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Realignment has changed college sports. Basketball still has to adjust that in a football-driven world

By AARON BEARD AP Basketball Writer

Pittsburgh coach Jeff Capel remembers coaching in the Big 12 when Texas flirted with joining what was then the Pac-10, a move that threatened to tear the Big 12 apart and potentially leave Kansas homeless despite being a basketball blueblood.

The Longhorns stayed put for another thirteen years, but it foreshadowed the chaos to come in college sports – and football’s overwhelming role in it.

Now there are only four power conferences. Two – the Atlantic Coast Conference and Big Ten – have cross-country footprints that require cross-country travel after the realignment fight over TV money. It revolves around football as the financial engine that powers every other sport on campuses across the country.

Men’s basketball’s influence has been reduced to a backseat role when the season opens Monday, even with its own lucrative TV contract for the March Madness tournament and its hypnotic effect on the country each spring.

“I think we’re an afterthought at this point,” said Capel, who was Oklahoma’s coach when Texas was contemplating the domino turnaround in 2010 before both schools ended up in the Southeastern Conference this year. “We are not at the forefront of what is best for college athletics. Everything revolves around football, because everything revolves around money.”

Capel is not so much critical as it is a representation of reality. The millions of dollars generated by conference television deals and distributed to member schools come primarily from football, which in turn is the lifeblood for other sports. And that has fueled speed dating links between leagues and schools looking for long-term stability.

“If you look at the professional level, you have the NFL and all the others, with the NBA coming in second but nowhere near in terms of revenue and popularity,” said Joe Favorito, a lecturer at Columbia University, a sports and entertainment marketing consultant. “The NFL, it’s American sports. That’s what football is.”

A call for ‘modernization’

Basketball, on both the men’s and women’s sides, has been forced to adapt, along with the rest of the non-revenue and Olympic sports programs, despite its high visibility.

“These days, if you’re not a little concerned about your status or how to get an edge, then something is wrong,” Duke coach Jon Scheyer said. “We need to modernize our game. We have to make it attractive. We need to make it more exciting than just March and different points of the year. That’s something college football does a great job with. They just did that, and we have to do a better job.”

The challenges are increasing. This also applies to the costs that drive the pursuit of money.

The NCAA cleared the way in 2021 for athletes to capitalize on their athletic fame through name, image and likeness (NIL) agreements. That opened the door for booster-funded collectives to offer payments that many college athletic leaders viewed as pay-for-play or incentive payments under the guise of endorsements.

There’s also another $2.8 billion legal settlement that will transform college sports by allowing schools to pay players. If the proposal is finalized, the largest schools would be able to share up to $22 million annually with their athletes, a figure easier to achieve for schools with significant football revenues compared to basketball-focused leagues and schools.

Basketball teams already travel more and play more games in longer seasons than the neat rhythm of one game a week in football. Now those trips are more of a burden. That includes the Big 12 covering four time zones and the ACC using a scheduling model with the additions of Stanford, California and SMU, sending some teams on cross-country trips for nearly a week.

“Sometimes we want to get stuck in the way we do things, but we can’t,” Michigan State Hall of Fame coach Tom Izzo said as his Spartans prepare for the Big Ten’s addition of UCLA, USC. , Oregon and Washington. “So I’m going to embrace that part. That doesn’t mean I have to enjoy traveling from LA to here and getting here at 6am and getting the guys to class and getting the team ready for the next game. But other people need to do the same.”

Izzo added: “I just get a kick out of everyone getting mad about football. I never get mad at football because I think they play such an important role in our athletic department.”

Tax documents for the power conferences emphasize Izzo’s point.

It starts with the Big Ten raising $879.9 million and paying out an average of $60.3 million per school for the 2022-2023 school year, followed by the SEC ($852.6 million, $51.3 million). The ACC was next by generating $706.6 million in revenue and paying out $44.8 million to its football playing members, followed by the Big 12 ($510.7 million, $44.2 million) and finally the Pac-12 ($603.9 million, $33.6 million).

By comparison, none of these leagues generated even $250 million in revenue or distributed even $21 million per school for the 2009-2010 season, when Texas was considering its partnership westward. And these numbers do not reflect the impact of this year’s realignment — which left the Pac-12 in tatters and working to rebuild — nor larger future payouts from the expanded playoffs.

But as Favorito noted, “You’re not really making any money. You just bring in more money to spend. There is a big difference between the two.”

What’s next for basketball

The question arises for basketball how it can maintain its own position.

Capel supports expanding the NCAA tournaments beyond their 68-team format. He points to the top level of Division I football splitting into the Bowl Subdivision, above the former I-AA level now known as the Championship Subdivision, heading toward the eventual four-team CFP launch for 2014 and now 12 teams this year.

“They’ve expanded because they realize there’s more money to be made from it,” Capel said. “Why don’t we do that? Like, who thinks about basketball?’

The basketball issue could be of particular importance to the future of the Big 12 and ACC.

The Big 12 lost its top football brands with the Longhorns and Sooners, expanding to include Pac-12 holdovers Arizona, Arizona State, Colorado and Utah — schools doing more to improve an already robust basketball league than to to encourage football.

“Listen, I’ve talked about it before and since I’ve been here, I think basketball has been undervalued,” Commissioner Brett Yormark said. “I think there is a real benefit. I think there is potential growth to further monetize it, both in the short and long term.”

He noted that women’s basketball is also an important part of the mix: “You see those WNBA numbers – record ratings. You saw that last year in our tournament, the NCAA Tournament. I think there are real benefits and I’m trying to make the most of them, both in the short and long term.”

The ACC is in a slightly different position as it still has the national football brands of Florida State, Clemson and Miami, coupled with a tradition-rich basketball league featuring bluebloods Duke and North Carolina. But the league is locked in a legal battle with FSU and Clemson after those schools filed lawsuits challenging the league’s ability to charge hundreds of millions of dollars for leaving the conference.

The league’s new incentive model, which allows teams to keep more of the money generated by their own postseason success, illustrates football’s pinnacle status: A team that hits all marks for the 2024-2025 sports season would earn about 25 million dollars more in league payouts, although $20 million goes toward winning the College Football Playoff.

ACC commissioner Jim Phillips has emphasized increased efforts to boost basketball over the past year, even as he acknowledges the reality of a football-first model.

“Basketball has never been more important to us than it is right now,” Phillips said. “I would definitely say we all understand the importance of football. But football’s shadow is probably bigger than it should be. We fully understand the economic engine that football is. But basketball and the season and the tournament, when you look at the numbers and things like that, it’s healthy, it’s a healthy sport within college sports.

“I think for all of us who run conferences or schools,” Phillips added, “basketball has to be a priority.”

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AP Basketball Writer Dave Skretta and AP Sports Writer Larry Lage contributed to this report.

The Associated Press contributed to this article