For decades now, it’s seemed as though the SEC and the Big Ten have been separating themselves from the rest of college football. Today, the two superleagues took another large step away from the rest of college football.
In a joint statement, the SEC and Big Ten have announced an initiative “to take a leadership role in developing solutions for a sustainable future of college sports.” The leagues purport not to be taking any actual power away from the NCAA, and that “The advisory group will have no authority to act independently and will only serve as a consulting body. Its composition, charter and timetable, as well as the specific questions it might examine, have yet to be determined.”
Which naturally feels like precisely the language I would expect to kick off the long and complicated process of detaching from the NCAA. If schools or leagues feel unjustly threatened and attacked by the NCAA, of course they’ll stand up for themselves and fire some salvos back. Tennessee is doing that right now. But when going on offense and initiating a breakup between itself and the governing body that’s overseen the sport since its inception, a more crafty, strategic method of operation is required.
The very wording of the tweet from national beat reporter Ross Dellenger implies as much. A “joint advisory group of presidents and ADs in an urgent mission to find solutions and steer college sports into the future” does not sound like the English that would be used if the conferences felt comfortable allowing the NCAA to continue presiding over them. It sounds a lot more like the legal equivalent of: “We’ve given you control of college sports since 1906, and you’ve done a terrible job since then. Your incompetence in handling the new world of college athletics with NIL and the transfer portal have destroyed any remaining morsels of trust we may have still had for you. So we’re going to figure this out on our own.”
And then, you know, a mic drop, exit stage left, and a middle finger raised high in the air on the way out.
It’s clear at this point that the two leagues have zero trust in NCAA president Charlie Baker, who went rogue and tried to unveil a plan to reform college athletics last December to more raised eyebrows than applause. Maybe SEC commissioner Greg Sankey and Big Ten commissioner Tony Pettiti appreciated his gusto, but the failure– or maybe the refusal?– to receive some input from anybody before announcing it to school and league administrators left them realizing that it was up to them to do his job for him.
One of the reasons this feels like the beginning of a secession from the NCAA is because for the first time, the two leagues can plausibly pull it off. The Big Ten and SEC have always had some powerhouse programs, like Michigan, Ohio State, Alabama, Florida, LSU, and Georgia, but now they’ve got a near monopoly on the sport’s dominant superpowers– and by superpowers, I mean both in terms of on-field results and TV markets.
Name a college football program that you feel meets either of these two criteria: historically successful, or commands a massive audience. Chances are, that team is in either the SEC or the Big Ten.
And that’s not a mistake; that’s by design. Think about it. Every major wave of expansion this century has run through those two conferences.
In the summer of 2010, college football was merrily churning along with six major conferences when all of a sudden, Nebraska applied for Big Ten membership. Their application was accepted, and shortly thereafter. Shortly after that news broke, the SEC countered by expanding further west with the additions of Missouri and Texas A&M, becoming the first fourteen-team league. Of course, one fourteen-team superconference deserves another, and the Big Ten matched the SEC’s megaleague by completing its march to the eastern seaboard, adding Rutgers and Maryland.
Other conferences then scrambled to keep up, poaching smaller conferences’ best and most prestigious schools in a game of musical chairs. When the music stopped, the Big East couldn’t find a seat, and was ejected from the game of college football.
Nearly ten years after that dust had settled, the SEC triggered another round of realignment, importing Texas and Oklahoma from the Big 12– creating a meat grinder of a schedule for each of its member schools that netted a mammoth TV deal. Like Nebraska a decade earlier, the SEC hadn’t gone out of its way to steal the two flagship schools; they were simply unhappy in the Big 12 and wanted to join a better-run, more prestigious, and more lucrative league. This bit of soul-searching led them to the SEC, and the league was smart enough to not say no.
Seeing that the SEC had just eaten up nearly the entire southeastern corner of the country, the Big Ten took it upon itself to one-up its southern counterparts and create a truly nationwide league. UCLA and USC got that ball rolling by realizing the fruitlessness of the Pac-12, and after accepting the two Hollywood schools, the Big Ten expanded to the Pacific Northwest with Oregon and Washington for the sport’s first eighteen-team league.
Like the Big East had ten years earlier, the Pac-12 found itself as the odd man out as other conferences jostled for stay afloat. Sensing the conference was a sinking ship, Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and Arizona State bolted for the Big 12, while Stanford and California fled to the now-paradoxically named Atlantic Coast Conference. With the ACC also adding SMU and the Big 12 having just grabbed BYU, Cincinnati, Houston and Central Florida, it does seem as though these two other leagues are set to survive.
But the situation for the ACC and Big 12 is just that– survival mode. They’re making moves because they have to. Contrast that with the SEC and Big Ten; they’re making moves because they want to. Conference realignment is a luxury, not a necessity, for these two leagues. They’re the leaders of college football, and everyone else can only follow them.
And now, here we go again. The SEC and the Big Ten are leading the way in college football once more. This time, it’s not in the form of college realignment, but rather in the form of taking a crack at governing itself.
Make no mistake: if the two leagues want this “advisory group” to become the sport’s new governing body, there’s very little any other school, conference, or even the NCAA itself can do to stop it. The NCAA or rival conferences could sue the two leagues in the name of violating antitrust laws, in theory, but all that’s going to do is prolong the inevitable. There’s no federal law (I know this because I looked) stating the two conferences cannot have their own private playoff, and declare the winner of said playoff to be the national champion– the same way that there’s no law preventing two conferences from setting identical laws for its leagues and holding the other league’s schools to them if need be.
You’d better believe that if a lawsuit against them is filed, once the dust clears, the SEC and Big Ten are going to see to it that whoever dared challenge their authority suffers the ultimate payback: the death of its program(s) in terms of national relevance. Not even out of spite or pettiness, but rather to see its collective vision of a college football monopoly through. And of course the money that comes along with that status.
Maybe FSU will succeed in its lawsuit and get out of the ACC. Maybe Clemson, North Carolina, and even Miami will follow. But those schools, every other conference, and the NCAA itself are at the mercy of the SEC and Big Ten. Perhaps a bit more tactful maneuvering is required– the SEC and Big Ten can’t just run around figuratively chopping everyone else’s heads off– but their collective rise to power feels imminent and unstoppable.
And that’s a good thing.
