Conference realignment is more than just a cash grab

Nebraska is now in the Big Ten. Colorado and Utah are now in what was for years the Pac-10. Texas A&M will soon be in the SEC and reports today indicate Missouri will be joining the Aggies there. Pittsburgh and Syracuse have jumped over to the ACC. Oklahoma and Texas have gotten the okay to leave the Big 12, a conference that is now in talks with the suddenly depleted Big East to possibly merge. Stunningly, Rutgers is in talks with multiple conferences?

Got all that?

First of all, we must begin with the understanding that collegiate athletics is hardly what you would call amateur anymore. Wait, let me amend that. College football is about the furthest thing from what you would call amateur anymore. Consider that ESPN pays $125 million per year for the rights to broadcast the five BCS games, and the University of Wisconsin's athletic department budget for this school year alone is $88.368 million, and the very word "amateur" cannot even be said with a straight face.

The NCAA pays plenty of lip service to their beloved "student-athletes" but the fact of the matter is that very few college football players want anything to do with the inside of a classroom. And as long as they don't get caught, most coaches and administrators couldn't care less either.

The Big Ten Network, jointly owned by the conference and Fox Sports (News Corp. owns a 51 percent majority stake of the network) is worth $2.8 billion through 2032. The Southeastern Conference has 15-year contracts in place through 2024 with ESPN ($2.2 billion) and CBS ($800 million). The Big East's 6-year, $200 million contract with ESPN expires in 2014. The Pac-12 just inked a television rights deal with Fox and ESPN that pays them $3 billion.

With schools changing conferences like Elizabeth Taylor used to change husbands, the knee-jerk reaction is to yell and scream that this is nothing more than a cash-grab. But while money is one of the reasons, don't fool yourself into thinking that's all this is about.

The Big East, which expanded westward in 2005 when Marquette and DePaul were added, exposed the conference to the Milwaukee and (more importantly) Chicago television markets. This year, as TCU was added, so was the Dallas television market. Those three cities represent market sizes 35, 3, and 5, or in brass terms, an additional 7 million television households.

When the Pac-10 expanded to the Pac-12, the media markets of Denver (No. 17) and Salt Lake City (No. 32) were added as well. All told, more than 2.5 million additional television households now live in Pac-12 country, with many more to come as more universities are added to the roster.

When the ACC accepted Syracuse and Pittsburgh, they got their footholds in the mammoth No. 1 market (Syracuse has approximately 46,000 alumni in New York City) as well as the No. 24 media market.

To paraphrase the mantra of Bill Clinton's first presidential campaign: "It's the eyeballs, stupid." The more of them that are watching your brand (in this case, president's universities), the more prestigious your brand is, even though the academic smokescreen predictably (and laughingly) was tossed out there by the powers that be.

"The ACC has enjoyed a rich tradition by balancing academics and athletics and the addition of Pitt and Syracuse further strengthens the ACC culture in this regard," according to conference Commissioner John Swofford in a written statement, ostensibly because when invoking the word "academics" he was unable to do so with a straight face.

"We have a long history of competing and collaborating with the distinguished universities that already are members of the Atlantic Coast Conference, and have enormous respect for both their academic strengths and their athletic accomplishments," University of Pittsburgh Chancellor Mark A. Nordenberg said, trying to convince someone without a grade school degree that this has anything to do with classroom work at all.

Even if there was one iota of truth to Nordenberg's statement, is he saying that he dismisses the academia at schools such as Marquette, Georgetown, and Notre Dame?

To quote the immortal words of Oregon State (still in the Pac-whatever) alumnus Chad Ochocinco, "Child, please."

University presidents crave prestige. Everyone wants to be the big boy on the block. And while the networks are behind this radicalization of college sports, the reason Texas A&M left for the SEC was because they felt like they would never emerge from the long (horn) shadow of their rivals in Austin, not for the money. Tired of always being second (at best) banana in a geographical football hotbed, they chose their point of least resistance. To Aggie alumni, it's better to lose five times to Alabama than to lose to Texas once.

But as the Big 12 lost yet another member with Texas A&M's departure, fear and panic set in like a staph infection all throughout college athletics. What started out as having little to do with money morphed into schools not wanting to be left out of the dividing up what they had been used to getting.

As it concerns sports, the hypocrisy of university presidents is mind-boggling. When discussing their desire to not give in to what fans have been screaming about for more than a decade, an alternative to the Bowl Championship Series, they will tell you that they want to preserve it because of "America's unique multiday bowl tradition that rewards student-athletes with a celebratory bowl-game week," according to CBS Executive Director Bill Hancock. "A playoff also would mean the end of America's bowl tradition as we know it."

Hancock, acting as the mouthpiece for his bosses (university presidents), is mortified with losing tradition, yet nothing has done more to trample on college football's tradition than the BCS. Remember when the Pac-10 and Big Ten champions played each other every year on Jan. 1? For more than 50 consecutive years those were the two conferences that squared off in "The Granddaddy of them All." The BCS put an end to that. Your current Rose Bowl champion is currently a member of the Mountain West, on its way to the Big East. Maybe. Their season ends not with a bowl game, but who they decide should play for the national championship. Remember how much ESPN pays for these games, right?

It seems that when money is on the line, tradition goes out the window.

Then again, what does traditional conference bowl agreements matter if the conferences themselves are a collection of free agent schools whored out to the highest bidder, while everyone else is scrambling to not be left out in the cold?

Pac-12 commissioner Larry Scott told USA Today this week that he believes college football would be more successful "if there were fewer, bigger, stronger conferences." I guess I did not realize that college football was somehow operating at a position of weakness in 2011. His statement speaks volumes, however, because of the mad dash to still get in on the party created out of fear of losing BCS television dollars.

Consider what has befallen two of the six BCS conferences. The Big East and Big 12 are on life support because football is king. If you are in what's left of these conferences and you do not have a traditional football powerhouse (Kansas, Iowa State, Baylor, or South Florida) or even worse, no football team at all (I'm talking to you, Marquette), you're scrambling around trying to find other schools in your position that might want to align with you out of sheer preservation.

Today, word comes out that West Virginia is in mad scramble mode, having been reportedly rejected by both the SEC and the ACC. Logic dictates the Mountaineers aren't the only ones burning up the phone lines hoping that now Plan C will be the one that hits.

For the last couple of weeks, literally every day something changes in the landscape of conference realignment in college sports. It has become abundantly clear that fear and panic has set in, however. Where schools like Marquette will ultimately wind up is anyone's guess. University presidents have gone into 'circle the wagons' mode to try to make sure that at the very least, as many eyeballs see their school's names and logos on television sets as before.

When the dust settles, there will be winners (Missouri, Utah) and there will be losers (West Virginia, South Florida). The domino effect of one school's insecurity (Texas A&M) has already had reverberations throughout the entire country. Today we see that fear and mistrust has infected sports in a way that has forever trampled any semblance of the decency and lessons organized athletics is supposed to provide. However, the die is cast. There's no turning back.

But remember, it's all about the kids.