On April 5th, the College Basketball Championship between Florida and Houston reached 18.1 million streams across all platforms in the United States. In 2024, the World Series drew 15.8 million viewers, and two months later, the NBA Finals had 16.4 million. Not to mention, the College Football Championship reached 22.1 million streams, surpassing all of them by a huge margin. By these statistics alone, anyone could tell that college sports are valued by almost every sports-watching family in America. 

Conference realignment has been around for centuries, starting at the very beginning of college sports. At the beginning, all it was was groups of two to three teams leaving small conferences to join other small conferences. However, in the summer of 1990, Arkansas left the Southwest Conference to join the Southeastern Conference, more popularly known as the SEC. Little did the other conferences know, the Southeastern Conference was hatching a plan that would slowly start the downfall of college Conferences as we know them.

The SEC was about to sign a major deal with TBS to have an individual television contract. In 1953, the NCAA and the FTC (Football Television Committee) made a rule that only one game was allowed to be played on television per weekend, and schools were limited to one appearance per season. The rule lasted all the way until 1977, when sixty-three programs came together to protest that these organizations were restricting the growth of their programs. The NCAA appealed this ruling in court until the case reached the Supreme Court in 1984.

“There can be no doubt the challenged practices of the NCAA constitute a restraint of trade,”  wrote Justice John Paul Stevens in the Court’s majority opinion.

After the ruling, teams began selling their own television rights to various programs. But having a whole conference available on one program was unheard of; after this ruling, all the Conferences were trying to sign with the biggest television programs and recruit the biggest schools. 

“Each Big Ten team now receives on average $71.874 million each year from the conference’s broadcast deals.” writes Edwin Farley, from the Harvard Sports Journal.

With this amount of money at stake, there’s no wonder teams are selling everything they have to be in the same spot as the big teams.

Talking about big schools, Every Conference wanted Texas and Texas A&M, but at the end of the day, the Big 8 Conference signed both of them, along with Baylor and Texas Tech, the other two major schools in Texas. With this “transaction”, the Big 12 conference was formed. 

Skip ahead to 2021, Big 12 Football has been on a decline for several years. Texas and Oklahoma saw teams in the SEC making a lot of money. So naturally, they left the Big 12 to join the SEC, making it even more of a “superconference”. To make matters even worse, the Big 10 signed Oregon, Washington, UCLA, and USC, which are all schools on the West Coast, formerly in the PAC 12. 

“We have compactness, we have contiguity geographically, we have many cities and states that share geographic and cultural commonality,” stated long-time Big 10 commissioner Jim Delany.

The Big 10 had been the Midwest’s conference for almost the entirety of college athletics, with big leaders of the conference expressing that any expansion would be to schools in adjacent states to others already in the Conference. Signing these West Coast teams essentially threw this century-old standard into the trash in a matter of seconds. 

Perhaps the most baffling changes take place in the ACC and PAC-12. In 2023, the Atlantic Coast Conference signed SMU, Cal, and Stanford. None of these schools are remotely close to the Atlantic coast, two of them being in California, a State that, last time anyone checked, borders the Pacific Ocean. With Stanford and Cal leaving the Pac-12, there were only 2 teams left in the Conference. 

With common sense, anyone can realize that if a conference only has 2 teams, it is not able to function properly. This is why realignment and expansion are slowly killing off all types of conferences, no matter the size. Just 5 years ago, the PAC-12 was a power-five conference, and now it is in shambles. 

College sports aren’t about sports anymore. It’s about money, and making lots of it.