The Decisions Behind College Sports’ Realignment Craze Are All Business

One Michigan regent took issue with the impact of last week’s chaos, but ultimately, some schools stand everything to gain.

While on vacation, University of Michigan regent Jordan Acker had a conversation about the realignment chaos with former Wolverines All-American linebacker Jarrett Irons. According to Acker, Irons was giving his perspective about how hectic the moves will make schedules and the pressures that will increase on the athletes in the newly 18-team college superconference currently known as the Big Ten. It got his mind going, so he went to the cabin he’d been sharing with his family, fired off a thread on Twitter and closed his laptop. Hundreds of text messages later, he realized he’d struck a nerve.

So I've been holding my tongue for a couple days on the conference realignment, Round 2023. But now its nap time on the shores of beautiful Lake Walloon in Northern Michigan so here goes...

— Jordan Acker (@JordanAckerMI) August 6, 2023

Last week was a big one for regents across the West Coast as their meetings were livestreamed and their surprise meetings anxiously awaited to see what news, if any, would develop from each one. A regent's job, according to Acker, is threefold. As a Michigan regent, he is an elected official serving an eight-year term; they provide supervision to the university, hire and fire the president, and pass the university’s budget. For Acker at Michigan—a school that wasn’t changing leagues—it involved communicating with Santa Ono, one of four Big Ten presidents in the inner circle of the decision to add Oregon and Washington to the league. This is the second summer in a row the Big Ten has rocked the college sports world with the addition of West Coast power programs. While at Wimbledon last year, Acker was blindsided like the rest of the industry by USC and UCLA’s addition to the Big Ten. But Acker says this feels different.

“Ultimately, for me it was less about what we’re adding to the conference and more about what we’re taking away from the full Power 5 landscape, which is what happened,” Acker says. “We’re not responsible for the demise of the [Pac-12]. I think there’s a lot of factors that go into that. To see it decline so quickly from a full conference to basically four schools is disconcerting. It was a 115-year old tradition that was basically wiped out in a weekend. By the way, this happens in business. How many companies have we seen in the last 50 years go under?”

But the distinction of major college sports matters greatly in Acker’s mind. The NCAA and its schools act like they aren’t businesses, whereas other companies do not hide behind pretense. Acker wants a world where everyone admits to it. For instance, in the wake of last week’s decision, a joint statement by Ono and Michigan athletic director Warde Manuel highlighted the research capabilities of Washington and Oregon before mentioning the “championship-caliber” athletic programs and said this was the culmination of a year’s work at “ensuring a positive student-athlete experience and fiscal stability.” The Big Ten’s TV deal was already slated to give its member schools upward of $60 million (the most in college sports) before adding Oregon and Washington, and Acker doesn’t even blame the TV executives at Fox for the current plight.

What really gets at Acker is the NCAA’s priorities as Rome burns around it.

“Sears was not pretending to do anything other than sell clothes and tools and a billion other things while demanding special dispensation from Congress,” Acker says. “Only the NCAA and its member institutions are demanding that.”

Acker believes new NCAA president Charlie Baker is the right man to think outside the box to change the way college sports operate but calls the way universities try to straddle the line without outright admitting they’re a business “a little gross.” He played a small advisory role in assisting search firm TurnkeyZRG in surfacing Baker’s name for the job and thinks Baker should engage the heads of the other so-called Power 5 conferences to see how they can work together to halt the rampant chopping and changing among leagues and put athlete welfare back at the forefront.

In a statement Monday to Sports Illustrated, Baker said:

I share concerns about the impact that the recent spate of conference realignment activities will have on student-athletes’ well-being. The recent conference moves highlight what I found during my review of the issues facing the NCAA — the growing gap between well-resourced Division I schools and the rest of the division is highly disruptive for all of DI and college sports overall. I believe DI university and college presidents, commissioners and the NCAA should work together to explore ways to address the impact this growing gap is having on student-athlete well-being and the competitive equity issues across the division.

Untangling thorny NCAA issues is often wading into a sea of contradictions. The NCAA is a member-run organization, and the members are the schools. That offers everyone involved a significant amount of cover when things go wrong. The NCAA office can say it serves at the behest of the membership, while the schools can point at the NCAA to claim that’s where blame ultimately lies. The NCAA might not have been able to stop last week’s realignment chaos, as conferences are private entities, but the leagues are also made up of their member schools. And although new Big Ten commissioner Tony Pettiti comes from a television background, the presidents of the universities made a final call on whether to add Oregon and Washington, which they did not want to do last summer, before businesses realities changed.

That reality is the Pac-12 not being able to provide a deal that could entice the heavyweights to stay, mainly because the Big Ten took away the key L.A. market last summer when it added USC and UCLA. It is almost certain that Michigan, if it chose to, likely could have taken a stand with its legitimate level of influence in the higher education landscape. So it raises the question, despite all the issues Acker may have with what happened last week: If he were president of the university, would he have voted to add Washington and Oregon to the Big Ten?

“I would have voted for it,” Acker says. “And I know that’s gonna sound enormously hypocritical to say, but the job of the president of the University of Michigan is to protect the University of Michigan, and I have no doubt that Santa Ono when he voted for it was doing that. The problem isn’t with one particular here-and-there, the problem is with the system as a whole. You could say yes, this is good for Michigan, but I can take a step back and say this is bad for college sports.”

And that is the age-old issue for college sports that Acker is getting at. Michigan, like the other 13 current Big Ten members who voted last week, made a business decision.