I don’t want Texas and Oklahoma to join the SEC. I could get used to OU, mainly because of the affinity I have for them via Bob Stoops and his tie to Steve Spurrier and the 1996 Gator team. I especially don’t want Texas to join, though.
But it doesn’t matter what I think, because the people who throw around tens of millions of dollars on the regular are the ones who will make the decisions. UF is trying to finish up an $85 million complex for its athletes. The early estimates I’m seeing from media speculation is that each member of a 16-team SEC could make almost that much (around $70 million) each year from media rights alone, before donations and ticket sales come into view.
That kind of money is hard to turn down, so the Longhorns and Sooners will get their invitations if they want them. It’s an accident of history that changes in the technology of media delivery — away from traditional cable/satellite and towards Internet streaming — are ultimately turning college head football coaches into decamillionaires. Live events are the last bastion for the old model, so the entities that supply them will command immense premiums.
The more time goes on, the less I like the changes derived from the SEC expanding a decade ago. I’d sooner go back to the 12-team SEC than go ahead with the proposed 16-team model. That’s not to say that I haven’t gotten used to Texas A&M and Missouri in the league, but this far along I could still take them or leave them.
I have to remind myself that ultimately, conference membership is anything but static. Where you as a person began determines what is natural to you.
I was born in the mid-1980s and have no strong memories of the SEC before Arkansas and South Carolina joined. People ten years older than me might’ve felt the same way in 2011 that I do now, wondering what an additional two teams will feel like when I’m not fully normalized to the last two teams that joined the league.
The 2010s were a decade of conference change. It’s far from alone. The 2000s had the ACC raiding the Big East with dominoes tumbling down from there. The 1990s saw Penn State join the Big Ten, the SEC expand, the Southwest Conference fall apart, and the birth of the Big 12. The ACC, SWC, and Pac-8 conferences added members in the 1970s. The ACC also lost a member in 1971, and the SEC lost two in the 1960s. The 1950s included Big Nine becoming the Big Ten again, the Big Seven becoming the Big Eight, and the birth of the ACC.
That’s only a quick summary of major conference changes. If you go down the line of the non-power conferences and teams moving up or down a division, the only constant theme is changing.
Even during the long haul from 1932 to 1991 when the SEC merely lost three teams and didn’t add any newcomers, the number of games each team played in a year could change. To pull a random year out of the air, in 1962 Ole Miss won the league with a 6-0 record while Bama finished second at 6-1. Five teams played six SEC games, six teams played seven games, and one played eight.
The SEC would standardize on a six-game conference schedule in 1974, which it bumped up to seven in 1988 and eight in 1992. Other leagues made things more uniform over time as well. Like a cloud of dust and gas coalescing into a star, planets, and moons over time, the pulls of various college football centers of gravity started the process of putting things in order long before anyone ever thought to string the letters B-C-S together.
The romanticized, nostalgic image of a completely decentralized sport that could be wildly different from one region to another is well and truly out of date. In the absence of a strong central authority — no, the NCAA doesn’t apply if you examine the power structures at all — college football is consolidating just like so many other industries in America. It’s a business, if you haven’t noticed, and the rules of business apply to it much the same as any other.
The more it consolidates and makes things explicitly about money, the less any of it makes sense. Why, exactly, to institutions of higher learning run minor league sports franchises? And to a larger point, why do institutions of higher learning sponsor sports that have serious risks to the long term health of the players’ brains?
If you stare at the contradictions too long, you’ll lose the plot entirely. That’s why I think so many people around the sport work so hard to avoid doing so. Just last week, Dabo Swinney again said he was against the professionalization of college football even though he is currently on a ten-year, $93 million contract. The athletes may be something less than professionalized, but no one else is. It wouldn’t profit Dabo much to rethink his stance here even though he catches heat every time he expresses it, so he doesn’t.
So, I’m a lot more zen about this new round of conference realignment than I was a decade ago. I was much more excited about that one, not the least because I wrote for a site that covered the entire SEC at the time. It was months of periodically being on high alert, as the Big Ten announced its plan to go to 12 teams in December of 2009 and the SEC didn’t add Texas A&M and Missouri until fall of 2011. Now I’m still following the news closely but I’m much more resigned than excited.
If it’ll happen, it will. If the eight Big 12 leftovers can concede enough money in the next contract, betting that taking a pay cut in the Big 12 is better than sinking down to G5 status by pilfering AAC teams, then it won’t. But it probably will at this point.
My SEC — the one created in 1992 — has been gone for a while now. It’s different than my father’s SEC of ten teams, and my two-year-old son’s SEC will almost certainly be the 16-team version. It’ll be all he knows, at least until the next round of realignment after this one helps to break the illusion that the world as he first understands it isn’t permanent. The 14-team SEC we’ve been living through since 2012 will be a weird transitional phase, the death throes of the old order before the new one with at least one 16-team superconference, NIL, one-time transfer exemptions, a 12-team playoff and whatever else was born.
That’s life, I guess.