Canzano: College football voices need to be heard
Who will speak for the 'non-power' conferences?
Downtown Boise is sneaky good. It has some fun restaurants, great hotels, some nightlife, and pockets of revitalized “old” new neighborhoods.
Boise State athletics fuels the town’s engine.
Jeremiah Shinn, Boise State’s interim president, went to graduate school at Michigan. He worked for three years as a vice president at LSU. What I’m saying is, he knows the difference between an apple and an orange.
He also understands that the college towns of Ann Arbor and Baton Rouge really aren’t all that different than Boise.
“College athletics serves as a community anchor and a driver of economic activity,” he told me this week. “It fills hotel rooms, supports small businesses, and gives alumni and families something to believe in together.”
Shinn is joining the growing number of campus leaders to speak out. He’s concerned with the unsustainable trajectory of college sports. Without wise intervention, Shinn fears further marginalization of the ‘non-power’ conferences will hit towns such as Boise like a bag of bricks.
“In a world of continued realignment, consolidation, and exclusion of programs outside the ‘Power 2’ or ‘Power 4’ structure, the potential economic consequences for those communities are significant,” he told me on Tuesday. “The economic impact doesn’t go somewhere else — it just ceases to exist.”
I can’t imagine another sports league having a strategy of contraction and alienation. But that’s exactly what college football has done.
A lot of it is arbitrary, too.
Some schools in the Big Ten and SEC don’t add competitive value, but still have a path to riches because they were fortunate enough to have that historical conference affiliation. Meanwhile, a handful of colleges in non-power leagues have done everything right — invested wisely, hired well, and played a deft game — only to bump their heads against an unforgiving ceiling.
Boise State is one of those schools. So are Tulane and James Madison University. That trio demonstrates the uphill runway that the most successful ‘non-power’ football schools face.
Mike Aresco, the retired commissioner of the American, watched the SEC and Big Ten throw their weight around during the College Football Playoff revenue distribution negotiations a few years ago. He was troubled by it.
“It’s become Darwinian,” Aresco said at the time.
Except that in a Darwinian game, everyone is theoretically playing by the same rules. Survival of the fittest. Natural selection. Variation. Inheritance. All that. But in this game, the historical winners (Big Ten and SEC) make the rules for everyone else. Then, when those rules widen the competitive gap, they point to the gap as proof and justification for the rules.
Look no further than the 12-team CFP model. Boise State earned a bye two years ago in the bracket. Then, what happened? They changed the rules. Last season, JMU and Tulane both got in the bracket. Two non-power teams in the field? What happened next? They changed the rules again.
As Shinn told me this week: “The current trajectory of college athletics isn’t sustainable for any program, but some programs have a longer runway than others.”
Another cry for help this week came from behind the doors at the University of Louisville. It arrived in the form of an open letter written by the president, athletic director, and the chairman of the university trustees.
“A structural crisis,” it hollered.
“We don’t have the answers,” it announced.
“The time for incremental tinkering has passed,” it read.
Louisville is bleeding cash. To bridge the shortfall in the athletic department, the school has relied on a $200-per-student athletic fee, a $12 million institutional subsidy, and a $25 million line of credit. Reserves that were once at $34 million have melted to $3.4 million.
Shinn read the Louisville letter and told me, “Switch out the numbers, and nearly every president and AD could have written the same article.”
Louisville, which plays in the ACC, is in financial peril. Ohio State is running at a $37.7 million deficit in the latest fiscal year, the letter stated. And Penn State holds the title of the most leveraged athletic department in America, carrying more than $500 million in debt.
Those stories that will get headlines and get their respective conference commissioners a seat on the looming presidential panel. But I’m left wondering who is going to speak for the non-power athletic programs.
Shinn’s right. The football programs in those cities generate economic and civic value for their communities, too. But there’s no pathway for them to earn higher status, gain resources, and increase viability.
The decisions being made by the Big Ten and SEC have the potential for devastating economic impact in places such as Corvallis, Pullman, Fresno, Fort Collins, Spokane, Boise, and a bunch of other places.
It’s not like the schools in those towns want to take resources from the Big Ten, SEC, ACC, and Big 12. It’s not the job of those four conferences to worry about the Pac-12, Mountain West, American, Sun Belt, Conference USA, and MAC. But someone ought to be thinking about more than the ‘Power 2’ or ‘Power 4.’
The recent economic shift caused by realignment in college athletics is troubling. The power structure and revenue have shifted to the two major conferences. The money has been redistributed, mostly to schools in the Midwest and South.
I thought it was revealing to hear the leaders at Louisville are worried about the chaos and calling for federal intervention. Places such as Penn State and Ohio State want that, too, but they can wait it out a little longer because of the financials.
The non-power football programs generate a ton of economic value and civic pride for their communities. Shinn’s dead, solid, perfect right about that. Yet status in the current system has largely been grandfathered in. There’s no clear, objective pathway for outliers to earn it.
Status determines resources. Resources determine viability. And viability determines whether a program can compete, invest, and ultimately survive.
A few years ago, a deputy athletic director at Boise State, Michael Walsh, spent a bunch of time dreaming up and sketching out a promotion/relegation model for college athletics. It provided a path for the best non-power programs to win games and punch their way into the upper echelon. It had a survival-of-the-fittest mentality.
Walsh grew up in Portland. He studied at Washington State. He’s a former intern of mine. His idea was fun and terrific. His prospectus got passed around by a few people at some of the conferences, but hardly anyone took it seriously. The feds might want to take a peek at his work.
Walsh threw in the keys and got out of college administration amid all the realignment chaos. He’s the chief operating officer now for a company that produces NIL-driven trading cards and collectibles.
The chorus of campus leaders now calling for intervention is impossible to ignore. It’s time for some action. The President of the United States announced he’ll be holding a meeting on Friday to discuss the future of college football. Urban Meyer and Nick Saban, two prominent former coaches, are expected to attend. So are the commissioners of the power conferences.
Tiger Woods will be there.
NBA Commissioner Adam Silver will attend.
The guest list is expected to swell to 35 or more.
Notably absent?
The leaders of the Pac-12, Mountain West, Sun Belt, Conference USA, and MAC won’t be in the room unless something changes. They sound grateful that it looks like federal intervention might be coming, but the cities and college towns connected to those leagues have to be terrified that the interests of the whole won’t be considered.
Tim Pernetti, the commissioner of The American, told me he’s invited and will be present on Friday. Pernetti told me, “I just want to make sure the (Group of 6) isn’t badly positioned.”
On the day the Pac-12 splintered, I wrote a column about a church pastor in Pullman who was despondent about the impact of that on his youth group. The church kids utilized the parking lot as a fundraiser on game days, selling parking spaces.
Hotels in town weren’t happy that day, either.
Restaurants told me they expected to take a hit.
Shinn’s not wrong. College football is an economic driver and a community anchor. Game days create a rallying point and boost a city. A home kickoff with big stakes is rocket fuel for a place like Boise. While they’re talking about how to save college football, someone in the room ought to make that point.
Great column, John. Please stay on this topic. Encourage Wilner too. You guys are influential. Thanks for your efforts here.
Louisville is in the ACC