The Pac-12 Is Dying. What Does that Mean for College Baseball?

Lenin might not have actually said: “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” But that doesn’t mean not-Lenin was wrong. College football just lived through such a week, as the Big Ten’s addition of UCLA and USC for the coming football season snowballed into an all-out raid on the Pac-12. Oregon and Washington are following the two Los Angeles schools to richer pastures. The Big 12, already in the process of adding four mid-major schools to replace the outgoing Texas and Oklahoma, is swooping in to pick Arizona, Arizona State, Colorado, and Utah from off the curb. Left with the proposition of propping up a rump four-team conference, Cal and Stanford are being courted by the ACC. Those schools, with their sterling academic reputations, are considered a good cultural fit for a conference that already includes Duke and Virginia; the same could be said about UCLA and the Big Ten.

If those institutions want to keep up the pretense of looking smart, they’re going to have to rename these conferences. An Atlantic Coast Conference with two teams in California? An 18-team Big Ten? A 16-team Big 12? People are going to start to think these jokers can’t count or read a map. But that’s of secondary importance. What this audience wants to know, surely, is what this means for college baseball.

It’s hard to pin down a moment before conference realignment because there really isn’t one. The various alliances between Division I athletics departments have always been in motion. I grew up an avid Virginia Tech football fan in a time when Syracuse, West Virginia, and Miami were the Hokies’ biggest rivals in the Big East; such a thing seems preposterous 20 years later. If you’re a little older and a little more Texan than I am, you probably mourn the SWC. You could really pick any starting point if you wanted to.

I chose 2011, the year before Texas A&M, Missouri, and Nebraska left the Big 12, which really set the gears in motion for the revolutionary moment we’re in now. In the years that followed, Louisville joined the ACC and turned into a perennial national championship contender under Dan McDonnell, and the Big Ten went from a baseball afterthought to a legitimate power conference thanks to geographic and financial growth.

Here’s how things stood in 2011, with the six conferences that received automatic bids to BCS football bowl games, plus the five non-power conferences that put multiple teams in the NCAA baseball tournament that year.

Schools marked with an asterisk are non-contiguous with the rest of the conference, meaning that they are in a state that does not border the group of adjacent states that contains the largest number of teams in the conference. That’s not a particularly big deal in 2011; the only geographical isolates in the major conferences are Boston College, UCF, and technically Georgetown. It will become a very big deal in years to come.

Here’s how things stood during the NCAA baseball season that just ended in June:

Over the past 12 seasons, the major conferences have stayed mostly stable, with the exception of the dissolution of the old Big East, which got picked over much the same way the Pac-12 is getting parted out now. TCU and Utah got promoted from the mid-major ranks, and Louisville did both, joining the Big East for a few years on its journey from Conference USA to the ACC.

As these schools got promoted to the big exposure and TV paydays of the major conferences, other schools tried to scramble up the ladder as well, leading to exchange and consolidation between the Mountain West and the WAC, and Conference USA and the AAC (the remnant of the old football Big East). Using the multi-bid cutoff also highlights another shift in the college baseball power structure at this time: the decline of the Big West.

Not too long ago, California’s non-Pac 12 (or Pac-10 back in the day) schools made up a de facto major baseball conference. Cal State-Fullerton has four national championships, and Fullerton, UC-Irvine, and UC-Santa Barbara have been to the College World Series in the past decade; those three schools and Long Beach State have all been out of a regional more recently than USC has. But the locus of power in college baseball has shifted east — southeast, really — in the past 10 years.

Non-Power Five conferences with a strong historical identity — the Big West, the MAC, the Ivy League — have remained more or less stable throughout the realignment process, but marriages of convenience have emerged as ex-power conference refugees (old Big East schools, or the universities that ended up on the wrong side of the SWC-to-Big 12 divide) popped up to fill vacancies elsewhere. Here, we see the advent of geographically incoherent conferences, or at least inconvenient ones. Conference USA would be contiguous if not for 75 miles’ worth of Mississippi, but its footprint covers most of the Southeastern U.S., from Bowling Green, Kentucky, to Miami, to San Antonio. The CAA spreads 11 schools across eight bordering states from Massachusetts to South Carolina. The AAC is the one appropriately named conference, with its eight baseball-playing members spread across seven states. Taking out Tennessee and North Carolina — Memphis and East Carolina are in adjacent states but more than 800 miles apart — only two of the remaining states in the conference border each other.

Things are about to get even weirder in the next couple years.

I keep harping on the geographical coherence of conferences for two reasons, one trivial, the other less so. The trivial reason is that throughout the history of college sports, a conference has conveyed a distinct cultural identity. I went to college in the SEC, but I’ve also lived in the shadow of universities that belonged to the old-school Big East basketball conference, the Big Ten, and the MAC. You’d never mistake one for another, and if that turns out to be a thing of the past, our sports culture will lose something ineffable but important. That particular horse, though, has been on its way out of the barn for years. If we do lose the distinctive regionality of college sports, it’ll be survivable, and people like me will learn to live with it, even if we’re being a little precious about it now.

