Price of college football realignment: Losing seasons, stiffer competition

Harvey Perlman had a big choice to make as the chancellor of Nebraska in 2010.

Should his university’s sports teams join the Big Ten Conference in 2011 for more money and stability?

Or should they stay in the Big 12, where they played all of their old rivals and won two championships in football since 1997?

He chose the money. But that decision has come with an apparent cost. The Cornhuskers haven’t been nearly as good in football as they used to be, in part because they are playing in a league where entrenched powerhouse teams have continued to dominate.  Next year, that league is expanding from 14 to 18 teams, making it even tougher to rise to the top in the Big Ten.

“The reason you’re moving up or moving to a different conference is a lot of reasons, but one of the primary drivers is money,” Perlman told USA TODAY Sports. “And if you’re going to move from a conference that’s making $20 million to a conference that’s making $38 million per team a year, there’s got to be a reason for that difference. And the reason of course is the quality of the competition. Any team that moves ought to understand they’re moving to a higher level of competition.”

Nebraska, he said, does not regret its move and wasn’t concerned about tougher competition when making its decision.

Yet this has proven to be a big risk with conference realignment, which only will grow for several teams after the latest round of it this month. The grass – and the cash − always look greener in another league that offers better viewership and money from television companies. On the other hand, the tradeoff for moving to such a league often has been a more difficult path that few teams have navigated with sustained success in the past 20 years, according to data compiled by USA TODAY Sports.

And that’s not always good for the school’s brand or fan base.

What the numbers show

Since 2004, 15 football programs in the current Power 5 conferences have realigned to join new leagues, often doing so by adding travel costs and sacrificing a history of success and cherished rivalries in their old leagues.

Those teams then went on to play a combined 183 individual seasons since they changed conferences, including Nebraska, which has played 12 seasons in the Big Ten.

After all that trouble, those teams finished with a winning record in league play only 37% of the time out of those 183 chances, slightly lower than the Power 5 average of 41% in recent seasons excluding the 2020 pandemic year. Only eight of those of 183 chances have resulted in league championships, including four by Virginia Tech in the Atlantic Coast Conference after leaving the Big East in 2004 and two by Utah in the Pac-12 after moving from the Mountain West in 2011.

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Take those two teams out of the equation and the realigned path has looked far worse, littered with football teams that have struggled for the most part, such as Colorado (Pac-12), Maryland (Big Ten), Syracuse (ACC) and Missouri (Southeastern).

“There absolutely is a cost,” former Fox Sports Networks president Bob Thompson told USA TODAY Sports. “There are few moves in realignment that have been successful in terms of won/loss percentages. Your TV dollars may have gone up, but did your donations to the school fall off because you stink on TV?”

Nebraska's comedown is among the worst. It has had no winning seasons since 2016, and only five since joining the Big Ten – all after winning at least a share of the national title three times from 1994 to 1997 in the Big 12 and its predecessor, the Big Eight.

Will it be worth it?

In the meantime, traditional powers in those leagues generally have kept a stranglehold over the top spots in the standings, such as in the SEC, where Alabama, Georgia and LSU have finished with winning records in league play 29 times out of 33 chances since Missouri and Texas A&M joined the league in 2012.

A similar dynamic has played out in the Big Ten, where Nebraska has a 4-21 record against league powers Ohio State, Michigan and Wisconsin since joining in 2011.

Yet Texas and Oklahoma have elected to jump into this fray next year, when they both join the SEC from the Big 12 to expand it to 16 teams. Likewise, Southern California, UCLA, Oregon and Washington are leaving the western-based Pac-12 to try to fare better than Nebraska in the Midwestern-based Big Ten.

The reason for this is an increase in revenue for all, fueled by a more lucrative TV deal with their new leagues. For example, USC and UCLA stand to earn around $70 million each per year, about double what they were getting before.

In return, these newly aligned schools give the TV companies more attractive football games to televise, largely based on the big brand recognition they’ve built in their previous conferences.

But what if they struggle to keep up in their tougher new neighborhoods? What happens to those brands then?

“That will be the question to be answered in this round of moves,” said Thompson, now the principal at Thompson Sports Group LLC. “Will Oregon, USC, Washington and UCLA compete in the Big Ten, or are they going to end up in the middle of the pack with no shot at the College Football Playoff? What if they had stayed in the Pac-12, taken less money but at least had a pretty good shot at winning an automatic bid to the CFP playoffs? I could make the case that they risk hurting their brands if they fall into the 7-5 yearly record marsh.”

The Colorado and Syracuse examples

Nobody saw its brand rot after realignment quite like Colorado. After winning a Big 12 title in 2001 and a share of the national title in 1990, the Buffaloes left for the Pac-12 in 2011 and swiftly sank to the bottom with a Pac-12 record of 27-76 in 12 seasons. Now they are returning to the Big 12 next year in a quest for stability and success – a move that was cheered by fans and alumni eager to regain the lost glory.

Should they have ever left the Big 12?

At the time of their decision to join the Pac-12, the Big 12 didn’t look stable or as good of a fit culturally for Colorado, which has a big alumni population on the West Coast. “Many people back then thought that was it − that was the demise of a conference,” Colorado chancellor Phil DiStefano recently said of the Big 12 back then.  

Colorado’s move wasn’t totally about the money, in other words, even though stability generally means money in these cases.

Similarly, staying behind in their old league looked like a potential death spiral for others, including the three Pac-12 teams joining Colorado in the Big 12 next year: Utah, Arizona and Arizona State.

