Last month, I had a blog post titled "Pac-12 and Mountain West should merge"
https://pablowegesend.blogspot.com/2023/08/pac-12-and-mountain-west-should-merge.html
When the blog post was written, USC and UCLA were already scheduled to join the Big 10, and Colorado had just announced they were officially headed to the Big 12.
At the time of that blog post, there was speculation that the Big 12 wanted to add Utah, Arizona and Arizona State. It is now official.
I also mentioned that there was a possibility that the Big 10 wanted to add Oregon, Washington, Stanford, and Cal (Berkeley).
It turned out the Big 10 only wanted Oregon and Washington.
That meant a major dilemma for Stanford and Cal. These were big universities in a major metro area. While their football teams weren't superpowers lately (though Stanford just over-powered my Hawaii Rainbow Warriors the other day), they still had prestigious teams in non-revenue Olympic sports. In fact, many Olympic champions played for Stanford and Cal during their college years.
Now consider that 32 American Olympians in Tokyo were current or former Stanford students. Sixteen were current or former Cal students. Both schools produced many other Tokyo Olympians who competed for other countries.
Those participation numbers are a continuation of historic trends. A 2017 study by the painstaking researchers at OlympStats.com says Stanford had produced more American Olympians than any other university to that time with 289—a distinction that almost assuredly holds true through Tokyo and the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics. UCLA was second with 277, USC third with 251 and Cal fourth with 212.
Some of the Cal and Stanford Olympians are obscure. And some of them are named Alex Morgan, Collin Morikawa, Holly McPeak, Helen Wills, Ryan Murphy, Nathan Adrian, Matt Biondi, Natalie Coughlin, Missy Franklin, Anthony Ervin and Mary T. Meagher (Cal). Some are named Katie Ledecky, Bob Mathias, Julie Foudy, Jennifer Azzi, Simone Manuel, Kerri Walsh Jennings, Maggie Steffens, Jessica Mendoza, Summer Sanders, Jenny Thompson, Janet Evans and Pablo Morales (Stanford).
To keep the Olympic-bound athletes coming to Stanford and Cal , going down to the Mountain West (or any mid-major conference) just wasn't a feasible option!
But at the same time, neither the Big 10 nor the Big 12 wanted Stanford and Cal. The SEC definitely wasn't interested either.
The only other major conference that was left was the ACC. Yes, the Atlantic Coast Conference.
The 2 universities located on the Pacific coast would have to join the Atlantic Coast Conference if they wanted to still be a part of a major conference.
The ACC does have similar institutions. ACC has prestigious universities like Pittsburgh, Virginia, Wake Forest, Syracuse, and Boston College.
And just like Cal vs Stanford, the ACC has a public vs private rivalry between North Carolina and Duke.
The ACC already has non-Atlantic coast schools like Louisville and Notre Dame (this one for non-football sports).
The ACC will also add another no-coast school Southern Methodist University (SMU) (located in Dallas, Texas).
The ACC will most likely lose Clemson and Florida State, both of whom are perfect cultural fits for the SEC. Nobody would be surprised if Miami joins them too.
There is the issue of student-athletes having to travel so far from Stanford/Cal to the Atlantic coast.
But what do you think the University of Hawaii sports teams have been dealing with all these decades? Their nearest opponents are thousands of miles away. No matter what conference the UH teams are in, their student-athletes must constantly deal with jet lag, missed class time & more. It's all business as usual to them.
====
Meanwhile, Oregon State and Washington State are on their own. The best option for them is to join the Mountain West. University of Hawaii would love to play them on an almost-annual basis.
====
Yahoo's sportswriter Dan Wetzel has the idea of "Football-only conferences", where teams can join non-regional conferences for the football money, but stay in regional conferences for easier travel for non-revenue sports
Dan Wetzel, “Here’s an Idea: Set up Football-Only College Conferences,” Yahoo! Sports, August 7, 2023, https://sports.yahoo.com/heres-an-idea-set-up-football-only-college-conferences-214244420.html
What would make sense, at least a little, is if college athletics made a simple move that would benefit both the bottom line and the welfare of the non-football playing student athletes.
Set up conferences that exist for football only. Or basketball only. Or any sport only. Chase your money in football. Chase sanity in everything else.
USC playing football in the predominantly Midwest and East Coast-based Big Ten may be good for revenue and exposure. Other sports, though, should be more local or regional. Put the softball team on a bus to San Diego State, not a plane and then a bus to Michigan State.
It’s not only sensible, but economical. Cutting travel costs for all these other teams actually increases the value of what football is bringing in.
This isn’t groundbreaking, by the way. It’s common for schools to belong to multiple athletic conferences.
Notre Dame is in the ACC for most sports but the Big Ten for ice hockey and independent for football. Missouri is in the SEC for all sports except wrestling, which remained in its old league, the Big 12.
Utah plays lacrosse in the Atlantic Sun. ECAC Hockey features six Ivy League schools. Johns Hopkins, which is D3 in most sports, competes in the Big Ten for lacrosse.
Out west there is already the Mountain Pacific Sports Federation which serves as a catch-all for numerous sports with limited participation such as gymnastics, track and field and fencing. It counts traditional members of the Pac-12, Mountain West and Big West, as well as D-II and D-III schools. That includes USC, UCLA, Stanford and others who are in it for men’s volleyball and water polo.
