Conference realignment’s winners and (many) losers after the latest upheaval

Friday’s realignment moves further consolidated college sports into two major conferences and everyone else.
The tectonic shifts produced one of college athletics’ wildest and most historic days. This is still sports — there are always winners and losers. After Friday featured some of the most depressing fireworks in history, let’s sort them out.
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Here’s who came out on top and who’s staring at a bleak future. Spoiler alert: There are a lot more losers than winners in this round of realignment.
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Winners: College administrators
Never fear, those seven-digit paychecks aren’t going away. Suits and ties at dozens of schools got together and held votes — and the final outcome was the implosion of the Pac-12, a foundational conference, and a college football landscape that is worse for fans and athletes and makes no sense geographically.
But presidents, chancellors and athletic directors will be congratulated by regents and rewarded with more money that (for now) will continue to not trickle down to athletes. They can pat themselves on the back for enriching their universities’ pockets and claiming that student-athlete welfare is at the forefront of every decision they make while their decisions prove the opposite.
Everyone is out for themselves. No one is in charge. Often, this produces comedy and chaos. But sometimes, like Friday, it produces self-interested, financially motivated decisions that make the landscape worse for everyone but a select few.
Losers: Oregon State and Washington State
Nobody lost more Friday. The schools’ prospects for future conference membership are bleak, and their television revenue will be a fraction of what they earn in the Pac-12. In the past fiscal year, the Pac-12 distributed $37 million to members. The Mountain West distributed $6.6 million. For now, it looks like the Apple Cup and Civil War will continue, but while rivals Oregon and Washington go to the Big Ten, the Beavers and Cougars are headed for a reality that’s every Power 5 member’s biggest fear.
Winner: Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark
He took a risk and re-upped with the Big 12’s TV partners ESPN and Fox rather than put the league on the open market like George Kliavkoff did with the Pac-12. The decision to jump the Pac-12 in line as both networks sorted out their shaky financials (ESPN is in the midst of layoffs and declining revenue) put the Big 12 in stable position and made it the better choice for a third of the Pac-12 when the league’s media deal negotiations went sideways. And that negotiation almost certainly would’ve played out differently if the Big 12 had waited to negotiate with other suitors.
Loser: Former Pac-12 commissioner Larry Scott
Kliavkoff will go down as the commissioner whose failure to secure a satisfactory TV deal spelled the end for the Pac-12, but it was Scott’s mismanagement of the conference that put Kliavkoff in a do-or-die position. Fewer than 12 years after signing the most lucrative television contract in college sports history, the Pac-12 has essentially dissolved.
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The silliness of a wildly expensive league headquarters was emblematic of the league’s issues but failing to land a distribution partner for the Pac-12 Networks was his biggest misfire. He also launched those networks at the expense of welcoming almost half the Big 12 into the league. If that decision plays out differently, people would have long ago written the Big 12’s obituary instead of penning the Pac-12’s on Friday.
Kliavkoff’s more recent failure was the Pac-12’s knockout blow, but Scott’s priorities and decision-making served as a series of body blows for the conference that led to his exit in 2021.
Loser: Pac-12 commissioner George Kliavkoff
Kliavkoff inherited a league in a difficult spot, and it’s probably unfair to blame him for USC and UCLA’s exit, but a commissioner’s most important and most valuable job is negotiating a media rights deal. Kliavkoff misplayed the public handling of negotiations with confident quotes (and silence) that will hang around his neck like an albatross in college sports history.
“The longer we wait for a deal, the better our options get,” he said at Pac-12 media day last month, where he also made the case that more Pac-12 teams being poached by other leagues was “not a concern.”
“Our schools are committed to each other and to the Pac-12,” Kliavkoff said. “We’ll get our media rights deal done, we’ll announce the deal. I think the realignment that’s going on in college athletics will come to an end for this cycle. The truth is we’ve got bigger fish to fry.”
He did not, in fact, have bigger fish to fry.
Losers: Cal and Stanford (for now)
Could a lifeboat come? Could their academic reputations eventually earn them a ticket back to the big time from the Big Ten’s presidents and chancellors? It can’t be ruled out, but for now, Cal and Stanford don’t control their own fates and appear banished to the same path that befell Rice decades ago when the Southwest Conference dissolved. They are in the same boat as Oregon State and Washington State.
Loser: Apple TV+
Fans would have been mad about it, but Apple becoming the chief rightsholder to a major conference would have been a coup in the streaming world. It would have meant a spike in subscribers and relevancy and a big move by a company that’s already embraced MLB and MLS in the live sports space.
Winner: The Big Ten
Let’s call it The Bigger Ten? (I have more of these for a modest seven-figure brand consulting fee.) A year after welcoming USC and UCLA into the fold, the league doubled down and dipped into the Pacific Northwest for Oregon and Washington. Difficult logistics and disrupted tradition aside, this is an unassailable win for the Big Ten. It makes it a more attractive television property, a more competitive football conference and cements its already unquestioned status alongside the SEC as college sports’ second premier league.
