dominos will fall (probably when the ACC splinters but maybe something more drastic like the Big 10 and SEC breaking away entirely), and maybe UConn finds a spot during the next round of musical chairs that changes the math.
The brand isn't strong enough for them to force their way in, but it is valuable enough to help someone round out a tier 2 conference (eg, the have nots of an ACC split).
The brand isn't strong enough for them to force their way in, but it is valuable enough to help someone round out a tier 2 conference (eg, the have nots of an ACC split).