The dust probably hasn’t settled on the realignment of major college sports, but in just about a year, the names Big Ten, Pac-12 and Big 12 will be distant approximations of what they were only a few years ago.
The Pac-12 might even disappear after eight of its 12 teams will be deserting in 2024 for bigger paydays with other conferences. Four of those teams will join the Big Ten – extending the conference’s influence from coast to coast.
Back when the Big Ten was actually 10 teams, the 627 miles between Columbus, Ohio, and Minneapolis, Minnesota, was the longest trip a student athlete might travel in conference. In 2024, the longest in-conference trip grows to 2,463 miles from Eugene, Oregon, to New Brunswick, New Jersey.
How much the longest in-conference trips will change for Power Five schools
Major college sports – especially the Power Five conference teams – have long required air travel to some of their more distant competition, but the spate of realignment in the past 20 years (mostly in the past two) will change puddle-jumper flights to multi-hour trips across the country.
And under current NCAA rules, student athletes cannot leave for a competition more than 48 hours before it starts and must return within 36 hours after the competition. Should that rule stand, it will likely drive some creative scheduling between athletic departments on opposite coasts.
Some even wonder whether schools will be capable of funding these longer trips for sports not named football or basketball. Consider just how much the average distance between schools in each conference will change between 1980 and 2024.
With additions, average distances within conferences increase
So why use 1980 as a baseline for this analysis? There are two reasons:
- The 7-2 ruling in 1984 by the Supreme Court that said the NCAA centralized system of controlling college football’s television coverage violated the Sherman Antitrust Act. Ultimately, that decision allowed conferences to make their own deals with TV networks. Brent Schrotenboer does an excellent job explaining the ruling here.
- The 80s are the most recent decade when all the monikers of the Power Five conferences actually represented either the region or actual number of schools in their conferences. Admittedly the term “Power Five” wouldn’t come into wide usage for another a couple decades, but even then those conferences’ schools produced the most championship teams in football and men’s basketball.
Perhaps mapping the footprints of the Power Five offers the best way to show dissonant these conference brands will soon sound.
