Pac-12’s demise is a warning: No one is safe anymore to college football realignment

BLOOMINGTON – IU welcomed Oregon and Washington into the Big Ten near the end of last week’s tumultuous latest round of conference consolidation, because when you’re standing at the edge of a cliff you don’t turn into the wind.

“IU Athletics is pleased to welcome the Universities of Oregon and Washington to the Big Ten Conference," AD Scott Dolson said in a statement.

“As fellow AAU members that share Indiana University’s commitment to being a world-leading research academic institution, both universities are a great fit for the Big Ten academically. Athletically, they share our commitment to having a broad-based athletic program that competes at the very highest levels within the conference and on the national stage.”

That stage has been altered to the point of unrecognizability now, the Big Ten effectively killing the Pac-12 with the Big 12 as its accomplice last week. They were both essentially just contractors, hired out by broadcast partners intent upon streamlining college sports at the expense of all cultural agency, Wal-Martizing for cold, bloodless efficiency that which found its greatest strength in its regionality.

How long will places like Indiana be immune?

Doyel: Tradition in college football is dead. TV is all that matters. Just ask Pac-12.

'This is all about money.' Oregon, Washington joining Big Ten 'about survival.'

For a long time, people like me told people like you conference expansion/realignment/contraction/consolidation was about television markets. To an extent, this was true. It just painted an incomplete picture.

Across the majority of its existence, college sports has been built financially upon a retail revenue model. In-person experience — buying tickets, attending games, asking for donations one to one — drove the bottom line that paid for everything. Go as far back as you’d like, to the World War II-era construction of stadiums that sat tens of thousands. This was the way you made money.

This started to change 30-40 years ago, when the expansion of cable television gave rise to the financial sway of television networks. For a time, these were symbiotic relationships. The networks were glad to have programming as their demands expanded, and conferences enjoyed the security of longer-term partnerships opening new and widening revenue streams.

Eventually, as is always the case, the race became too ratty. Networks amassed ever more influence and authority over college sports, their dollars impossible to turn down. Conference TV networks, a boondoggle for those who did them right, only further wedded those leagues to partners who made them go; ESPN for the ACC and SEC, Fox for the Big Ten.

These relationships became increasingly one-sided until college athletics became so beholden to television money it broke itself against whichever rocks broadcast partners demanded to make more. The Longhorn Network begat SEC expansion in the early 2010s. The Big Ten Network prompted the arrivals of Nebraska, Maryland at Rutgers, at the expense of three separate former conferences.

Revenues drove ever higher, and with them spending. Facilities became an arms race. Coaches’ salaries exploded. So too did departmental spending on support staff — administrators, quality control personnel, etc.

As the money got bigger, the questions about why athletes weren’t seeing a share of it got louder and more frequent. Challenges to NCAA rules regarding athlete compensation became more refined.

Legally, the amateur model began to wobble, yet like the nobles in Poe’s “Mask of the Red Death,” college sports’ leaders locked themselves in their castle and attempted to dance away the plague. In its various forms, athlete compensation entered the system anyway, just as cord-cutting cleaved into cable and rolled back TV revenue growth.

It’s obviously more complicated than that, but at least as a rough outline, that’s how we wound up where we are today. Smart people in college athletics expect revenue sharing to adjoin or replace NIL in the near future. TV contracts that once climbed endlessly upward have begun to plateau. Access to the College Football Playoff looks like the next golden parachute.

And now, here we are. Athletic departments have made themselves prisoners to revenues that are paring down just as a huge new cost (revenue sharing) approaches. Whatever sacred cows were left have been discarded, along with one of the oldest and most tradition-soaked conferences in the country.

Which begs a simple yet disturbing question: What’s next?

If you or I had the answer to that billion-dollar question, we’d be set. As it stands, presidents, chancellors and ADs across the country are left to sweat that question. At schools in the entrenched conferences (the Big Ten and SEC) without established football programs — and the accompanying box-office appeal — that conversation is uncomfortably uncertain.

Efficiency is the order of the day now. Everything streamlined. Maximize revenue, even if at the expense of someone else. Like a big box store plowing through local business.

For the past 10 years, general wisdom has been that Big Ten membership for schools like Indiana insulated them from consolidation’s greatest dangers. But if college sports are prepared to sacrifice an entire conference, are the castle walls really so safe anymore?

'The power of broadcast TV': Big Ten readies for new media deal with NBC, CBS, Fox

It is virtually impossible to argue college athletics are on a healthy path to the future. Any leader in the field calling for a federal solution to name, image and likeness now, suggesting the monetization of college sports has gotten out of control and must be bounded by Congress, should be laughed out of the room. The naked pursuit of money at all costs is a self-defeating spiral, but it’s in charge now.

Testimonials coming out of what will probably be remembered as the last days of the Pac-12 have been striking. Empty promises, late-hour deals, last-minute reversals of fortune, it all makes for a great and distracting soap opera.

But while you sympathize with Oregon State and Washington State, or laugh at the idea of the ACC vetting Stanford and Cal, consider what was left unsaid by everything filtered into the media across the past week, from the dying embers of a conference that barely more than a decade ago enjoyed the richest of those coveted media rights deals:

If it can happen to us, why don’t you think it can happen to you?

Follow IndyStar reporter Zach Osterman on Twitter: @ZachOsterman.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Pac-12 death a warning no one is safe in college football realignment