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Conference realignment may have unintended consequences for student athletes in non-revenue sports

Writer's picture: John EwaldJohn Ewald

Updated: Jan 21

Women's basketball rack
A CU Events Center basketball rack ahead of a women's basketball game on Dec. 5, 2024. (Photo by Brody Rector/Sko Buffs Sports)

The fate of college athletics forever changed in June of 2022 when The University of Southern California and the University of California, Los Angeles announced their departures from the Pac-12 conference in favor of the midwestern-based Big Ten (B1G) conference.


A ripple effect ensued across the national college athletics landscape, as USC and UCLA were simply the first two dominoes in a series to fall. Their departures led to many programs leaving their conferences for self-preservation and more lucrative TV deals for their universities.  


The Pac-12 conference was subsequently stripped for parts as a mass exodus ensued. A proud conference with a rich 108-year history of perennial powers in the West was effectively destroyed by other conferences that were able to sell Athletic Directors lucrative media rights deals they could not decline.  


USC athletic director Mike Bohn and UCLA athletic director Martin Jammond claimed the unprecedented move was in the best interests of protecting all its student-athletes. The schools could not afford to stand still with sweeping change on the horizon. Football dictated the transition for these schools as it generated massive revenue. However, experts say the non-revenue sports that do not get the same funding, Name Image and Likeness (NIL) deals, and other resources are left disadvantaged by the change.  


The University of Colorado was one of the schools that followed suit and announced its departure from the Pac-12 in August of 2023.Much speculation was made that recently hired head football coach Deion "Coach Prime" Sanders was the catalyst of the move, as it expanded recruiting opportunities in talent-rich areas like Texas and Florida.


Some experts wondered if other sports like basketball, soccer, lacrosse, and a host of other CU athletics programs that forced its student-athletes to embrace sudden, massive change were fairly considered.  


"It's frustrating," CU women’s basketball fifth-year forward Sara-Rose Smith from Australia mentioned. "A lot of us are here for the basketball, but at the same time, you have to remember there is a student element to it as well.”  


The Buffs' women’s hoopers achieved great success the last two seasons in the Pac-12, culminating in two deep runs in the NCAA tournament. However, for the student-athletes on the team, that isn't their only goal.  


"For everyone on the team, there's a really big emphasis on getting a degree and doing well in school," Smith said. "When you're playing on a Wednesday night in West Virginia, we're leaving on Tuesday, which means we're out Tuesday and out Wednesday and probably won't land until 2 or 3 a.m. Do you think I want to wake up and go to an 8 a.m. class? No!" Smith added.  


Colorado had exclusively played Pacific-based schools in conference play, mitigating cross-country flights and allowing student-athletes to have much-needed flexibility to tend to their studies. That all changes now that CU women's basketball and other programs will have to brace midweek cross-country travel while balancing rigorous course loads.  


"It's going to be a big toll," Smith said. “Moving over to the Big 12 with where the games are, you're missing class no matter what." 


The conference change was rather sudden and left the student-athletes in sports other than football with more questions than answers. CU student-athletes were unsure what days of the week they would be playing if the BIG-12 would break into geographic divisions to accommodate travel and more.  


Analysts believe that, while the money involved does not answer these questions, it at least makes sense that Colorado left its conference behind. CU is expected to earn north of $50 million per year in the 2025-2026 fiscal year as opposed to the $37 million per year it was earning in the Pac-12. Moreover, the Pac-12 was unable to secure media rights after the 2024 season, with a proposed deal of $23 million per school failing to come to fruition on Apple's linear streaming service. 


Linear streaming reportedly concerned many ADs as it likely means less viewership, and pundits believe CU athletic director Rick George saw the writing on the wall with the Pac-12 and jumped ship in favor of securing a far more lucrative TV deal. The extent of the consequences of this drastic change remains largely unknown.  


"The coaches didn't actually know what the schedules were going to look like," Smith said regarding CU's conference change. "We didn't know what days we were going to be playing. We didn't know if it was going to be an east-west split conference. We were asking Coach JR (Payne) for months and months ‘Do you know anything more?’ and she said no.”  


The student-athletes in non-revenue sports are not the only students at CU affected by conference realignment and more travel burdens. Executive Producer of the student sports publication (Sko Buffs Sports) at CU and sophomore Patrick Dawson echoed many of the sentiments expressed by Smith.  


"Flying cross-country to Orlando and West Virginia is not ideal and it's much more expensive to fly out there than it is to Tempe for example," Dawson said. "Travel also just takes a lot out of you physically, especially when it's as far as we now are having to go compared to when CU was in the Pac-12" Dawson added.  


Smith and her fellow student-athletes will not be the only ones preparing for the travel changes associated with new conferences. Equipment personnel, members of the media, and other athletic administrators will also embark on new, long voyages in the coming weeks and months.  


Conferences were originally constructed in college athletics to provide regionality and establish rivalries between bordering states and communities. Some of these rivalries have been left in the wake of conference realignment. Now, fans will watch Colorado play Central Florida,  California play North Carolina and USC play Maryland. For student-athletes playing on weekdays, the multi-thousand-mile trips will mean missed classes and scrambled schedules.


What's been done can't be undone for at least a decade, with many of these schools under contract with new conferences through the 2035-2036 season. The potential scope of burdens placed on student-athletes challenged with new travel schedules may not be fully realized for years to come, as it's only been a few short months since these changes were finalized.  


It will be interesting to see how the Buffs respond to longer travel and new venues they had not previously frequented.


Colorado women’s basketball traveled to Morgantown on Wednesday to face the West Virginia Mountaineers in a matchup that highlighted the complete abandonment of regionality in college sports.


"It's a great blessing in some sense that you get to experience all this travel,”  Smith said. “But then at the same time, can I be human?"

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