7 Things You Must Know To Understand New ‘Alliance’ Among ACC, Big Ten, Pac-12
By David Glenn
It’s easy to mock or ridicule the recently announced alliance among the Atlantic Coast Conference, the Big Ten Conference and the Pac-12 Conference.
It’s a bit more difficult to truly embrace its admittedly toothless present — it’s not even a signed, binding contract, for crying out loud — while also attempting to understand its highly speculative but potentially powerful nature and future.
With that in mind, here is your seven-step, need-to-know guide:
- Officials Wary Of “Predatory” SEC
Washington State president Kirk Schulz recently said the quiet part out loud, accurately portraying how many powerful people in college athletics view the Southeastern Conference right now, after that league recently agreed to accept long-time Big 12 stalwarts Oklahoma and Texas as members.
“What the SEC has done is unify the other conferences in a way that nothing else could have, in terms of working together,” Schulz recently told Jon Wilner of the Bay Area News Group.
“A lot of people now are very concerned about the predatory nature of the SEC. More presidents are talking. There’s a lot of back and forth.”
New Pac-12 commissioner George Kliavkoff, by all accounts the initial ringleader in his league’s new “gentleman’s agreement” with the ACC and Big Ten, struck a much more conciliatory tone Tuesday with his comments toward the SEC and its commissioner, Greg Sankey, while at a press conference announcing the alliance.
“Greg has stated how this happened, and I believe him,” Kliavkoff said. “I agree with his statement that if Texas and Oklahoma would have called one of the other Power Five conferences, we would have taken the call and acted the same way he did.”
It may sound strange, perhaps even contradictory, but both Schulz and Kliavkoff were telling the truth and painting an accurate picture. How so?
Yes, any other league would have loved to take Oklahoma and/or Texas, by far the two most valuable members of the Big 12. Indeed, ACC officials informally inquired about the Longhorns’ interest multiple times over the last two decades.
However, the road that led to this realignment news, coupled with recent headlines about the proposed expansion of the College Football Playoff from four to perhaps 12 teams, left a lot of college sports officials understandably wondering about the SEC’s motives and sense of fair play.
From early 2019 through this summer, a period of roughly two and a half years, four men met regularly as members of a working group asked to explore the future of the now seven-year-old College Football Playoff: Sankey, Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby, Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick and Mountain West Conference commissioner Craig Thompson.
The group members’ conclusions became public in early June, including their preference for a 12-team playoff model, along with the possibility that the new format could debut as early as 2023, even though the existing 12-year, $5.6 billion playoff contract with ESPN runs all the way through the 2025 season.
Just one month later, the news broke that Oklahoma and Texas would be leaving the Big 12 for the SEC. In other words, the existence of Bowlsby’s league was now in jeopardy, and Sankey’s league would benefit tremendously as a direct result.
“Obviously, Bob Bowlsby and everyone else in the Big 12 has listened to Texas and OU complain for years, so it’s not as if this came out of nowhere,” one ACC official said. “But to work for two and a half years with someone (Sankey), on a committee with only two other people … How could you not wonder what (Sankey) knew, when he knew it, and whether at some point he was talking with Bob while secretly knowing that Bob’s league might be about to implode?”
Meanwhile, everyone quickly realized that the early-start (2023) playoff possibility would be smooth and easy only with the cooperation of ESPN, a major TV partner of the SEC (and others, including the ACC) and the creator of the SEC Network.
Again, all eyes were on Sankey. Some ACC officials said they believe he should have recused himself from some parts of the playoff conversations, because of his league’s close, extensive relationships with ESPN. While the ACC also is a partner with ESPN, it was not truly represented on the four-person committee, despite Notre Dame’s presence, because the Irish remain an independent in football.
In the end, of course, the working group’s recommendations weren’t binding, and the recent controversies now have more decision-makers talking about opening up the playoff conversation to multiple TV and streaming bidders. Many believe a true bidding war could push the playoff’s annual value past $2 billion per year.
“Everyone I know wants a healthy relationship with the SEC,” the ACC official said, “but this summer certainly has created some bad blood.”
- Timing Means Everything
Change is constant, of course, and the college sports world certainly never has been an exception to that rule. But even change comes in doses large and small.
