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The realignment changed college sports. It is basketball that must adapt to a football-driven world

By AARON BEARD AP Basketball Writer

Pittsburgh coach Jeff Capel recalls coaching a Big 12 team when Texas was flirting with moving to the then-Pac-10, which risked tearing the Big 12 apart and potentially leaving Kansas homeless despite being a blue-blooded basketball player.

The Longhorns remained in place for another 13 years, but it was a preview of the chaos to come in college sports and the overwhelming role football would play in it.

Now there are only four power conferences. Two of them – the Atlantic Coast Conference and the Big Ten – have coast-to-coast coverage, requiring you to travel across the country to compete for TV dollars. It focuses on football as the financial engine that powers every other sport on campuses across the country.

After opening the season on Monday, men’s basketball’s influence has been reduced to a secondary role, despite its own lucrative March Madness television contract and the hypnotic influence it has on the country every spring.

“I think we’ve already thought about it,” said Capel, who was Oklahoma’s coach when Texas was contemplating a domino toppling in 2010, before both schools were in the Southeastern Conference that 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 a critic as a statement of reality. The millions of dollars generated through conference television deals and distributed to member schools come primarily from football, which in turn drives other sports. And that has spurred speed dating between leagues and schools looking for long-term stability.

“If you look at the professional level, we have the NFL and the rest of the league, and the NBA is second in revenue and popularity, but it’s not even close,” said Joe Favorito, a Columbia University lecturer and sports marketing consultant and entertainment. “The NFL is an American sport. That’s football.”

A call for “modernization”

Basketball, both men’s and women’s, has been forced to adapt, along with other nonprofit and Olympic sports programs, despite high visibility.

“In this day and age, if you’re not the least bit worried about your situation or how to get ahead, there’s something wrong,” Duke coach Jon Scheyer said. “We need to modernize our game. We have to make it attractive. We need to make it exciting not just in March and at different times throughout the year. That’s something college football does a great job with. They just did it and we have to do a better job.

The challenges are growing. Similarly, spending fuels the pursuit of money.

In 2021, the NCAA allowed athletes to capitalize on their athletic fame through name, image and likeness (NIL) agreements. This opened up opportunities for booster-funded collectives to offer payments that many college sports leaders viewed as pay-for-play or recruiting incentives under the guise of endorsements.

Also awaiting approval is a $2.8 billion legal settlement that would transform college sports by allowing schools to pay players. If finalized, the bill would allow major schools to make up to $22 million a year available to their athletes, an amount that would be easier to achieve for schools with significant revenues from football compared to basketball-focused leagues and schools.

Basketball teams already travel more, playing more games over longer seasons than soccer’s one-game-per-week rhythm. Now these trips are a bigger burden. That includes the Big 12 spanning four time zones and the ACC adopting a scheduling model with the addition of Stanford, California and SMU, which sends some teams on field trips almost once a week.

“Sometimes we want to stay stuck in our ways, but we’re not going to be able to stay stuck in our ways,” said Michigan State Hall of Fame coach Tom Izzo as his Spartans prepare to join the Big Ten of UCLA, USC, Oregon and Washington. “So I’m going to accept that part. That doesn’t mean I have to love the fact that I travel from Los Angeles to here, get here at 6 a.m., take the guys to practice and get the team ready for the next game. But other people need to do the same.”

Izzo added: “I’m just fascinated by everyone who gets mad about football. I will never, ever get angry at football because I believe it plays such a significant role in our athletic department.

Power conference tax documents underscore Izzo’s thesis.

It starts with the Big Ten, which generated $879.9 million and is paying out an average of $60.3 million per school in the 2022-23 school year, followed by the SEC ($852.6 million, $51.3 million). Next was the ACC, which generated $706.6 million in revenue and distributed $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 dollars, 33.6 million dollars).

By comparison, neither league generated even $250 million in revenue or contributed even $21 million to the school during the 2009-10 season, when Texas was considering a partnership with West. These numbers do not reflect the impact of this year’s realignment, which left the Pac-12 in tatters and working to rebuild, or the larger future payouts from the expanded playoffs.

However, as Favorito noted, “You don’t actually make money. You just bring more money to spend. There is a big difference between them.”

What’s next for basketball?

When it comes to basketball, the question is how to maintain your position.

Capel supports expanding the NCAA Tournament beyond a 68-team format. It points to the top division of Division I football moving to the Bowl Subdivision, above the former I-AA level, now known as the Championship Subdivision, on the way to the eventual introduction of the four-team CFP in 2014 and now 12 teams this year.

“They expanded because they realized there was more money to be made in it,” Capel said. “Why don’t we do it? Like, who thinks about basketball?”

The basketball issue could be particularly important for the future of the Big 12 and the ACC.

The Big 12 lost its top football franchises to the Longhorns and Sooners and expanded to absorb the Pac-12 remnants of Arizona, Arizona State, Colorado and Utah — schools that do more to improve an already weak basketball league than to advance football .

“Listen, I’ve discussed this before, and since I’ve been here, I really think basketball is underrated,” commissioner Brett Yormark said. “I think it’s really positive. I think there is upside potential to further monetize this investment, both short-term and long-term.”

He noted that women’s basketball also plays a key role in the mix: “You see those WNBA numbers – record-breaking rankings. You saw it last year in our tournament, the NCAA tournament. I think there are really a lot of benefits to this and I try to capture as many of them as I can in both the short and long term.”

The ACC is in a slightly different situation as it still has national football franchises Florida State, Clemson and Miami coupled with a tradition-rich basketball league that includes blue bloods Duke and North Carolina. However, the league is embroiled in a legal dispute with FSU and Clemson after the schools filed lawsuits questioning the league’s ability to collect hundreds of millions of dollars for leaving the conference.

The league’s new incentive model, which allows teams to keep a larger share of the money generated by their own postseason success, illustrates football’s status at the top: a team that achieves every goal in the 2024-2025 sports season could earn about $25 million more in league payouts. $20 million for winning the College Football Playoff.

ACC Commissioner Jim Phillips highlighted increased efforts to revitalize basketball last year while acknowledging the viability of a football-first model.

“Basketball has never been more important to us than it is right now,” Phillips said. “I would say that we all definitely understand the importance of football. But football’s shadow is probably bigger than it needs to be. We fully understand the economic engine that is football. But basketball, the season and the tournament, if 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 lead 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