041: Conference Composition
A guess at conference composition across college athletics in 2024.
Conference realignment is sports fan fiction. And business is booming lately.
Colorado is re-joining the Big 12 in 2024. The Pac-12 is losing three teams next season, and as I’m writing this newsletter, maybe more?
Grant of rights is a phrase mentioned as routinely as wins and losses these days. Does the Magnificent Seven end the ACC as we know it?
It’s exhausting. And in an effort to try and understand how bonkers it’s going to be, let’s try to outline the composition of these conferences.
Conference composition methodology
Here is the method to the madness in this table, again it’s a guess:
start with FBS football conferences (this means we’re excluding a conference like Big East)
filter out football independents, and adjust conference affiliation if the school is part of another conference (i.e. Notre Dame is in ACC)
make adjustments for known moving members in 2024 (i.e. Texas to SEC)
count the number of distinct time zones and states for the members
use the ncaa.org to count the number of public or private institutions
The methodology is far from perfect. The full list of data can be found here, and you can see the code to generate the charts too. Feel free to offer suggestions or corrections in the comments.
Three things about conference composition
Public or Private?
40 percent of the ACC is made up of private institutions. Four of the 14 American Athletic conference members are also private.
It’s hard to understand if that means much for any sort of conference realignment, however, it does feel notable when trying to find information because those private schools operate to a different set of rules.
Time zones for scheduling
All 15 members of the ACC (including Notre Dame) are in the same time zone. It’s the only conference to have all its members in one time zone.
Nicole Auerbach wrote about scheduling challenges for the future Big Ten in The Athletic yesterday. The three time zones in the Big Ten means travel is going to be a challenge for Olympic sports or any non-revenue sports.
Anyone who thinks that is sustainable is not paying attention. There is a reason that minor league baseball plays six-game series in one location now. It’s more cost effective and predictable for travel.
Volleyball schedules started to show how you can reduce travel with series matches too. For example, Oklahoma plays UCF twice in consecutive days in Orlando, Florida this season. There are no other Big 12 teams in Florida, so it doesn’t make sense for the Sooners to go all the way there and play just one match.
Are more states better?
The Big Ten and SEC will soon have members in 12 different states. Given the complexity of the US government, it feels like that could get complicated. Think about multiple versions of NIL laws or different protocols during a pandemic.
I’m not sure more states or fewer states is actually better or even insightful for a conference? States are not the same size, see Texas and California. And those states are not governed or represented in a remotely similar way either.
Did you know North Carolina has 42 more counties than California?
Maybe a larger footprint makes the conferences more attractive to networks, but that didn’t really work out for the ACC when adding Boston College and Syracuse.
The way college athletics is trending doesn’t feel sustainable. Matt Brown pointed this out last week, and it’s true. I’m not sure the casual fan realizes it though.
Brain drain happening at every single level of the college sports ecosystem right now, with expectations outstripping resources. It's bad for GA types, SIDs, TRAINERS, etc etc.
It’s no longer a viable place for employment for a lot of the people that do the actual work to keep the system operating day-to-day. I don’t think realignment changes that, but it might accelerate it?