Don’t blame Big 12 for conference realignment. They didn’t create this. They responded
The conference realignment saga has thrown college athletics into such disarray that coaches are now feeling inclined to speak on it.
And man if a couple of them, Missouri’s Eli Drinkwitz on Saturday and Colorado’s Deion Sanders a day earlier, didn’t offer some compelling messages about it — even if they’re perhaps interesting messengers on the topic.
The two head football coaches, Drinkwitz and Sanders, responded to questions with just-gotta-get-something-off-my-chest monologues. But they left a little something on there, too.
They made separate but related arguments — Sanders questioning how you could criticize a college athlete for chasing money if the schools are doing it; Drinkwitz noting that the student-athletes (and particularly non-revenue student-athletes) don’t benefit from traveling across time zones to play games.
Frankly, I wish more high-level football coaches had the guts to take what really amounts to shots at universities’ leadership, even if doing so almost certainly won’t change a thing. So I’m not here to push back on a single aspect of what either man said.
But I do want to talk about a few things they didn’t say. A few things they left out — because it mirrors what the national conversation seems to continue omitting.
The problem of conference realignment is not of the Big 12’s creation, or at least not the creation of this version of the Big 12. It is the Big 12’s solution. They did not throw blindsided haymakers at college athletics in the middle of the night this week. They punched back. And it feels as though the real complaint nationally is that they have finally, after a decade-long attempt, landed some impact blows.
The Big 12 Conference was left for dead not once but twice. What its current member schools are feeling this week is relief rather than celebration. The Big Ten is probably a different story, but that’s part of the point — realignment isn’t created equally.
The whole thing undoubtedly stinks, but you know where Arizona and Arizona State would probably prefer to be? Back alongside UCLA, USC and Oregon. Arizona and Arizona State are enacting alternative options, because those who acted first robbed them of their primary choice. Yet they’re the bad guys?
You know which schools the Big 12 would probably love to poach? How about Missouri, Texas A&M, Nebraska, Texas and Oklahoma? The programs that left. The ones that actually started this mess.
How can we praise their moves a decade earlier — finding safe ground after Texas’ establishment of the Longhorn Network provided some suddenly uneasy footing — and yet criticize the schools left behind for responding? (If the Big 12 is to blame anywhere near the starting line, it’s there; yielding power to Texas, unnerving some of its own programs.)
We knew this would be the aftermath of the movement a decade ago, same as we still know this isn’t the last shoe to drop. That the response took so long doesn’t change the origin.
Which, sure, I guess makes it interesting that Mizzou’s head football coach is denouncing the effects of realignment, even as his arrival to Columbia came long after Missouri’s departure from the Big 12. If he meant his words to include anyone and everyone’s role in realignment, including his own school, then more power to him and more of that, please. If he didn’t, well, we’re ignoring who fired first.
Drinkwitz provided some convincing anecdotes about athletes arriving home early in the morning from long trips, only to attend class the next day. Some of those examples, though, occupy seats in classrooms on the Mizzou campus.
Gainesville, a conference trip and an in-division one, sits 1,007 miles from Columbia, an extra 200 miles from any trip in their old conference. But Mizzou isn’t waiting in line to return to the Big 12, where the Tigers could play three opponents within a 4 1/2-hour car ride, closer than any opponent in the SEC. Missouri has long been part of the chaos, not the leaders of orderliness. The game is rigged in such a way that everyone is waiting for the invitation to join the chaos, too.
At one point Saturday, Drinkwitz asked (already knowing the answer), “Did we count the cost for student-athletes involved in this decision?”
No, of course not. It is a rich-get-richer world, same as many worlds when millions of dollars are involved. The winners are those already flush with cash. The losers are more plentiful, less powerful.
The athletes.
The fans.
Mom and Dad who might want to attend a son or daughter’s tennis match or basketball game or conference championship swim meet.
That’s the aspect Drinkwitz so effectively captured Saturday, and he’s not the one who should have to capture it.
Put the school presidents in front of the lecterns to answer the very questions Drinkwitz asked of those involved. The ones chasing the cash, without a care for the consequences. But make sure to put the oldest examples up there, too.
Which brings it back to one more thing on Deion Sanders. He characterized realignment as “about the bag.” We knew that already, and a bunch of teenagers and students in their early 20s are getting a first-hand lesson in something we all learn at some point in life.
Sanders later questioned, “How do grown-ups get mad at the players when they’re chasing it — when the colleges are chasing it?”
He’s not wrong. Forgot one person, though: himself. I don’t recall Sanders taking a pay cut to move to Boulder. Instead, he signed a five-year, $29.5 million contract with Colorado — a bit more than the four-year, $1.2 million pact he’d made with his previous stop, Jackson State.
If there’s a difference, it’s a small one.
If we’re going to have ongoing conversations about realignment, and I suspect we just might, we have to at least start from a place of stating the obvious: Head football coaches are among the biggest beneficiaries of the chaos, not the victims of it.
Drinkwitz came close to making that argument, saying, “We’re talking about a football decision,” and “Football is gonna be fine.”
Indeed, the richest sport in college athletics will survive realignment. But first and foremost, the richest schools in the richest conferences will, too.
They chose money over tradition, over the kids, over the fans, over their peers, over all else.
Let’s keep the blame there — not with those they left in their wake, trying to find the best scraps left at the table.
This story was originally published August 6, 2023 at 12:58 PM.