My favorite college football team is the Michigan Wolverines, which makes the Big Ten my favorite conference. The oldest Division 1 athletic …
My favorite college football team is the Michigan Wolverines, which makes the Big Ten my favorite conference. The oldest Division 1 athletic conference in the country, the association that would eventually be called the Big Ten was originally composed of Midwestern universities like Michigan (where, as regular readers know, I went), the University of Illinois and the University of Wisconsin, before adding Penn State in 1990 to make the Big Ten a conference of 11.
No, Pennsylvania is not Midwestern, but I suppose if you squinted particularly hard, the 325 miles between State College, Pa., and Columbus, Ohio, wasn’t that egregious a distance. And the customs of the Big Ten Conference — apple pie, winter casseroles, gray November afternoons spent wearing mittens and hand-me-down college sweatshirts while politely sharing ancient loathings — happily remained intact.
And then in 2011, the Big Ten added the University of Nebraska, and in 2014, Rutgers University and the University of Maryland, too. But these schools were kind of neighbors. And while the traditions of the Big Ten continued to thrive, new ones were added, like rooting against Nebraska because their fans are annoying and their mascot is scary. (Perhaps that’s more of a me thing.)
But what about bridging 2,223 miles — the distance between East Lansing, Mich., and Los Angeles? Because late last month the Big Ten announced that the University of Southern California and the University of California, Los Angeles, would join its ranks in 2024.
When I saw the news, my first response was mild disbelief. Both U.S.C. and U.C.L.A. have been members of the Pac-12 since its early days, a conference so named for its predecessor, the Pacific Coast Conference — as in, that’s where these schools are. To me, U.C.L.A.’s joining the Big Ten is as if Omaha suddenly decided it wanted to move to Miami Beach. It’s weird.
But then I progressed to my typical reaction when it comes to changes in college sports: acquiescence. Sure, it’ll be strange to see U.C.L.A. football playing Northwestern in Evanston, Ill., but then, eventually, it won’t be. It will be … Saturday.
College sports have survived Supreme Court decisions, the streaming age and dozens (and dozens) of previous realignments. I am not a traditionalist. I don’t wax nostalgic for the “good old days” of college sports (or anything) because there weren’t any. College sports have been and likely will always be a complex amoral morass in which students play at an elite level while also still going to class and not getting paid by the entities that profit from their labor.
But other people, including very smart people, are more concerned about U.C.L.A. and U.S.C.’s big move and about the future of college sports’ realignment more generally. Among them is my former colleague at Vox Media, Matt Brown, now the author of the Extra Points newsletter, which has become a must-read for fans of college sports. He told me that while the reasons for U.S.C.’s and U.C.L.A.’s decisions to move to the Big Ten are fairly straightforward (namely, television money through deals with major networks), the knock-on effects could continue the nationalization of college sports and be harmful to the athletes, who will have to balance the travel obligations of a professional athlete with the academic requirements of a college student.
Brown understands the draw. The Big Ten and the S.E.C. (Southeastern Conference) are cash cows, and the Pac-12 just isn’t. “What major mainstream analysts were saying is that the revenue projections for the Big Ten and S.E.C. were overwhelmingly higher than everybody else and that gap would only grow by the end of the decade to the point where it was feasible that the Big Ten could distribute close to $100 million a year just in TV money, per school.” He added that moving to the Big Ten was “a chance for the Los Angeles schools to earn television money comparable to the biggest programs in the Big Ten and the S.E.C.”