Tim Benz: Like him or not, Rick Pitino is right about the state of college sports’ conference meltdowns
Share this post:
Here’s a classic case of “listen to the message, even if you don’t like the messenger.”
Rick Pitino has certainly done a lot to make many college basketball fans dislike him during his highly successful yet highly checkered coaching career.
But on the topic of nonstop conference realignment chaos, Pitino posted a comment on social media last weekend that got a lot of approval from fans who are fed up with the process.
Doesn't it make more sense for football to break away to separate leagues and allow the rest of the sports to compete regionally? Rivalries remain n minor sports don't spend half their day looking for bad food at airport restaurants!!!
— Rick Pitino (@RealPitino) August 6, 2023
Amen.
Once you get beyond the irony of Pitino taking a jab at any sort of negative restaurant experience (I know, it’s tough to do), the post is worthy of further discussion.
In fact, it’s an opinion I expressed way back when the ACC raided a bunch of Big East teams, such as Pitt, and West Virginia eventually found itself in the Big 12.
If college football “drives the bus” for college athletics (as we are so often told), why can’t that bus operate in its own HOV lane and let the other sports sputter along the parkway at their own speed?
Or just forget the bus analogy. Think of football as a tow truck pulling the rest of college sports behind it.
College football can do that from its own league.
Why not? Simply create those two, three or four mega conferences we are all pointing toward right now anyway.
Call them Big 10 Football, SEC Football, ACC Football, Big 12 Football. They’d be separate entities under the same umbrella from the current conference — kind of like Peacock to NBC or Paramount-plus to CBS.
They could strike separate TV deals however they see fit. Then use that cash to subsidize the other sports at each school.
That would allow the traditional conferences to realign in whatever ways make the most sense geographically for other sports without football. So Rutgers’ and Oregon’s field hockey teams don’t have to blow their entire budgets to play each other home and away in a given year.
More sports
• First Call: Opposing QB news for Steelers pre/regular season openers; ex-Steeler may have averted a high school tragedy
• Healthy Calvin Austin taking steps to becoming more well-rounded WR for Steelers
• For Kyle Dubas, adding Erik Karlsson serves as ‘an affirmation’ the Penguins can still win
Why is that so hard? Or why is it so hard to have multiple sports in different conferences? Notre Dame is an independent in football, in the ACC for basketball and in the Big Ten for hockey.
If you want a smaller school, a regional example, Robert Morris is in the Horizon League for basketball, the Atlantic for men’s hockey, the CHA for women’s hockey, the MAC for women’s lacrosse and the Big South for football.
Why can’t Pitt and Syracuse be in the ACC for football and the Big East for basketball? Why can’t UCLA women’s soccer team keep playing Stanford in what would remain of the Pac-12 and let its football team start that electrifying, traditional Big Ten rivalry with Maryland everybody is so excited to see launch?
By everybody, I, of course, mean nobody. From either campus.
When I clicked on Pitino’s tweet, I kept seeing comments from people fretting about Title IX implications. I have no idea how Title IX would be adversely affected by either solution.
The “Requirements Under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972” state, “To the extent that a college or university provided athletic scholarships, it is required to provide reasonable opportunities for such awards to members of each sex in proportion to the participation rate of each sex in intercollegiate athletics.”
I fail to grasp how scholarship opportunities get skewed based on what conference the football scholar-athletes compete in.
It’s “scholarship opportunities” in “intercollegiate athletics” that are up for scrutiny here. If the scholarship provided is a “Big Ten Football Conference” free ride to Ohio State as a running back or an NCAA scholarship-funded free ride to Ohio State to be the women’s point guard, what’s the difference?
Either way, it’s trickle-down economics from what the football program would be bringing into the coffers.
In fact, I’d argue Title IX is going to make keeping things status quo harder to do. Because these lower budget, non-revenue sports, particularly on the women’s side, are going to drown in red ink with the travel issues presented by these massively expanding, geographical punchline conferences alignments.
Yeah. It’s going to be messy. Yes, it’s going to take avoiding a lot of logistical minefields. But the college sports powers that be are creating their own minefields in the name of abject greed as it is anyway.
Pitino is right. Smarmy history and utter lack of self-awareness in that post aside, Pitino is correct. Let football do its own thing and get back to a conference that makes sense for every other sport.
Football can still drive the bus. It’d just be nice if the bus didn’t have to drive all the way from Eugene, Ore., to State College, Pa., for a softball game.