The real concern has been voiced over and over regarding — and here’s one of my favorite euphemisms in the business — “non-revenue sports,” i.e. not football and men’s basketball at most schools. The football tail is wagging the dog here, because that’s the sport that drives the TV contracts that enrich the people deciding who plays where.

For football, a national conference involving cross-country travel for one game once or twice a season, frequently with chartered travel, is not a big deal. Baseball players play three-game weekend series, with lower program budgets. Teams from cold-weather climates almost always spend the first month of the season on the road, because, well, do you want to find out what it’s like to hit with a metal bat in Ypsilanti in February? I don’t.

If the Big Ten had any sense of humor, they’d schedule the California schools to open their conference schedules on the road. When I was covering college baseball in the Midwest, I went to Ann Arbor in mid-March to see a pitching matchup between Maryland ace Mike Shawaryn and Michigan’s Jake Cronenworth. After the game I went from the press box down to the field to interview Shawaryn, forgot to zip up my jacket, and got kicked in the chest by a burst of 23-degree air as I stepped outside. During this year’s draft combine, I asked Arizona native Roch Cholowsky, then a potential first-day pick and now bound for Big Ten newcomer UCLA, if he owned a winter coat. He said no. He should consider buying one.

Even assuming hospitable weather, cross-country travel is a huge time suck on people who are still trying to keep up a full college schedule. Most Power Five football players are on full scholarship and hope to play in the NFL. Most Power Five baseball players are going to become gym teachers or real estate agents after they get out of school. And as of this year, Division I baseball programs have to spread 11.7 scholarships out over as many as 32 players on a 40-man roster. These guys are going to have to balance a professional travel schedule half the year with actually going to college, a challenge that becomes all the greater at schools like Stanford, Vanderbilt, and Rice.

In his story on realignment for Baseball America, Teddy Cahill explained the impact that such grueling travel could have on these students. Maybe it’s not every week, but we’re looking at a 17-team Big Ten based mostly in the Midwest, but with six schools on the coasts. A conference like the remade Big 12, with its bipolar geographic distribution, could mitigate some of the travel burden by establishing division-based scheduling, but flying from Cincinnati or Orlando to basically anywhere else in the conference week in and week out isn’t going to be a picnic. It’s going to be hard on the athletes, coaches, and staff, and more than that, it’s going to be expensive.

With all of that in mind, one of three things is going to happen to college baseball in the next several years.

Option 1: Continue down the current path.

Previous conference realignment gold rushes were mostly about reshuffling the established order, maybe adding one or two new teams to a conference to court a big TV market. (The Big Ten adding Rutgers as a pretext to get the conference’s TV network on the air in New York is about as nakedly cynical a sports management decision as you’ll ever see, short of holding the World Cup in Qatar.) Now, it looks like we’re in a race between the Big Ten and the SEC to eat the rest of college sports, or at least college football. The Pac-12 looks cooked at this point, and it seems like only a matter of time before Florida State and/or Clemson tries to bolt for the SEC before it’s too late. Until the money disappears, the consolidation will continue.

When football is such big business, obviously coaches’ salaries go up and facilities budgets improve, but some of that money does trickle out into other sports. It’s easy to mock the round of Big Ten expansion from a decade ago, but it raised the expectations and standards for that conference in baseball, and not just because Nebraska and Maryland were relatively successful at the time. Indiana is a perennial regional team now. Michigan played for a national championship in 2019. Illinois has been a national seed in the NCAA tournament. Penn State, which has been nowhere for the past 20 years, just made a huge splash by hiring head coach Mike Gambino away from Boston College.

Baseball is serious business out there now. What was a one-bid league 12 years ago regularly gets three or four at-large bids and often as not hosts a regional. But as much as spending has gone up in the Big Ten as the conference started to notice the sport, the gap to the SEC has only grown larger. South Carolina spent $35 million on a new baseball stadium in 2009. A decade later, Mississippi State and Florida were spending almost twice that on new ballparks. LSU poached a pitching coach from the Minnesota Twins, and after one season, Georgia hired him away from LSU.

If college football turns into a two-conference superleague centered on the Big Ten and the SEC, and other sports’ alignments follow football, the SEC is going to end up with an even bigger financial and infrastructure advantage over the rest of the country than it already has.

Option 2: Major conference schools de-emphasize or cut baseball.

If you were looking closely at those conference realignment tables, you probably noticed that a few names were missing. Several Power Five schools don’t sponsor varsity baseball: Wisconsin, Iowa State, Colorado, Syracuse. If these football-first conferences put a major strain on university resources, it would not surprise me if other schools followed suit. In 2011, Cal was set to disband its baseball program before a last-ditch $9 million fundraising effort stayed the team’s execution. Such a thing would be unthinkable in Florida, Texas, or the rest of the SEC. But imagine a Big Ten school with little history of success or even relevance in baseball, staring down the following choice: spend $30 million on a new ballpark, plus millions more for top coaches and an indoor practice facility, or go 5–25 in-conference every year forever. At a time when the athletics department (or perhaps even the university at large) is facing a crisis, would Rutgers spend to keep up with Ohio State and UCLA? Would Northwestern? Would West Virginia? Kansas? Or would these schools cut off a limb to save the body, if the limb goes 20 years between regional appearances and only draws a couple hundred fans a game?

