Big 10 expansion: Why Oregon, Washington are joining confrence

It is a wholly American tale, this latest wave of realignment in college sports, where that the thing no one wants is happening because it’s what will get the most money out of the people who claim they don’t support it in the first place.

College sports realignment — probably better labeled college football realignment at this point — began as a fight for America’s most-lucrative TV markets. It evolved into a fight for the last meaningful brands available, as bigger conferences pillaged smaller ones to squeeze every dollar out of media rights deals that will eventually have to cover things like athlete revenue sharing and nonstop cross-country travel.

Finally, it became a fight for survival, as the landscape devolves into a race onto the boat before it leaves shore. We’ve finally seen the bottom of the television revenue barrel. There are no more sacred cows.

“This is all about money,” said Patrick Crakes, a former senior vice president at Fox Sports who now runs his own media consulting firm, “but it’s about survival as well.”

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You probably hate this. I’ve yet to meet someone that doesn't, since the latest round of expansion accelerated to fission last summer thanks to Texas, Oklahoma and the Los Angeles Two.

It is fundamentally antithetical to what we say draws us to college sports — their immense tradition, their parochial nature, decades of tribalism creating a shared sense of identity among fans.

Tearing down these institutions (and make no mistake, that will almost certainly happen to the Pac-12 now) seems hugely at odds with the qualities that make college sports distinct in their fans’ minds. That’s particularly true of the Big Ten in its relationship with the Pac-12, and yet the Big Ten set its old partner on this course to destruction last summer when it welcomed the Pac-12’s two most important schools with open arms.

This is often likened to an arms race, but it’s something more fundamental than that.

College sports and the business structure around them have been driven by revenue since the first day someone decided to charge money for tickets. Modes become outdated. New revenue streams replaced old ones. But the guiding principle remains. Like anything else, college sports goes where the money is.

During the financial boom in the late-2000s and the past decade, that money was in television. Media rights deals fueled department budgets that paid for better facilities and bigger contracts. It was barely more than a decade ago that the Pac-12, not far removed from passing on trying to poach Texas and Oklahoma from the Big 12, landed the most lucrative television deal of any of the Power Five conferences.

This was why you saw the grand push to add new television markets a decade ago. More TVs meant more money from cable distributors and a more appealing product to offer to media partners. Maryland and Rutgers are Big Ten schools today for this reason.

Nothing lasts forever. Streaming options cut into cable bundles. Distributors made less money, but streamers didn’t fill the gap. Less revenue meant less money to go around.

“The old system’s in decline and the new system doesn’t make any money,” Crakes said. “We’ve got a problem.”

College sports followed consumer behavior. Conferences started getting more creative and, frankly, more ruthless as they tried to push the ticket price on their next TV deals ever upward.

But if the total pot of money stops growing, then anyone making more is going to have to get it from someone making less. The Big 12 knew this when it aggressively expanded with independent and Group of Five schools, and entrenched its deals with Fox and ESPN. The Pac-12 bet a streaming service would eventually pony up, but not enough, apparently. Even at what will reportedly be reduced shares of the Big Ten media deal, Oregon and Washington saw greater security and opportunity in leaving their historic home for pastures new.

“That’s why Oregon and Washington may take significantly lower shares to join the Big Ten,” Crakes said. “They can’t take the chance. Oregon and Washington had had enough. They were worried they’d be stuck out there by themselves.”

At least in theory, conference consolidation probably also makes a handful of other looming issues easier to address. Questions of revenue sharing, further College Football Playoff expansion and big-picture governance in college athletics have simpler answers if there are fewer brokers with greater power in the room.

“You can’t blame the Big Ten for going on the offense here early,” Crakes said. “It probably makes some things more complicated for them, but at the end of the day, they have two more quality schools.”

There will be a fair bit of vilifying the Big Ten for today’s developments, and the conference should wear its share of blame. So too, frankly, should a series of leaders and administrators in the Pac-12 that set the conference on a course to this disaster.

None of which will probably matter to you today. It’s virtually impossible for this discussion to go into any depth without devolving into a lecture on profit margins, and the hard truth many schools that have lately switched conferences — including some in the Big Ten — have discovered is that fans don’t cheer for revenue streams.

And yet, so long as the spigot runs water, those same schools will continue to drink from it. The day the model shifts, they’ll shift with it, and the landscape with them.

In the meantime, all this may put you off. You may find it distasteful. And from Labor Day to Thanksgiving, you’ll probably still spend your Saturdays glued to college football.

For years, big box stores cut deep into the profits and success of local businesses to the chagrin of their communities. Individually, people said they hated this, that they didn’t want those communities to lose their culture and familiarity to faceless corporate business. But collectively, those people shopped and spent in ways that just drove further expansion of the very thing they said they hated, at the expense of what they claimed to love.

College sports — namely college football — can be viewed through the same lens. You may not like this. You may viscerally hate it. And there very well might come a day when the powers that be take it too far and reach a point of negative return, and are forced to course correct.

Until then, just remember: They are only following where you lead.

Follow IndyStar reporter Zach Osterman on Twitter: @ZachOsterman.