Ten years earlier, Syracuse also jumped ship to the ACC after being caught in an unstable situation in the crumbling Big East. Since then, Syracuse has mostly fallen short in the ACC, with only one winning season in league play in 10 seasons.

But the alternative was to risk being left behind in this musical-chairs race for resources, as former Big East rival Connecticut was in football. UConn didn’t get an invite from the ACC and is now playing as a football independent. It hasn’t had a winning season since 2010.

“There are so many other variables that you have to take into account, but the biggest decision-maker of them all is the survivability of your program,” said Daryl Gross, the athletic director of Syracuse at the time, now at Cal State Los Angeles. “Trust me, if Connecticut could have traded with us at the time (to join the ACC), they would have gladly. Do the math, and you’re $30 million a year less-resourced (if your program is not invited to a richer league). You’ve got to think in that $30 million maybe there’s a plan to be competitive at this new level you are at, whether it’s the ACC or any other conferences.”

It’s sort of like moving into a better neighborhood after getting a raise.

Everything will be better there, right?

The problem is all teams think that, including those that have been patrolling those neighborhoods for decades. Half the teams lose every Saturday. And then a team's recruiting strategy can change when that team is no longer playing league rivals in Texas or other areas of the country as it did in its former league.

Missouri, for example, had 33 players from Texas on its roster in its second season in the SEC in 2013, when it finished 12-2, including 7-1 in league play. Back then, the Tigers had recruited Texas players more heavily as a member of the Big 12, which was based in Texas and had four teams in the state.

The Tigers since have strayed from that in a South-based league and have not had a winning record in league play since 2014. Last year, they had only 11 players from Texas and finished 6-7 overall, including 3-5 in league play.

Though that’s not necessarily a correlation, it can be a factor as strategies evolve and don’t always work against new competition.

“They were kind of riding high (early in their SEC tenure), but that went away as they lost those Texas connections and Texas recruits,” said Dan Beebe, commissioner of the Big 12 from 2007-2011.

To stabilize the Big 12 after the departure of Missouri and others, the league added Texas Christian from the Mountain West in 2012, a program that went all the way to the national championship game last season before finishing 13-2. But before that, TCU hit such a rough patch that it parted ways with its longtime coach, Gary Patterson, and paid him a $11.5 million separation agreement in 2021.

The Maryland example

Falling fortunes in new leagues also can be costly at the box office. Last season, Maryland had the second-worst average announced attendance in the Big Ten (31,934) despite finishing 8-5, including 4-5 in the league. Of the top 33 biggest home crowds in Maryland history, only four have come since 2014, when the Terrapins moved to the Big Ten from the ACC.

It has never finished with a winning record in league play since then, marking a downfall from its heyday in the ACC, where it was a founding member and won the league title in 2001 under coach Ralph Friedgen. Of the top 33 home crowds at Maryland, 22 came during his tenure from 2001-2010, when his teams went 75-50.

“Sentimentally, I would have wanted to stay in the ACC, but financially I understand why they didn’t,” Friedgen told USA TODAY Sports.

Was it a mistake to move?

“I wouldn’t say it’s a mistake, because I really think Maryland can compete in the Big Ten,” Friedgen said. “I don’t see why they shouldn’t, everything being equal with everything else.”

He also noted that those decisions are not made by football coaches but administrators, “and you’ve got to pay the bills.” The Big Ten next year starts a media-rights deal worth about $7 billion over seven years with Fox Sports, CBS and NBC.

“In the end, money affects how competitive you’re going to be,” Perlman of Nebraska said.

Media money doesn’t necessarily buy happiness

If the biggest brands cram themselves into two super-leagues with the SEC and Big Ten, those teams will beat each other up, and half will finish in the bottom half of those leagues every year. Meanwhile, the rest of college football very well could start to lose interest because those on the outside of the two leagues might not be as engaged as they were when the power and money were spread more widely across the landscape.

“It seemed to me, and I think most people around our program − and I think most fans – that the benefits far exceeded the risk,” Perlman said of Nebraska’s move to the Big Ten.

“You inevitably compete in football with any teams across the country, whether it’s in a traditional bowl game or now with the College Football Playoff. You’ve got to be able to play at the highest level or fans are never going to be fully satisfied. So you might as well get in and learn how to do it (in a tough league).”

Perlman said his athletic department and coaches supported the move to the Big Ten at the time but didn’t raise the issue of how Nebraska might have a more difficult time on the field.

“There were concerns, but it wasn’t that,” he said. “It was extended travel, the giving up of traditional rivalries. The expectations of our fans would have to change, things like that, but never (concerns about) the level of competition.”

The test of time

The old Big 12 still might seem like a place to long for in certain respects. It had big regional brand names in college football at the time: Texas, Oklahoma, Nebraska. It had old rivalries, such as Missouri-Kansas and Texas-Texas A&M. As it was, it might have even commanded a nice price from TV companies in 2023.

“Of course, I’m going to feel like the old Big 12 configuration even today would have stood the test of time and been a formidable, competitive league, as well as one that was most considerate of student-athlete welfare with geographic proximity,” said Beebe, the former commissioner.

It wasn’t good enough for some, though. They left for where the grass appeared as green as the cash.

“It was a good league in football, but it’s also in Midwestern states, many of which don’t have large population bases and you can’t compete monetarily,” Perlman said of the old Big 12. “And money does affect how good you are.”

Follow reporter Brent Schrotenboer @Schrotenboer. Email: [email protected]