NCAA Conference Realignment
Source: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-realignment-is-changing-college-football-in-20-maps/
The age of regionalized, tightly-knit college athletics conferences may be all but over. What was once a tradition that incentivized history-rich rivalries and regional fan travel has become a frantic cash grab as programs race to join developing super conferences. This FiveThirtyEight article by Elena Mejía and Jake Lourim highlights the recent shifting of teams in the Power Five NCAA Division I athletic conferences (Big Ten, Big 12, SEC, ACC, and PAC-12) and how, in their words, “conference swaps in college sports have dismantled regional traditions.” Since 2010, the Power Five have slowly but surely expanded their geographic territory and usurped strong schools. It began between 2011 and 2014 when the SEC took Missouri and Texas A&M from the Big 12 and the Big Ten added Nebraska (Big 12), Maryland (ACC), and Rutgers (Big East). Although minor (and mostly within the Power Five conferences themselves), these moves served as a spark for many other programs following suit and switching conferences. In 2021, another large domino fell with the SEC’s absorption of Texas and Oklahoma from the Big 12. Although this move still made some geographical sense (albeit less than Texas and Oklahoma simply staying in the Big 12), the traditionally southeastern SEC began to spread its boundaries into the south-central United States. The two most recent conference shifts are by far the least geographically sound. Big 12 responded to its recent net loss by adding BYU, Central Florida, Houston, and Cincinnati and the traditionally midwestern Big Ten stole UCLA and USC all the way from the PAC-12. See the below diagrams for a visual representation of the accelerating movement and expansion of these five conferences.
The geographic coverage of each athletic conference in the NCAA can be represented by a graph of nodes laid out on a map of the United States (like the above image from FiveThirtyEight). There are two major takeaways that can be derived from analyzing these networks.
1. Using the graphs as a means of representing the destruction of historic tradition and rivalry. The main metric that was used in this article was nodes’ “distance to center”, that is, the distance a school is from the geographical center of their conference. Across all five conferences, no single school was over 1,000 miles away from their conference center in 2010, with most being well within 500 miles. Texas and Oklahoma’s move from the Big 12 to the SEC is an apt representation of geographical inefficiency in super conferences – as their 425 and 84 miles respectively from the Big 12 center became 576 and 489 miles to the SEC’s center with their 2021 move to the SEC. These increases quickly become more and more ridiculous. Central Florida is 917 miles away from the Big 12 center, and BYU is even further (986 miles). Lastly, when the switch from the Pac-12 to the Big 10 is made, USC’s and UCLA’s campuses in Los Angeles will be approximately 1,621 miles away from the conference center, a tremendous outlier. These seismic shifts are summarized by the average distance of every college football team and its conference’s center, increasing from 336 miles in 2010, to 365 in 2021, to an estimated 412 by 2025. Note that all distance from center numbers are, in practice, deflated – because they are as the crow flies and do not take into account the shape of routes taken (thus adding even more commute time for the athletes making these trips).
2. Analyzing the motives of these programs and conferences. Let each node represent the monetary value of each school, and assume every school within a conference has a strong tie with all other schools in its conference. Because marquee matchups in big revenue sports (namely basketball and football) bring in larger crowds, schools will naturally want to face schools with the highest possible values. For instance, the Big Ten adding USC and UCLA (ranked second and third respectively in total all-time NCAA Division I national championships) significantly increased the value of the others schools in the conference because they now will face them regularly. USC and UCLA likely saw a jump in their own value resulting from the move away from the Pac-12 and thus carried out the decision. This idea can be extrapolated across the rest of these examples, depicting money serving as a main motive for schools making these changes. Additionally, money-hungry conferences are looking to maximize their total value (summing the value of all nodes in their graph) in order to set themselves apart from competition and, of course, rake in more revenue. They are willing to forfeit geographic simplicity so they can increase their values and be more competitive with other conferences. Alas, my dream of the Ivy League rising to power and helping form a “Power Six” is looking less and less likely by the day.