From the NCAA’s perspective, 2021 is not a time of mere tweaks, but rather massive shocks and overhauls to the system. Weather reflects constant movement, mostly in more subtle ways. Current and recent NCAA changes are more of the wheel, printing press, automobile, personal computer or Internet varieties.
In other words, it’s a heck of a time to be a university president, conference commissioner or athletic director. There’s no reliable blueprint for what to do next.
The United States Supreme Court directly tackled an important NCAA matter for the first time in almost four decades this summer, in the Alston case, and the NCAA lost in convincing (9-0) fashion. Moving forward, colleges and universities no longer can cap the education-related benefits for student-athletes. One justice argued that the existing rules restricting athletic-related benefits are illegal, as well, although that revolutionary (for the NCAA) concept is not yet the law of the land.
Meanwhile, after more than a century that brought only minor tweaks to the NCAA’s concept of amateurism, this summer also brought a second major jolt to that long-standing system, in the form of name-image-likeness policies.
Notably, despite crafting NLI-related legislation over a period of years, the NCAA ultimately opted against implementing a detailed national policy, instead leaving most matters for leagues and schools to handle on an individual basis. That sort of decentralized approach is expected to become part of a broader “new normal,” too.
In the meantime, of course, these same universities recently have taken massive, COVID-related budgetary hits, in their athletic departments and otherwise.
There aren’t many obvious places to turn in an attempt to fill those revenue gaps, but an expanded version of the College Football Playoff is one of those places.
Moving forward, as college sports decision-makers contemplate the future of the playoff, along with governance structure, amateurism issues and other foundational matters, they want to find and align with kindred spirits to help shape such things in a way that reflects their collective vision.
For now, at least, the ACC, Big Ten and Pac-12 see much of that kindred spirit in each other, even as they’re not quite sure about the SEC.
- Expanded Playoff Details Matter
Anyone who follows college football even a little bit understands that the College Football Playoff has become a massive cash cow.
In 2013, for example, during the last season of the Bowl Championship Series format, the ACC collected about $34 million just for that elite portion of football’s postseason. By 2017 and 2018, in the third and fourth years of the playoff format, the ACC (again excluding money connected to the many bowls outside the BCS/CFP structures) earned an average of about $88 million per year.
Most fans also understand that, while the NCAA governs the postseasons in every other major sport, and even at the lower levels of college football, it’s the 10 Football Bowl Subdivision conferences (plus FBS independents) that oversee the postseason, and collect the big money, for their various postseason games.
Mainly because of the even bigger money that will arrive with an expanded playoff, expansion is coming. Even the alliance schools, the 41 members of the ACC, Big Ten and Pac-12, clearly favor that important part of the equation.
Importantly, though, the “when” and “how” parts aren’t clear yet.
“The Pac-12 is 100 percent in favor of expansion of the College Football Playoffs,” Kliavkoff said. “But there are issues at the margins.”
How many sports fans knew what Kliavkoff meant when he said that last handful of words, the “issues at the margins” part? It’s likely not a high percentage.
Did you know there’s a major academic element in how the current playoff money is distributed? In fact, after the 2021 season, if a 14-team football league had each of its teams meet the NCAA’s required Academic Progress Rate for a possible bowl invitation, it automatically will receive $4.2 million ($300,000 per school).
The same playoff rules in effect today direct “only” $6 million in bonus money to a conference if one of its members participates in the national semifinals. The additional bonus for making or winning the championship game? Zero. Seriously.
Did you also know that the Group of Five schools also get sizable playoff checks every year, despite never having one of their members in the national semifinals?
Did you know that some Football Championship Subdivision conferences, which have their own separate playoffs, also receive some (for example, a collective $2.85 million earlier this year, based on the 2020 season) FBS playoff money?
Maybe. Maybe not.
The point is, whenever the expanded playoff comes, these are among the issues that need to be debated and negotiated again. Because of the size of this particular financial pie, there likely will be lots of fighting over the size of the various slices.
Meanwhile, if a 12-team playoff really is next, Sankey understandably is going to favor a rule that would allow an unlimited number of teams per conference to participate, especially because the soon-to-be super-sized (16-team) version of his super-successful league will be most likely to benefit from such an arrangement.
