Keep Your Hands Off My Stack...

So now that all of the moving and shaking amongst college athletics has settled a little, what do we have?

As many folks have noted, we have a conference called the Big Ten that has 12 teams, and a conference called the Big 12 that has (currently) 10 teams. The Big Less Than 12 lost two of its northern schools as Nebraska became a part of the Big More Than Ten  and Colorado joined the Pac 10 For Now, But We'll See.

Of course, things could have been much worse for the Big 12 Or Thereabouts, as some of the top football schools of the conference were being courted by the Pacific and Points East 10. And the Southeastish Conference was making eyes at Texas A&M. And most of the coverage of this matter used words like "courting" far too often, making my sports page read like a Harlequin romance. Fortunately no one talked about the earth moving, or I might just have lost my mind.

In the end, Big 12 More or Less conference officials decided that the extensive travel schedule that would result from having its athletes play schools two time zones away would present too much of an academic hardship, affect their schoolwork and hamper them from earning their degrees on schedule, so they decided to stay part of the Big 12 With 10 Teams Not the Big 10 With 12 Teams. Ha! No, of course they didn't. They got assurances they could make just as much money from TV contracts staying put as they could if they moved.

And, according to a columnist at Sports Illustrated, a couple of other monetary factors may have crept into the decision as well. The columnist quotes from a report by Big Still 12 For Awhile Yet commissioner Dan Beebe about some of the fallout for collegiate athletics if four or so large conferences had all the top-level football programs and everyone else played with their own marbles in their own little backyards. This item at the Sports Economist site quotes a line that gives coaches and athletic directors everywhere sweaty palms: "Clear identification of the highest level of intercollegiate athletics reduced to a smaller grouping of schools (e.g., four 16-member conferences) could cause eventual tax consequences and tremendous pressure to pay those student-athletes responsible in programs driving the most revenue…" I sympathize with the "eventual tax consequences" issue but the second reason remains a part of the hypocrisy rotting at the core of the collegiate athletic system today.

See, schools that are thinking about shuffling off to these other conferences could give some folks ideas. Some of those folks are in government, and one of those ideas might be even though we haven't been non-profit outfits for awhile now, they've at least tried to pretend like they are.  And profits smell like tax revenue to them, and they're congenitally unable to see money without trying to take a chunk from it. Further, if people see that programs make a lot of money, and coaches make a lot of money and conferences make a lot of money, well, they might ask what those sports-office do to earn it and they don't even want to go there because they'll have to answer, "Sit in air-conditioning while large numbers of young men, many of them minorities, perspire a lot and run into each other on Saturday afternoons."

So the Big Approximately 12 survives for another few years, and major collegiate athletics avoids a situation it fears more than it fears an NCAA inspection team rummaging through phone logs, travel receipts and the AD's laptop: Sharing its money.