It has been widely known for some time that the United States has a highly litigious society. Some will say — not without merit — that it is good that citizens and groups can have their grievances addressed and heard in a court of law. To be sure, it is good that we have the outlet of litigation available.
However, this shouldn’t mean that litigation ought to be the first — or main — avenue through which we resolve disputes. In an ideal world, two parties would be able to arrive at an agreement or compromise without having to hire lawyers or go through a prolonged, contentious battle which has the possibility of leaving both sides drained and unsatisfied when the smoke clears.
College football is now confronting the reality of litigation. You are going to see schools or conferences — if not both — suing in response to the Big Ten’s and Pac-12’s separate decisions to move to conference-only game schedules.
No one should blame them for doing so, assuming we see a wave of litigation in the near future.
Four different schools from the Mid-American Conference — Ball State, Central Michigan, Northern Illinois, and Bowling Green — had scheduled not one, but two, games against Big Ten opponents this season. Those games have payouts in the neighborhood of $1 million per game. That’s a huge portion of the schools’ athletic budgets, at least 30 percent if not more. Those MAC athletic programs need to collect that money to resume anything resembling normal operations serving all of their athletes.
Yet, lawyers don’t work for free. Schools and conferences might have to dip into resources to pay lawyers. The Big Ten and Pac-12 will either contest the claim that they have to pay up, or… they will have to eat these payments for games which never occurred. Either way, financial damage will grow within the college sports industry.
In light of the Pac-12’s move to conference-only football, you will see Mountain West schools — involved in 13 different games scheduled with Pac-12 schools — attempt to get their money. It is likely that some legal battles will emerge there.
Then consider what might soon happen with the Big 12, ACC, and SEC. Those schools might insist on keeping nonconference games, but after the Big Ten and Pac-12 made their moves, the Big 12, ACC, and SEC are in a box. Their choices have been constrained. They might allow one or two nonconference games, but nothing more than that. Realistically, if the Big Ten has chosen 10 games as its adjusted regular-season length, it’s hard to envision how the other Power Five conferences could have an 11- or 12-game schedule. The 10-game mark is likely to be the ceiling. That gives the Big 12 one non-con game, the ACC and SEC no more than two.
That means the Sun Belt and Conference USA are going to join the MAC and the Mountain West in fighting to collect game payments. This will almost certainly lead to a lot of lawyering throughout the college sports industry, as the various parties parse the legalese in contracts and try to determine if the language is clear enough to force the Power Fives to pay up to the Group of Fives (and FCS schools as well).
Yes, COVID-19 — and its affects on how college sports does business — will certainly reshape how contracts of various kinds are drawn up, not just between conferences and schools, but between schools and coaches, and also between schools and various vendors such as Under Armour and other apparel providers. To be sure, you will see contracts drawn up with much more attention to detail. That is on the schools to improve.
Yet, if we did have more central governance in college football — and widely-applied standards which gave the sport more structural and organizational uniformity — we might not see the flood of lawyering which is likely to emerge as parties haggle over money in the coming months.
Those of us who cover college sports have long argued for more uniformity in terms of the playing field: All conferences should play the same amount of nonconference games each season, for instance. Either all conferences should play eight league games and four non-cons, or nine and three… but no, the Power Fives could never get on the same page. The sizes of the Power Five leagues are different. Other imbalances exist as well.
Chalk this up to many different realities, sure… but a lack of central governance is a key part of this problem. Now, schools or conferences — if not both — are having to spend money on laywers in a pandemic.
It didn’t have to be this way. This wasn’t inevitable.
College football, though, didn’t think structural balance was important enough to attain.
On the other side of the pandemic, that will hopefully change.