How much support will Sankey get on that point, or for any of his other desires?
The alliance is in part a reminder that even the mighty SEC, by itself, can’t ram the new playoff rules, individually or collectively, down everybody else’s throat. Any such attempt now could be challenged by the other three most influential leagues in college football, locked arm in arm on the other side of the table, if needed.
- ACC, Pac-12 Way Behind Financially
Speaking of the College Football Playoff, here’s a quick illustration of the massive power of television, and TV dollars, in modern college football, followed by a snapshot of the ACC’s gradual, undeniable fall from its long-time perch as the wealthiest conference in America.
In 1983, the last season before a landmark Supreme Court decision enabled individual conferences and schools to negotiate TV deals in the free market, college football brought in about $70 million, collectively, for its broadcast rights. Adjusted for inflation, that’s about $192 million in 2021 dollars — for all conferences, all teams, all college gridiron games played in 1983, combined.
Here in 2021, ESPN is paying more than that amount for ONE GAME. It will be the national championship game, but it’s just ONE GAME. As part of the 12-year deal that started with the 2014 season, ESPN pays an annual average of about $470 million for the three-game College Football Playoff, with the most valuable event obviously being the title game itself.
That’s how much things have changed over the last four decades.
Even over the last two decades, some key college sports revenues have increased roughly five-fold, as the charts below indicate, again wildly outpacing inflation.
Along the way, the ACC has fallen from being college sports’ financial pace-setter to, in some years, fifth place among the Power Five conferences.
These trends are most alarming for the Big 12, of course. That league’s mere existence, and certainly its preferred place (for rule-making and playoff purposes, etc.) as a Power Five member, are in serious jeopardy.
At the absolute latest, Oklahoma and Texas will officially become SEC members in July 2025, and the Big 12’s eight remaining members (Baylor, Iowa State, Kansas, Kansas State, Oklahoma State, Texas Christian, Texas Tech, West Virginia) don’t look dramatically different than those in the American Athletic Conference, which is outside the Power Five and (like all other Group of Five members) never has placed a team in the College Football Playoff.
Even if the Big 12 expands, with Brigham Young (football independent), Cincinnati (AAC) and UCF (AAC) among the most likely targets, it’s not clear that those schools would bring more to the financial table than they’d take as an extra mouth to feed. Similarly, if the AAC instead cannibalizes the Big 12 leftovers, that new-look league wouldn’t look much like the Power Four, either.
Meanwhile, the ACC and the Pac-12 continue to exist on an unnerving middle ground of sorts, acres behind the Big Ten and SEC monetarily, yet leaps and bounds above all others, including any new-look version of the Big 12 or AAC.
That reality leaves some serious work ahead.
- New Commissioners, No Easy An$wer$
On your first day of school or work, it certainly doesn’t hurt to see a friendly face or connect with new allies, and those rules tend to apply at any age. Especially if adversity hits, sometimes you can get by with a little help from your friends.
Kliavkoff (Pac-12), Phillips (ACC) and Warren (Big Ten) certainly aren’t rookies — each is in his mid-50s — but all three are relatively new to their current roles as conference commissioners, and as strange as this may sound two of the three (all but Phillips) actually don’t have much experience in the college sports realm.
Kliavkoff’s first day with the Pac-12 was less than two months ago (July 1). Phillips succeeded John Swofford as the ACC’s leader in February. Warren took his position in the Big Ten just last year. Talk about quick learning curves.
Phillips has by far the most experience in college athletics specifically. He has been an administrator at various NCAA schools since 1997, and he was a respected Big Ten AD (at Northwestern) for the last 13 years. That seems very helpful.
Kliavkoff most recently was the vice president of sports and entertainment at MGM Resorts, where he had at least as much experience with casinos, gambling and other entertainment as he had with traditional sports per se. Prior to joining the Big Ten, Warren spent more than two decades as an attorney and executive in the National Football League. Perhaps those backgrounds will be helpful, too.
While Warren inherited an overwhelmingly positive financial situation (see above) from his legendary Big Ten predecessor, former UNC basketball player Jim Delany, the same can’t be said for Kliavkoff or Phillips, and moving forward all three men will have to concern themselves with trying to keep up with the SEC.
