The continuing assault by university administrators upon elementary school teaching standards advanced another step this week with the latest burst of math, furniture, and geography rearrangement in college sports. The Pacific 12 Conference, which began as the Pac 8 then went to a membership of 10, and then 12, and then worryingly down to two, is now back up to six, only five of which cannot see the ocean after which the conference is named. As a result of that conference’s raid on its own ranks, the Mountain West is now slightly less mountainous and notably less western. If all pundit-based guesstimates are right it will be even less of both by Hallowe'en.
Because this is American athletic culture in the third decade of the 2000s, it both fits and is essential that one of those candidates for re-re-re-location is based in, wait for it, Las Vegas.
This is happening because the principal way for athletic departments to make money in the new era is not in making or marketing games but in simple money movement. The Pac 12, which is actually just Oregon State and Washington State, has actually used some of the money it seized when its once-loyal-until-the-end partners at Washington, Oregon, California, Stanford, Utah, Colorado, USC, UCLA, Arizona, and Arizona State bolted for their new temporary homes. They then did the same things done unto them to lure Boise State, Colorado State, Fresno State, and San Diego State into their still expanding tent.
In other words, the festival of dancing deck chairs continues because the churn throws off some ancillary revenue for people who live for and live off that money. The more it churns, the more they make; the rumors are that the next group of defectors (YAAAAAAAYYY DEFECTORS!) from the not-so-status quo could include Wyoming, Air Force, New Mexico and, oh yeah daddy, UNLV. There are of course other possible candidates as well, because the new staple of college athletics coverage is realignment speculation; the idea of, say, Memphis in the Pac-Random-Integer is as superficially ludicrous and ultimately irrelevant as Washington’s presence in the Big 10 or Texas A&M’s in the SEC. The conferences should be named by the total value of its members athletic departments anyway, since that is the only thing school presidents and athletic directors comprehend as their calling in life.
College sports traditionalists always seem to be ready to wring their hands about the new world disorder, offering as proof the notion that UCLA has to play Rutgers now and then, or in this case that the new Pac-Whatever has only the prospect of every game having the "Go State Beat State!" chant. That the broader current situation is ridiculous and impractical is true, but it’s also irrelevant. The increasingly antique geographic markers in the names of these bloated conferences only underlines this further—none of that, and nothing at all but that money-making movement, matters. That the Pac-TK haven't figured out how to abscond with Utah State, New Mexico State, and San Jose State since you started reading this mostly amounts to a failure of imagination.
More to the point, though, the real fight has yet to be engaged, which is how the SEC and Big 10, the only conferences with enduring media money, figure out how to get rid of some of their lagging legacy members so that they can cut fewer slices of this momentarily growing pie. That's how cannibalism works—you eat until the only ones left on the menu are your dining partners. You can talk about alignment of philosophy and traditional athletic cultures and historic rivalries until that vein in your forehead stands out like the lacing on a football, but none of that is the basis of college sports now. The day will come, much sooner than anyone thinks, when the Ohio State president asks the Michigan president, "Are you sure we need Purdue or Northwestern?" or when Georgia and Alabama begin wondering aloud about the necessity of Mississippi State or Vanderbilt. Partnerships are made to be destroyed, and every handshake should be followed by an immediate inventory of fingers.
And Vegas? Well, UNLV is still the oldest sports franchise in the new capital of American sport, and the city’s relatively small market size is less important in a world of hopelessly addicted sports gamblers. The school’s teams still receive outsized affection in a town that fell in love with hockey because it was the first of the big four leagues to move into town, but which seems less enamored with the Raiders (as opposed to the NFL as a whole) and utterly disinterested in baseball. UNLV, for its part, still aches for the good old days when Jerry Tarkanian and his basketball program was among the nation's most famous and lucrative. The school and town have been searching for the next version of that ever since, and between the NIL system, the essential collapse of the NCAA as America's mall cop and everyone crowding into organized gambling's spacious bed, the window of opportunity for UNLV Redux has never felt more capacious.
All that needs to be done here is for the school to align with a couple of/several/as many casinos as possible and become an out-and-out conglomerate. However long they stay in the new Pac-Whatever, it will only be an intermediate step toward the SEC, at which point the question will become "if we’ve got Vegas, why do we need Auburn?" There is nothing but money to bind the shrinking number of survivors in college sports, which is just the code name for "football and the stuff we still have to pretend to fund," and conference realignment is the sleight of hand before the real stabbings begin.
If you find this unnecessarily dire, well, you are entitled to your blissful inattention, although you might be shocked when the billion-ton craphammer hits your stadium. The American appetite for sports is not endless, no matter what your prop card tells you; college sports, which is furthest along evolutionarily in the whales-v.-plankton matchup and a highly variable product on the merits, will in time shrink to being a regional entertainment source. If the NFL is the money model, the limit is 32; you never hear about Jerry Jones pushing for expansion because he can do the division in his head—"1/50th of everything is still less than 1/32nd of everything, and tell me again why Jacksonville or Buffalo are so goddamned vital to this operation." In the new, less geography-dependent sports economy, Vegas can handle two more teams in town, as long as none of them are the A's.
