Realignment has changed college sports. That’s left basketball to adjust in a football-driven world

Pittsburgh coach Jeff Capel recalls coaching in the Big 12 when Texas flirted with heading to what was then the Pac-10, a move that threatened to tear the Big 12 apart and potentially leave Kansas homeless despite being a basketball blueblood.

The Longhorns stayed put for another 13 years, but it foreshadowed the chaos to come in college sports — and football’s overwhelming role in it.

Now there are just four power conferences. Two – the Atlantic Coast Conference and Big Ten — have shore-to-shore footprints requiring cross-country travel after the realignment scramble for TV money. It centers on football as the financial engine powering every other sport on campuses across the country.

Men’s basketball’s influence has been reduced to a backseat role as it opens the season Monday, even with its own lucrative TV contract for the March Madness tournament and its hypnotic effect on the country every spring.

“I think we are an afterthought right now,” said Capel, who was Oklahoma’s coach as Texas mulled the domino-tipping shift in 2010 before both schools ended up in the Southeastern Conference this year. “We’re not at the forefront of what’s thought about with what’s best for college athletics. Everything is about football because everything’s about money.”

Capel isn’t being critical so much as stating reality. The millions of dollars generated by conference TV deals and distributed to member schools comes primarily from football, which in turn is the lifeblood for other sports. And that has spurred the speed-dating pairings between leagues and schools seeking long-term stability.

“If you look at the professional level, there’s the NFL and everybody else, with the NBA being second but nowhere near in terms of revenue and popularity,” said Columbia University lecturer Joe Favorito, a sports and entertainment marketing consultant. “The NFL, it’s America’s sport. That’s what football is.”

A call to ‘modernize’

Basketball, on both the men’s and women’s side, has been forced to adapt like the rest of nonrevenue and Olympic sports programs despite its high visibility.

“If you’re not worried a little bit in this day and age about your standing or how you make sure you can get an edge, then something’s wrong,” Duke coach Jon Scheyer said. “We have to modernize our game. We have to make it appealing. We have to make it exciting beyond just March and different points of the year. That’s something college football is doing a great job with. They just have, and we have to do a better job.”

Challenges are growing. So too are the expenses driving the money chase.

The NCAA cleared the way in 2021 for athletes to profit from their athletic fame through name, image and likeness (NIL) deals. That opened the door for booster-funded collectives to offer payments that many college sports leaders viewed as pay-for-play or recruiting inducements under the guise of endorsements.

There’s also the pending $2.8 billion legal settlement that will transform college sports by allowing schools to pay players. If finalized, it would allow the biggest schools to share up to $22 million annually with their athletes, an easier-to-reach figure for schools with significant football revenue compared to basketball-centric leagues and schools.

Basketball teams already travel more while playing more games in longer seasons than football’s tidy one-game-per-week rhythm. Now those trips are more of a burden. That includes the Big 12 spanning four time zones and the ACC adopting a scheduling model with the additions of Stanford, California and SMU that sends some teams on cross-country trips nearly a week at a time.

“Sometimes we want to be stuck in our ways, but we’re not going to be able to be stuck in our ways,” Michigan State Hall of Fame coach Tom Izzo said as his Spartans prepare for the Big Ten’s additions of UCLA, USC, Oregon and Washington. “So I’m going to embrace that part. It doesn’t mean I have to love the fact of traveling from L.A. to here and getting here at 6 in the morning and getting guys to class and getting the team ready for the next game. But other people have to do the same thing.”

Izzo added: “I just get a kick out of everybody that gets mad at football. I never, ever get mad at football because I think they play such a significant part in our athletic department.”

Tax documents for the power conferences highlight Izzo’s point.

It starts with the Big Ten generating $879.9 million and paying out an average of $60.3 million per school for the 2022-23 school year, followed by the SEC ($852.6 million, $51.3 million). The ACC was next by generating $706.6 million in revenue and distributing $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, $33.6 million).

By comparison, none of those leagues generated even $250 million in revenue or distributed even $21 million per school for the 2009-10 season when Texas considered its westward partnership. And those figures don’t reflect this year’s realignment impact — which left the Pac-12 left in tatters and working to rebuild itself — nor bigger future payouts from the expanded playoff.

Yet as Favorito noted: “You’re not really making money. You’re just bringing in more money to spend. There’s a big difference between the two.”

What’s next for basketball

For basketball, the question becomes how to maintain its own standing.

Capel supports expanding the NCAA tournaments beyond their 68-team format. He points to the top tier of Division I football breaking away into the Bowl Subdivision, above the former I-AA level now known as the Championship Subdivision, en route to the eventual CFP launch at four teams for 2014 and now 12 teams this year.

“They’ve expanded because they realize there’s more money to be made with that,” Capel said. “Why don’t we do that? Like, who’s thinking about basketball?”

The basketball question could be of particular importance for the futures of the Big 12 and ACC.

The Big 12 lost its top football brands with the Longhorns and Sooners, and expanded to absorb Pac-12 remnants Arizona, Arizona State, Colorado and Utah — schools that do more to enhance an already-rugged basketball league than boost football.

“Listen, I’ve discussed it before and since I’ve been here, I do think basketball is undervalued,” commissioner Brett Yormark said. “I think there is real upside. I think there’s potential growth to further monetize it, both short-term and long-term.”

He noted that women’s basketball is also a key part of the mix: “You see those WNBA numbers – record ratings. You saw that last year in our tournament, the NCAA Tournament. I think there is real upside and I’m looking to capture as much of that both short-term and long-term as I can.”

The ACC is in slightly different position by still having national football brands Florida State, Clemson and Miami to pair with a tradition-rich basketball league featuring bluebloods Duke and North Carolina. But the league is locked in a legal fight with FSU and Clemson after those schools filed lawsuits challenging the league’s ability to charge hundreds of millions of dollars for leaving the conference.

The league’s new incentive model allowing teams to keep more of the money generated by their own postseason success illustrates football’s top-dog status: a team that hits every marker for the 2024-25 sports season could earn around $25 million more in league payouts, though $20 million rides on winning the College Football Playoff.

ACC commissioner Jim Phillips has highlighted increased efforts to boost basketball in the past year, even while acknowledging the reality of a football-first model.

“Basketball’s never been more important for us than it is now,” Phillips said. “I would say certainly we all understand the importance of football. But football’s shadow is probably larger than it should be. We understand fully the economic engine that football is. But basketball and the season and the tournament, if you look at the numbers and those types of things, it’s healthy, it’s a healthy sport within college sports.

“I think for all of us that are leading conferences or leading 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.

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