The problem is, there are no easy answers for any of them.
At the conference level, the three most obvious avenues for revenue development right now are college football playoff expansion (discussed above), conference expansion and upgraded multi-media contracts (TV, streaming, radio, etc.).
One extra-large and soon-to-expand collegiate treasure chest, the playoff, will require sticky negotiations with the SEC and other parties, which is likely why those details were left unspoken during the recent alliance announcement.
The three commissioners did address the other two topics, although neither seems likely to provide a windfall any time soon. They even made the public promise, collectively, not to raid each other’s membership for expansion purposes.
“The foundation of college sports, in many respects, is in turmoil,” Kliavkoff said. “We get to hit the reset button.”
“We are bullish on the schedule alliance,” Phillips said, “because it will enable our profile coast to coast.”
“Hopefully, this will bring some much-needed stability to the college landscape,” Warren said. “It will enable everyone to understand where everyone stands.”
- Football-Related Anxiety Abounds
As recently as the 1990s, the ACC and other major conferences still made more money from men’s basketball than from football, but at the Power Five level (and at a large majority of the 130 FBS schools) those days are long gone.
Over the last 20 years especially, the financial influence of football has become overwhelming. When former Boston College athletic director Gene DeFilippo publicly stated (more than a decade ago) that at least 80 percent of the value of the ACC’s television contracts was tied to football, a lot of college sports executives became uncomfortable with the conversation, but nobody disputed his bottom line.
With that in mind, only the mighty SEC can feel great about itself right now. Everyone else, to one degree or another, is reaching for the Pepto Bismol.
SEC members have captured 11 of the last 15 FBS national championships on the gridiron, including four of seven during the playoff era. Under legendary coach Nick Saban, Alabama has won six of those recent national titles, but Auburn (2010), Florida (2006, 2008) and LSU (2007, 2019) have contributed, too.
If you extend the timetable and parameters just a bit, current and incoming SEC members have won 15 of the last 23 national gridiron titles, including those by Tennessee (1998), Oklahoma (2000), LSU (2003) and Texas (2005).
In the two biggest revenue-producing sports, that’s about as dominant as it gets, especially in the big-money era. Current members of the ACC, for example, have won nine of the last 20 NCAA Tournaments contested in men’s basketball, with Duke (three), UNC (three), Louisville*, Syracuse and Virginia all contributing.
Contrast the SEC’s modern gridiron dominance with the recent, top-level presence (or lack thereof) of the other Power Five leagues.
The Big 12 has participated in the seven-year-old College Football Playoff only four times, winning none, and Oklahoma was its representative all four times. Obviously, the Sooners won’t be carrying that flag much longer.
The Big Ten, while on sturdy financial footing because of its expansive geography, enormous alumni bases (only Northwestern is a private school) and lucrative TV deals (the Big Ten Network launched in 2007), has captured only two national championships in football over the past 23 years. Ohio State won in 2002 and 2014; the Buckeyes also have landed four of the league’s five playoff invitations.
The Pac-12 has missed the four-team playoff five times, while making it just twice, and over the past three decades only rarely has been a factor in the national championship picture. Its only titles since 1991 came during the Pete Carroll era at Southern California; the Trojans shared the 2003 crown with LSU and were forced to vacate their undefeated, Reggie Bush-led 2004 campaign.
The ACC has mostly Clemson to thank for its prominent presence on the national stage in recent years. (It’s easy to forget, but Jimbo Fisher led Florida State to a 14-0 season and the final BCS title in 2013.) Dabo Swinney and the Tigers have won six straight conference championships and two (2016, 2018) of the last five national titles, while taking six consecutive trips to the playoff.
As in the 1990s, however, when ACC football was known as “Florida State and the Eight Dwarfs,” the league has been too top-heavy, only this time led by Clemson. It’s essential to be strong at the top, but the SEC and others have quality depth, too.
Five years ago, in 2016, the ACC had arguably its greatest gridiron campaign ever.
Clemson won the national championship, giving the ACC two of the last four titles at the time. FSU captured the Orange Bowl and earned another top-10 ranking. Virginia Tech, Miami and Louisville also finished in the Top 25. Never, in its previous 63 years of existence, had the ACC had two top-10 and five Top 25 teams in the final, postseason football polls.
