If anyone can copy it in, most appreciated. There was also a Ryan article about how college football was being ruined by all the conference shifts that I'd love to read as well.
BOB RYAN
College sports keep getting less and less
recognizable, but can we look away?
By Bob Ryan Globe Correspondent, Updated August 11, 2023, 5:00 a.m.
It turns out BC was a canary in the mine shaft when it came to scrambling traditional conference makeups, but the problems in college sports go beyond that.
I’ll still watch the games. At least I think so. It’s what enablers do.
College sports keep getting less and less recognizable, but can we look away?
What are USC and UCLA doing in the Big Ten? What are Texas and Oklahoma doing in
the SEC? Is the ACC seriously talking about bringing in Cal and Stanford?
For that matter, what is Boston College doing in the ACC? It turns out our beloved Eagles
were the canary in the mine shaft when they abandoned the Big East — a basketball
conference of which they were a founding member — in favor of the ACC, itself a
basketball conference then in the process of being hijacked by football.
Conferences once made sense. Consider an entity created more than a century ago as the
Pacific Coast Conference. As the Pac 8, what could have been more logical? Two teams in
the state of Washington. Two teams in Oregon. Two teams in the Bay Area. Two teams in
Los Angeles. Scheduling and travel couldn’t be simpler. Expand by incorporating two
teams from Arizona. Why not?
It was truly the perfect conference.
And that’s what we remaining fans of big-time college sports are. For anyone over the age
of, let’s say, 20, the world of college sports is not the one we once knew and loved.
9/25/23, 7:55 AM Bob Ryan: College sports keep getting less and less recognizable, but can we look away?
www.bostonglobe.com/2023/08/11/sports/college-football-realignment/?p1=StaffPage 3/6
As you may or may not know, the once-proud Pac 8/10 found out this week it would be
down to just four: Washington State, Oregon State, Cal, and Stanford, which means it
would cease to exist. Cal and Stanford going wherever won’t matter.
For those of you keeping score, if everything happens to plan by the year 2024, the SEC
will have 16 teams, the Big 12 will have 16, and the Big Ten will have 18. Explain that to
your kids.
Oh, and before I forget: Can anyone tell me how a future Big Ten conference stretching
from Los Angeles to New Brunswick, N.J. (Rutgers) can schedule its non-revenue sports?
Or does anyone care?
Again I feel compelled to remind you that the concept of big-time college sports is unique
to America. We are the only nation in which our institutions of higher learning routinely
provide entertainment for the masses. Canada? College sports in our friendly neighbor to
Stanford and Cal are two of just four remaining teams in what used to be the formidable Pac-12.
The north are not a major item on most people’s sports menus. Accomplished adolescent
basketball players have no choice but to come down here to play.
Now we all realize that the current madness that has engulfed college sports is easily
explained. It has to do with the frantic pursuit of a five-letter word that begins with “M”
and ends with “Y.”
The assumption is that people want to see the games and TV wants programming. It also
happens that the big money sport is football. The Pac 10′s demise is due to its inability to
negotiate a sufficiently lucrative TV contract that would allow it to compete with Power 5
conference rivals Big 12, SEC, Big Ten, and ACC. Henceforth, the Power 5 will be a Power
4.
Concurrent with all this are two items that have upset whatever semblance of order once
existed in big-time college sports: the Name-Image-Likeness (NIL) policy and the
transfer portal.
For most of the 20th century and into the early 21st, the colleges playing football and
basketball on a high level sold the public on the premise that the young men (until
recently, women were not a factor) were legitimate students playing these sports while
attending school on scholarship and they should be grateful for that privilege. But from
the beginning, people pushed various envelopes.
In the 1890s, people spoke of the so-called “tramp athletes” who sometimes played for
one school this week and another the next. Winning always was paramount. The NCAA
itself basically came about because no one trusted anyone and rules needed to be
established.
The mythology was encoded when legendary NCAA chief Walter Byers came up with the
phrase “student-athlete” to ensure that the players could not be termed “employees” and
thus be subject to possible legal involvement.
Well, we lurched into the 21st century perpetuating the “student-athlete” concept. Then a
funny thing happened. Coaching salaries, for decades in the five figures (John Wooden
retired in 1975 while making $32,500 a year), moved past the six-figure range into the
sevens. Players such as UCLA’s Ed O’Bannon discovered their images and likenesses
being used in video games without them being compensated and rightfully said, “Where’s
mine?”
Making direct payments to players was always logistically unfeasible — does the starting
quarterback get more than the backup tight end? — but we have now arrived at a
juncture where players can indeed cash in on their image and likeness with
endorsements, appearance fees, etc. Thus the rich can get richer by enticing players with
help from boosters and local business folk. The ramifications of the NIL thing are just
beginning to be felt. But they will be profound.
New NCAA president and former Massachusetts governor Charlie Baker has emphasized his plans to address NIL legislation.
As for the transfer policy, “insanity” doesn’t begin to describe the climate. Suffice it to say
that the unofficial operative phrase college coaches and administrators use to describe it
is “The Wild, Wild West.”
Many schools now employ someone whose sole responsibility is to monitor the landscape
in search of transfer targets. We’ve already had a Final Four participant play for four
schools in four years, and he won’t be the last. I wonder how many classrooms he
accidentally wandered into?
Full disclosure: I’ve been following college sports since my father, then the assistant
athletic director at Villanova, first took me to the Pennsylvania Palestra in 1952. I feel
very proprietary about college sports. Or, at least, I did.
Now? It just feels wrong, somehow. Yes, and please stop insulting our intelligence with
this “student-athlete” nonsense. Those days, if they ever existed, are gone.
Deion Sanders U vs. TCU on Sept. 2. I’ll probably watch. It’s what an enabler would do.
Bob Ryan can be reached at robert.ryan@globe.com.