Winners: USC and UCLA
Having a four-team Big Ten pod on the West Coast will make life a little easier on the league’s Los Angeles schools. There’s more familiarity, and it’ll be good for them to have two more conference members that don’t require flights across three or more giant states to reach another campus for games. Non-revenue sports (and their budgets) will especially appreciate it. At least not every road trip is a three- or four-hour flight now.
Losers: Washington and Oregon
They’ll go from charter members of a historic conference to programs earning partial shares of a conference with members on the East Coast and built around the middle of the country. It doesn’t make sense, and though it was a better move financially than a modest Pac-12 deal that would have also harmed their exposure, mostly everything else about their existence in their new league will be worse for athletes and fans.
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Joining the Big Ten was the best move for both but is a worse reality than living in a healthy Pac-12.
Losers: Arizona State, Arizona, Utah
Joining the Big 12 proved more attractive than holding together a Pac-12 that had been stripped for parts, but the three schools are leaving a conference that worked for them. Utah won the league the past two seasons after moving up to the Power 5. Though the Arizona schools had been in the Pac-12 for only half a century, they were in a major conference with schools near them and in a league built around the west.
Now, they’re sharing a conference with West Virginia and UCF.
At least they’re not in Oregon State and Washington State’s shoes.
Winners: Boise State and most Mountain West schools
It seemed like teams like Boise State, Nevada and Colorado State could never get real consideration from the Pac-12 for membership, despite Boise State’s many on-field successes.
But now? Whatever happens in a seemingly inevitable merger is better for those schools. Welcoming Oregon State and Washington State (we’ll see about the brainiacs in the Bay) to the Mountain West would be a win, but so would rebuilding some kind of slimmed-down Pac-12.
Winners: Casual fans
Those who couldn’t be bothered to tune in to the second-most popular sport in America unless the biggest brands were facing off will see that happen a lot more often. The most recognizable teams will be going head-to-head and television networks sold out an entire sport to monetize the most eyeballs.
Enjoy the storied rivalry between Oregon and Penn State, where they fight in pregame about donning ever-changing or traditional game-day attire.
Losers: Die-hard college football fans
This sport is officially unrecognizable from the one most fans fell in love with. No one wants to see the game consolidate into two major leagues, but schools making the decisions feel they have no choice. (Author’s note: They do have a choice.) A league with a century of tradition basically disappeared in one day after being kneecapped a year ago. One of the alluring things about the sport is its regional identity and differences in leagues throughout the country. That identity is no longer as distinct.
There’s an alternate universe where a few things break a bit differently and the Mustangs and Aztecs are in a bigger, more lucrative conference. SMU has long eyed a move back to the big time and is aggrieved the Big 12 passed on it through multiple rounds of expansion.
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San Diego State risked money and its relationships in the Mountain West in hopes it might get the call. That call might still come but is worth a fraction of what it might have been. The hope these programs once had is basically gone.
Winner: BYU (and probably Utah)
After just one season in the Big 12, BYU’s biggest rival will join its new league? I wish I had the Cougars’ luck. Realignment has broken so many rivalries, it’s wild to see one of the best and most heated find a new home as a conference game.
If Big 12 fans aren’t familiar with The Holy War, they will be soon. It’s amazing.
And well-played on … X? Sure. In this house, we just say good tweet. Rebranding a well-recognized tech company makes about as much sense as the Pacific Northwest becoming a Big Ten stronghold.
Losers: Fans of most Pac-12 teams
It just got more difficult and expensive to attend road games. And there’s no longer a major conference built around the Left Coast.
Trips to Texas and Ohio from out west aren’t easy or cheap. They may feel novel when they are for big-time nonconference games. They’re tiresome when they happen multiple times every year.
Losers: Logistics staff
USC and UCLA will have two years to prepare for the logistics of their move to the Big Ten. It’s not simple. Most of the rest of the former Pac-12 will have to solve the same issues and alter their plans with just a year’s notice.
And it’s not just football. These jobs got immeasurably more difficult after Friday.
Losers: Non-revenue athletes at most major West Coast schools
It didn’t take long for obvious, legitimate complaints to emerge.
Several softball players who compete for schools that are leaving the Pac-12 have spoken out against the latest round of conference realignment. They cited mental health and further distances for their families to travel for road games. pic.twitter.com/jeURfGGqjC — Andy Wittry (@AndyWittry) August 5, 2023
Football’s travel headaches are nothing compared with the athletes in non-revenue sports who now must adjust to going to class after regular red-eye flights and traveling longer distances in the middle of the week. It exposes the idea that athletic departments make decisions with student-athlete welfare front of mind.
Loser: Common sense
Washington and Rutgers should not be in the same conference. The lifeblood of college football is regional rivalries.
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Now, Utah and UCF will be new conference rivals, just like Maryland and Oregon.
I don’t buy the idea that college football is destroyed or dying. I suspect the sport will become even more popular at the top. But it lost a lot of its soul on Friday and is becoming something entirely different — and not better — for people who love the sport.
(Photo: Brian Rothmuller / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)