The league also had 11 (out of 14) bowl teams, tied the all-time record for any conference with nine bowl victories (9-3), and had 11 squads finish with winning records, as Boston College, Georgia Tech, UNC, NC State, Pitt and Wake Forest joined the five from the Top 25.
Counting the regular season, the ACC even finished 10-4 in head-to-head games against the SEC and 6-2 versus the Big Ten. One more thing: Louisville quarterback Lamar Jackson won the Heisman Trophy. Not bad.
By ACC standards or any other, that’s truly fantastic football.
Unfortunately for the ACC, such football seasons remain an anomaly for the league, even as the SEC cranks them out almost routinely.
In 2019, for example, although Clemson went 14-0 before losing in the national championship game, no other ACC team finished in the Associated Press Top 25. The Big Ten (six teams), SEC (five), AAC (four), Big 12 (three), Mountain West (two), Pac-12 (two) all had greater representation in the final AP poll.
- Presidents Still Value Academics
Cue the eye rolls.
There’s no doubt that many college sports fans save their most dismissive Judge Judy impression for the mere mention of the word “academics.”
When former NCAA president Walter Byers and his staff carefully crafted the term “student-athlete” — the student part always comes before the hyphen and the athlete, get it?! — and embedded it throughout the organization’s thickening rulebook and public statements in the 1960s, they likely didn’t realize so many sports fans eventually would come to view it with disdain and ridicule.
Nevertheless, the academic side of college sports still matters sometimes, and this may be one of those times.
That’s not to say academics matter nearly as much as money; they absolutely, positively don’t. There are plenty of athletes, coaches and even athletic directors who care about academics only to the extent that it impacts them in some sort of competitive (player availability/eligibility, scholarships, money, etc.) manner.
University presidents and chancellors inevitably must care a lot about money, too. But they also tend to place more emphasis on academics, in more contexts, than most fans, coaches, ADs or corporate executives (TV and otherwise) would.
Collectively, select members of the ACC, Big Ten and Pac-12 make up 42 percent (27 of 64) of the United States-based colleges and universities in a highly respected, invitation-only organization known as the Association of American Universities. (Two schools in Canada also are members.) AAU schools are widely regarded as the top research institutions in North America.
In the ACC, AAU members Duke, Georgia Tech, UNC, Pittsburgh, Syracuse (a member until 2011) and Virginia generally like the idea of associating with other elite universities. The relatively recent, realignment-related ACC additions of Boston College, Notre Dame, Pitt and Syracuse came about primarily for money-related reasons connected to new markets, an expanding geographic footprint and the desires of the league’s TV partners, mainly ESPN. But academics helped, too.
Just remember who had the final vote on those (and other) ACC additions: the member schools’ presidents and chancellors. Again, they can see the financial bottom line, too, but while most others are ignoring or minimizing academic matters those in the ivory towers tend to at least include them in the conversation.
If the alliance ends of being much ado about nothing, fine. If in the long run it’s primarily about scheduling partnerships and playoff negotiations, great.
But if the future of college athletics ends up being at stake, with important NCAA votes on a plethora of revolutionary and likely controversial topics (including the academic-athletic balance and many related matters) in the coming years, the ACC, Big Ten and Pac-12 hope to feel infinitely better about pursuing a shared vision with a couple of kindred spirits by their sides.
“This is an historic moment,” Kliavkoff said, while introducing the alliance, “but the beginning of a long journey.”
David Glenn (DavidGlennShow.com, @DavidGlennShow) is an award-winning author, broadcaster, editor, entrepreneur, publisher, speaker, writer and university lecturer (now at UNC Wilmington) who has covered sports in North Carolina since 1987.
The founding editor and long-time owner of the ACC Sports Journal and ACCSports.com, he also has contributed to the Durham Herald-Sun, ESPN Radio, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Raycom Sports, SiriusXM and most recently The Athletic. From 1999-2020, he also hosted the David Glenn Show, which became the largest sports radio program in the history of the Carolinas, syndicated in more than 300 North Carolina cities and towns, plus parts of South Carolina and Virginia.
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