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KANSAS AND THE STATE OF COLLEGE HOOPS

Rob Harrington
robharrington@prepstars.com
June 10, 2010

By now you’ve seen the reports: Nebraska is expected to leave the Big 12 in favor of the Big Ten, and it’s considered likely by some that Texas, Texas A&M, Texas Tech, Oklahoma and Oklahoma State will depart the Big 12 for the Pac-10. Already, Colorado has announced its intention to move to the Pac-10.

While conference allegiances were expected to shift, the changes were expected to unfold more gradually. Colorado, which was considered marginal for the Pac-10 due to the possibility that Baylor would be invited instead, practically leapt out the window to announce its departure.

The obvious motivating factor in the radically changing landscape is money: The Big Ten’s television network has produced a financial windfall, and the proposed mega-conferences all would become that much more lucrative for the league’s individual members.

Specifically, football is driving the revenue train. Never has that fact been more clear than now, when one of college basketball’s all-time great programs, Kansas, could be left without a dance partner. The Jayhawks haven’t been discussed widely as a candidate for the Big Ten or the Big 12, and they don’t have the clout to keep the fractured Big 12 together, either. While they ultimately may end up somewhere major, the fact that their inclusion is an issue at all makes the point.

For college basketball observers, it’s shocking to see the market inferiority of the sport compared with that of football. And with one sport dictating terms to schools’ entire athletic programs and even their institutional cultures as a whole, there’s no way college hoops will emerge from all this unscathed.

Because while consolidation may promote the changes of a college football playoff, the segregation of power conferences from everyone else could diminish the more utilitarian magic of the NCAA basketball tournament, at a time when a smaller school like Butler was a few inches away from winning a national championship.

The ugly truth is that schools such as Butler will be made subordinate to the power conferences, as the money divide will become that much wider and the ability to play coaches at a competitive rate or keep pace with facilities will be nearly impossible. And from our perspective in recruiting, we know how critical top coaches and infrastructure are to a program’s efforts to attract talent.

And the impact obviously figures to affect more than college basketball’s mid-majors, as the Kansas case illustrates. Even if KU manages to latch on with someone else, there are numerous other major-conference programs — those abandoned in the remnants of the Big 12 as well as some from the football-starved Big East —that will be forced into a lower competitive rung.

It remains to be seen what the political pushback will be to the proposed changes, but with this much money involved, there’s no telling when the changes will stop.