College football’s superhaves and have-nots
In Week 2, both the University of Florida and Michigan State University posted huge, shutout victories. The Spartans shut down Florida Atlantic’s offense, limiting them to just one first down. The Gators blew the University of Alabama-Birmingham out with in a 39-0 win. These wins don’t just speak to offense over defense, but to a larger issue. After all, college football is nothing if not uneven.
The Florida Gators have finished the college football season ranked first in the country twice since 2003. So has LSU. Since 2000, a Southeastern Conference school has been named national champion seven times.
This success has played into the SEC’s lucrative TV deals. In 2008, the SEC signed a 15-year deal with ESPN worth more than $2 billion. This, combined with a $800 million-plus deal with CBS, makes the SEC the most widely available conference for many TV viewers in the US. There may not be a literal SEC network, but with a game of the week airing nationally on CBS each Saturday – not to mention a SEC-produced telecast of another game plus additional games on ESPN – it’s not needed.
It’s not unfair to say the SEC is one of the most important conferences in college football. If they’re on top, though, the Big 10 and Pac-12 aren’t far behind.
It’s not just that the Big 10 has had 23 Bowl Championship Series appearances since the series’ inception in 1998, they also have their own network and a deal with ESPN that lasts until 2016 and is worth $1 billion. The Pac-12 has a similar deal with ESPN and FOX, worth $225 million a year for 12 seasons, and they’ve just launched their own network as well.
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No other conference has TV deals that approach this kind of money. According to a 2009 report, the closest is the Big 12, who has a deal worth $480 million. Other conferences make far less: Conference USA recently signed a deal worth about $7 million per year.
Reading about TV deals can seem inside baseball. Who cares how much money conferences make? But in the light of a recent report on NCAA athletics, it’s worth bringing up the just how big the Big 10, Pac-12 and SEC are. Why? The migration of schools to those conferences feels like the beginning of an age of supersized conferences.
The Pac-12 has recently added two schools (Utah and Colorado). The Big 10’s also expanded, adding Nebraska. All now have 12 schools, with Texas A&M likely to become the SEC’s 13th. They’re now packed with some of the top names in college football: over half of the current AP Top 25 are from the Big 10, SEC and Pac 12.
This only shows how tight competition within those top conferences is and how high standards are for those programs; this isn’t like the NFC West where a losing team can make the postseason. It’s no surprise their TV deals are so valuable. But it raises a larger question: aren’t the players entitled to a cut of the vast sums of money flowing into the conference?
Recently, The Atlantic published a story on the fallacy of college athletics, a model which allows schools to rake in gigantic sums of money. Both the SEC and Big 10 made close to, or over, $1 billion last season. Yet, this system allows coaches to sign million dollar contracts and pays the players nothing.
The Atlantic‘s story should have been more shocking than it felt, but anybody that pays attention to college sports should have seen it coming. As college sports explode in popularity, with so much money flowing into the NCAA, why shouldn’t the players get a share – in above-board fashion?
Payments to players in college football have a checkered history. In a sport where a free education is considered payment enough, schools have sweetened the pot to attract players, be it with rent-free apartments, cars or straight cash. Still, get caught and you pay dearly; SMU had its football program completely suspended. Other schools got off more lightly: USC had its 2006 title revoked, lost scholarships and was banned from bowl games for two seasons. while Ohio State vacated an entire season, fired a football coach and put itself on two years’ probation.
So, why should athletes make nothing, especially when such enticements already exist? Why is an education considered enough when the school is profiting from your labor? Is it fair, especially when fans can buy your jersey? Arguing in favor of a model of amateurism only goes so far: as The Atlantic pointed out, even the Olympics let professionals compete now.
The article also raises a nightmare scenario for the NCAA: big time college sports existing elsewhere. On Pardon The Interruption recently, Tony Kornheiser floated the idea of larger conferences seceding from the NCAA to form their own football conference, with a separate playoff and a model that pays the athletes. With the ongoing superconferences movement, this may become more and more plausible.
Kornheiser was speaking somewhat glibly, but there’s an interesting idea there. If the NCAA lets schools pay players, wouldn’t it go across the board, covering tennis, track, et al? They can’t play favorites, so to speak, paying only for revenue-making sports, especially considering the influence of Title IX legislation. That seems like the reason above all others why a system that pays the players is unlikely.
So why not just abscond, take the programs to a place where they don’t have to follow that rule? It’d be easier to recruit players, not to mention finally set up a long-awaited football playoff. With their own networks, it’s not as if they’d be frozen out by the NCAA.
However, this would create not only a super-conference super-have, but a selection of conference have-nots. If all the major talent flows to the bigger programs that can afford to pay players, what does it do to those who can’t, to those in Conference USA or the Sun Belt? Would NCAA football be left rummaging through the leftovers? Unless the NCAA gets itself together and comes up with a model fair to those who are actually putting their bodies on line, that fate, or something like it, seems inevitable.
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