SLOWLY THEY LEARN.

I've long been of the view that Big Time College Sports has more to gain than to lose by shedding the fiction of Amateur Sport that having the Ivies or the Horizon League providing that veil of innocence.

Let's set the Wayback Machine to last December.  "How long have I been carrying on about College Sports, Inc. realigning until there are four major conferences of sixteen teams each and the National Collegiate Athletic Association becomes irrelevant?"

Will you still read me, will you believe me, when there's thirty-four?  "SEC, Big Ten 'advisory group' stands as coded threat to NCAA: Figure it out, or we'll go off ourselves."  The money quote was nailed to Newmark's Door.

There's the little challenge of the basketball-heavy Big East alongside the football-powered Southeastern, Atlantic Coast, Big Ten, and Big Twelve.

Inside Higher Ed pays attention to those realignments, and contributors Josephine Potuto and Brian Shannon, law professors with athletics board experience at football schools, urge their colleagues to take a break from all wokeness, all the time, to understand the political economy of college sports.  "Any real reform in college sports needs to start with autonomy for the major programs and conferences."  It's simple, really.  There are limits to achieving competitive balance.

Throughout its history, the National Collegiate Athletic Association has been slow to divide and subdivide as the landscape of college athletics has changed dramatically.

At its inception in 1906 and for decades after, there was a one-size-fits-all NCAA. There also was very little money in college athletics. Then the money started rolling in, primarily generated, and retained, by the major football powers, programs that currently are grouped in the four power conferences—the Atlantic Coast Conference, Big Ten, Big 12 and the Southeastern Conference. A cacophony of criticism erupted, and grew, centered on these programs for their perceived unfair treatment of college athletes as well as their exclusion of athletes, aside from athletics scholarships, from the money being generated. The major football powers pushed the NCAA for greater authority to respond to the criticism by adopting bylaws specific to them for how to run their programs and how to spend their money. A one-size-fits-all NCAA meant that lesser-resourced institutions could block policies too costly for them to implement.

We still have sports economics classes, dear reader, to look more closely at that "money rolling in."  (Only rarely, and you still have to look for the hidden subsidies.)

Isn't it a truth universally accepted, though, that the "lesser-resourced institutions" would rather hamper their competitors rather than make the effort to gain additional resources, or, perhaps, to consider a different focus?  The latter might be the more productive approach, see, again, the Big East.  It's been a long lifetime since Marquette had a graduate play a snap in the National Football League.

In 1977, the College Football Association, comprised of most of the major football powers, formed to negotiate its own media deal for college football; many expected the CFA eventually to break from the NCAA. Instead, the power conferences reaped their own revenues and became even more powerful, but separately. The result: conference realignment that continues unabated today. The NCAA also divided and subdivided, at a painstakingly slow pace, to give the major football powers greater—but only incrementally greater—autonomy.

And perhaps that thing we call major football powers has become incompatible with its amateur athletics integument.  Thus we have nutrition coaches for scholarship athletes, and now the opportunity for players to trade on their images, whether that's as video game avatars or hawking insurance.

With little regulatory structure, the Wild West erupted. We agree with Dean Smith, the former head men’s basketball coach at the University of North Carolina, who observed that college athletics might be “the front porch of a university, the most visible part, but that it should not be the most important.” College athletics is competition engaged in by college students. It marries the academic with the athletic. The current drivers of college athletic reform, however, coming from outside the higher education sector, leave little room to preserve the primacy of a student’s academic experience or the values of higher education.

That ship sailed long ago, dear reader; and one has to have a heart of stone not to laugh at "the values of higher education," not after a half century of admitting unprepared students and calling it access, or letting Student Affairs set the core curriculum.  Put another way, there are a lot of true believers in equity, or maybe in socialism, in higher education, and in the same way that they expect to live their lives at the expense of each other, they see their sports programs as being deprived of their fair share.

Even now, with faculty, athletic administrators, coaches, and some media representatives and fans decrying the current situation, at least for football, there are obstacles to establishing a needed paradigmatic shift. The major impediment has been with us all along—the resistance of lesser-resourced institutions to a division that excludes them. There is cachet to being included with the major football powers. There also are more revenue opportunities. Currently, for example, a lesser-resourced university in the FBS still makes more money than Division I universities outside it. So, many universities expend beyond realistic budgetary thresholds to try to keep up. Universities that fall behind or attempt to reclassify out of the FBS meet major pushback from fans and donors.

A considerable hurdle to establishing a new division, and one that killed its creation a decade ago, is the men’s basketball tournament. The tournament is open to all comers in Division I, and that is part of its charm and popularity. It produces the great bulk of all NCAA revenues, shared with all NCAA institutions but on a formula that greatly favors Division I. It also produces additional revenues for a university with a team that competes in the tournament, with increased payout the further a team proceeds. A separate division may upend the current revenue formula for Division I institutions. It also very likely will provide more benefits to the new division’s athletes, further increasing the talent advantage of the best-resourced institutions and lessening the possibility for a Cinderella team to advance far into the tournament.

From there the column gets into the thickets of process worship, in the best faculty senate or governing board style.  Note in the immediate paragraph above how a compromise works: we all understand that the best basketball players are in the five power conferences, but the Ivies and Horizon League and Mid American get to send a team that gets to hang a participation trophy banner.  If you don't like that, Oakland, and the pittance that the Horizon League gets, well, we can always redesign the tournament and you don't get even that.

Note also that "separate division."  I can't help but wonder whether the Association created that Little Dance for the women's teams as a stalking horse for a future realignment of the men's tournament.

None of which dissuades me from envisioning College Sports, Inc., as four power conferences doing their own football and basketball tournaments.