Big Ten's next move: Notre Dame? A glance down south? And what about March Madness?
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. – The Big Ten now stretches from ocean to ocean. It has torn the heart out of its old bedfellow, the Pac-12, and knocked down the last remaining obstacles to the dramatic remaking of college athletics as we recognize them today.
So, what’s next?
That’s a question with many answers, few of them straightforward. The whirlwind arrival of USC and UCLA into the conference Thursday felt more like a beginning than an end, so there is much we cannot know about what the coming months and years will bring.
The page is turning for college athletics. As we cast our minds forward, some thoughts on where we’re headed in college in NCAA college sports:
What’s next?
Short term, the answer may be “not much.”
The Pac-12 needs to pick up the pieces. The Big 12, which has a new commissioner coming on board and a new TV deal kicking in soon, is in an interesting position.
But make no mistake, college sports orbit the SEC and the Big Ten right now. And those conferences could choose to stand pat for the moment.
The question will essentially be what their priorities are. If either or both feel consolidation is necessary, there’s plenty of inventory to choose from. There are Pac-12 schools right now who would probably welcome an invitation to join their old pals from Los Angeles in the Big Ten. The ACC’s grant of rights doesn’t expire until 2036 and extricating from that could be tricky, but there are valuable properties there if the SEC is interested — Miami, Clemson, Florida State, to name a few.
But absent Notre Dame finally forsaking its independence (more on that in a minute), the biggest fish are all off the board. There’s not another Texas/Oklahoma/USC/UCLA in play outside of South Bend.
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It might make more sense for the Big Ten and the SEC to jointly revisit College Football Playoff expansion. The Big Ten entered into the ill-fated Alliance last summer to build a coalition that could stop the SEC railroading through its ideal Playoff, but Kevin Warren might have woken up Friday morning a lot more politically aligned with SEC commissioner Greg Sankey than he was a week ago, much less a year ago.
Hashing out what the next generation of the Playoff looks like would also give the two super-conferences a chance to fully survey the field, determine what format would be best for them under a hypothetical new Playoff format and then expand (or not) from there.
In the meantime, the Big Ten has made the biggest power play possible here. It now reasonably exists in perhaps as many as six of the top seven TV markets in the country, and it has effectively shut the West Coast’s only Power Five conference out of the biggest city on the West Coast. Given their popularity, it isn’t hard to imagine the Big Ten using USC and UCLA to claim California writ large, which would open more than 10 million new TV homes up to their broadcast partners and conference television network.
The Big Ten now stands poised to up annual revenues from broadcast partners from their current level, $440 million per year, to something well north of $1 billion. Big Ten Network revenues comfortably pass $100 million right now. They will also likely see a spike once these new markets come online.
The revenue jump will be eye-watering. If anything, the Big Ten might want to hold off on adding new schools to the mix so as not to water that number down for existing members, until it is sure it will make up the revenue somewhere else. Unless …
Here come the Irish?
… the biggest whale is finally attainable.
That, of course, is Notre Dame, Big Ten HQ’s hugely valuable neighbor to the east. The Irish have held tightly to their independence for more than a century. Even as realignment set the terms for the previous decade in college athletics, Notre Dame stuck to its NBC contract, strong-armed the ACC into a favorable quasi-member arrangement and bet on streaming to cover the difference.
Is that sustainable now? Maybe not.
If college athletics really is consolidating toward 2-3 super-conferences that will ultimately control the direction of the sport for at least the next generation, it becomes difficult to see a path to Notre Dame getting a seat at that table as an independent.
Perhaps more importantly, right now, Notre Dame still holds great leverage. Provided it could untangle itself from its ACC commitments, it would be the most golden of all geese for the Big Ten. It could stay in the ACC and give that conference tremendous foundation to try and pull itself up alongside (or at least nearer to) the Big Ten and SEC. It could go elsewhere.
The point is, the Irish still enjoy the leverage associated with being masters of their own fate. We might be moving in a direction that makes that untenable in the not-so-distant future. Powers that be in South Bend might decide — and it’s been reliably reported in a handful of places that it’s being more seriously considered than in the past — that it’s time to sign on somewhere.
If there’s one more move that could shake up the whole board in near-term expansion, it’s Notre Dame. All eyes are, once again, trained on the banks of the St. Joseph River.
Going south gets tricky
Bearing in mind so much of this exists largely in the hypothetical sense — as did yesterday’s raid, until it was no longer hypothetically — there’s another alternative, should the Big Ten want to expand. But it’s complicated.
There are numerous institutions within the ACC (North Carolina, Virginia, Georgia Tech to name a few) that would be good academic fits for the Big Ten. They are mostly large state institutions with a heavy emphasis on research, and membership within the Association of American Universities.
Before you scoff at the idea of academics playing a role in this, know that it still does matter to the Big Ten. USC and UCLA, institutionally, look and behave very much like Big Ten schools. Every Big Ten school is a member of the AAU except for Nebraska, which was when it joined before falling out.
More broadly, though, all current Big Ten institutions share a lot of common values and practices. Not just phony national rankings administrators can backslap over at Friday afternoon mixers, but hard, tangible things like graduate programs and research emphases that bring in millions of dollars annually, to universities that operate endowments in the billions of dollars.
Those relationships are not taken lightly in expansion, even if they are not always equal to competitive or financial concerns. They can have tremendous impact on the bottom line of member schools, saving or securing millions that, just as TV revenues do in athletics, cause all boats to rise.
Some of those schools just mentioned are close academic fits for the Big Ten. Closer, it should be said, than Notre Dame, whose academic profile is outstanding but not necessarily in a way that closely aligns with the Big Ten. It has been a concern when talking about potentially adding the Irish in the past, though not any time recently.
And yes, some of those schools would open lucrative TV markets like Atlanta or Charlotte.
But there would also be complications. The ACC grant of rights is a problem for anyone wanting to siphon schools off that conference. From the Big Ten’s perspective, this would also be a move directly onto SEC soil. Could those two leagues coexist cleanly in the same media ecosystem, in a way that benefitted everyone? Maybe, maybe not.
But if we’re exploring all angles here, we shouldn’t leave this one out.
What happens to the NCAA tournament?
Make no mistake, football is driving this bus and will continue to. But no one’s just going to leave money on the table, and the men’s basketball tournament remains the only other billion-dollar product in college sports.
College sports leaders have been turning up the volume on the idea of pulling football away from the NCAA and entirely under the umbrella of the Playoff. Concurrently, keen observers have wondered if a similar move might be on the cards for the NCAA tournament as well.
Once again, caveating that this is hypothetical, some thoughts:
>> First, the contract situation would seem difficult to navigate. It was extended through 2032 six years ago, and everyone involved is probably just starting to clear the headache of navigating the pandemic to get a 2021 tournament at all, and a 2022 tournament back to normal. Is anyone ready to go off the deep end again?
>> Second, the idea of a Power Five-only or FBS-only tournament seems tricky. From a product standpoint, the tournament sells two things, elite matchups in the later rounds and Cinderella. Kicking Cinderella out of the ball removes a huge piece of what’s appealing to viewers about the NCAA tournament, and that affects the product.
>> Third, the Playoff appears likely to eat up a lot of oxygen in the next few years. It will command tremendous time and attention, perhaps enough that there’s just not enough energy to try and take something so foolproof and streamlined right now away from the experts in running it, and try to reboot it under a whole new apparatus.
A lot is going to change in college athletics in the coming years. The tournament might end up in that whirlwind at some point, but the impact may not be so profound as in football.
Follow IndyStar reporter Zach Osterman on Twitter: @ZachOsterman.