So has the reverse: A power conference’s biggest draws see that, if the TV deal pie is divided X ways, it behooves the big schools to cut the chaff loose and divide the spoils X-1 ways. It’s happened before, when the Big East booted Temple after the 2004 season, only to welcome the Owls back in 2012 after the last round of realignment bloodletting. Which brings up Option 3.

Option 3: Football gets decoupled from the rest of the conference infrastructure.

This is what I’d like to see happen.

I know it seems like nobody outside the SEC (outside of Georgia and Alabama, if we’re being honest) has a real shot at winning a national football championship. The SEC has won the past four national football championships and sent at least one team to the national title game in 16 of the past 17 seasons.

The conference is even more dominant in baseball. The SEC has won the past four national titles in baseball as well, and all six finalists in the past three seasons will play in the SEC next year. In the past 15 College World Series, there have been three final series that pit Florida against another SEC team, but only one that involved no SEC teams. Over that time, 10 of the 16 teams from next year’s SEC have played for the national championship at least once; three of the six others have made it to Omaha twice in the past six seasons. This conference is so deep, so well-resourced, so well-buttressed culturally, that we’re approaching a point at which the rest of the country is playing for second place. That’ll only become more true if Florida State and Clemson join up a few years down the road.

There are individual Big Ten, ACC, and Big 12 programs with the wherewithal to stand up to the SEC juggernauts, but that will and support isn’t there from top to bottom in those conferences. That raises an obvious question: Why should commitment to football dictate conference affiliation across all sports?

I’m not entirely sure what’s going to happen to individual baseball programs in this latest round of realignment, but the teams whose fates interest me most are USC and Oregon State. USC is the most decorated program in baseball history, with 12 national championships and more impactful big leaguers than almost anyone: Tom Seaver, Randy Johnson, Mark McGwire, Mark Prior, Barry Zito, Fred Lynn, the Boone brothers… the list goes on. But this program has been a virtual nonentity in the 21st century. Will moving to the Big Ten signal a return to relevance, or will we watch the Trojans get stomped by Iowa and Michigan State every year?

Oregon State, on the other hand, has been the best West Coast program of the past 20 years. Since 2005, the Beavers have won five regular-season Pac-12 titles, made six trips to the College World Series, and won three national titles. And now they’re being left without a chair as the music stops in the Pac-12. If you were drafting football programs into a power conference, Oregon State, last year’s 10-win season notwithstanding, probably wouldn’t be anywhere near the top of the list. But if the Beavers are left without a home, they should be high on the list of any conference with an interest in baseball.

Until the recent run of SEC dominance, college baseball’s centers of power had more to do with geography and coaching than conference brand recognition. Taking baseball in isolation, Oregon State would make a natural partner for Cal State-Fullerton and the other Big West heavyweights. Rice, Dallas Baptist, Wichita State, and Southern Miss would make more sense in the Big 12 than would Utah or the Kansas schools. But in order to do that, you have to decouple football’s hierarchy from the organization of other sports.

It can be done. The reconstituted Big East preserves some of the rivalries among basketball programs like UConn, Villanova, Georgetown, and St. John’s, schools whose history in football is less storied. Or consider a sport like ice hockey, which has just 61 Division I men’s teams, compared to 300 in baseball. Like baseball, hockey is a heavily regionalized college sport whose historical powers often have little to do with football. And with teams as far-flung as Alaska, Arizona, and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, travel in hockey is its own unique challenge. So they said to hell with other sports’ conference structure. The only conference that sponsors both football and men’s ice hockey is the Big Ten, which includes just seven teams (among them Notre Dame) and only came into being within the past 10 years. The MAC teams that play hockey don’t all play in the same conference, nor do the Patriot League teams. Six of the eight Ivy League schools have Division I men’s hockey teams, but the Ivy League does not sponsor the sport itself.

Baseball could do this too if it wanted: Maybe all 16 (for now) SEC teams have a dire need to play baseball at the highest level, but if the same isn’t true of the Big Ten or Big 12, or if a middling football school likes its chances better on the diamond, it could play in a higher league.

The big obstacle: television rights, particularly in conferences like the Big Ten and ACC, whose in-house networks show plenty of conference baseball. How much would Northwestern stand to lose if it de-emphasized baseball? How much would an Indiana State be entitled to as a baseball-only member?

Eventually, someone’s going to figure this question out, because the current model expects every school to operate like a Texas or Florida and entertain national championship aspirations in every sport. That’s not sustainable forever, even for schools that are currently well-ensconced in the bank vault. Either the top couple dozen football teams will break away from the NCAA as we know it, or teams that dominate in less prestigious sports will be discarded from major conference sports for lack of football prowess. It already looks like that’s happening to Oregon State.

Until then, every other sport is living under the conditions football is dictating. The potential money is eye-watering, but it comes at its own cost.