Add the Ducks, Add the Bucks

Those of you who read this column regularly may have taken notice that now and then I opine in favor of paying college athletes. Well. Okay. Fine. It seems like I do that every other week. 

But that’s only because the gods of college sports keep feeding me more evidence. The latest piece is the surprise announcement that the Oregon Ducks and the Washington Huskies would be joining the Big Ten next year, only a couple weeks after the Big Ten commissioner said that that wasn’t likely to happen any time soon. 

Why the reversal? Money, specifically television and streaming money. All of the big conferences are negotiating or have just inked new media deals. And as they lock into multi-year contracts they want two things: big markets and a presence in all four U.S. time zones so that their games can be on live all day and into the evening on every autumn Saturday, not to mention weeknight evenings whenever possible. Markets and reach are worth a lot of money. 

That’s why the Big Ten picked off Rutgers and Maryland several years ago and that’s why they added UCLA and USC before their TV contract came up for renewal. 

But once UCLA and USC were on their way out, the PAC 12 was on a slippery slope to oblivion. Colorado bolted for the Big 12 and then, just after Washington and Oregon announced that they would decamp to the Big 10, Utah, Arizona and Arizona State followed Colorado. In fact, the Big 12 moved up their TV package renewal specifically to try to protect it from these kinds of raids. Because the PAC 12 lagged in this, they will soon find themselves down to only four schools. 

Unless they can add some teams back, they’ll be history. And, in fact, just the opposite is likely to happen, as Stanford and Cal are looking to join the Atlantic Coast Conference.

Oregon and Washington looked around, saw that their ship was sinking, and jumped it just in time. The reason they were able to get on board the big boat is that they accepted less money from the Big Ten’s new media contract. Wisconsin and each of the other 15 schools that were part of the conference when the deal was announced will get about $60 million a year, while Oregon and Washington will get half that, but with increases over time. That’s still more than the Ducks and the Huskies would have received had they stayed in the PAC 12. 

College sports bigwigs love to talk about tradition. Well, let’s review. The Big Ten, once a solidly Midwest institution, now extends from coast to coast. The Rose Bowl, once the storied contest between the Big Ten champion and their PAC 12 rival, is now just another bowl game. And the PAC 12 itself, a conference that has existed since 1916, is likely to go belly up. And just to underscore the inanity of it all, two of the remaining PAC 12 teams, ensconced on the Pacific ocean, may join the Atlantic Coast Conference.

The idea that big time college sports is anything but a business is made still more ludicrous by these realignments. The only world in which any of this makes sense is one in which it is being done to capture big markets in all the time zones in order to get the most lucrative TV and streaming deals. And as for all those “student athletes”? Well, heck, they’ll get in a ton of study time as they fly from New Jersey to California and back.

This is all happening because the schools, and their coaches and administrators,  want to make still more money. When tradition gets between them and the ATM they shove it aside like a linebacker dispensing with a tackling dummy. And to make sure that their slice grows exponentially, they want to make sure that none of that money goes to the guys on the field, playing the game, and risking, what are in too many cases, life-long injuries. 

The gods of big time college sports love to blather on about tradition, but the only legacy they really want to protect is the time-honored rule of not paying their players. 

A version of this piece originally appeared in Isthmus.