The Alliance stands athwart history yelling, “Thought leadership!”
On August 24, a day that will live, three of the six or so most important college football conferences gathered to announce something of some sort. The Big Ten, ACC, and another league unveiled The Alliance, a consortium of 41 universities who like being in consortiums.
First, The Alliance would like you to know it does not exist simply because the SEC is mean, smelly, dumb, and greedy. It also exists because of clear reasons such as [fill in before publish]. Definitely not just countering the SEC with a display of buzzwords.
So why does The Alliance exist?
Whoa. Hold your horses, buddy. Dial that question down a little. I think a better question at this juncture would be: does The Alliance exist?
The whole thing is an NFT, a cryptocurrency, a verbal commitment. In college sports, verbal commitments are worth their weight in gold. Imagine someone in college sports breaking a verbal commitment. We’d need to invent a whole new word. Decommitments, we’d have to call them. Nobody has ever said that word about things that happen in college sports every day.
Mainly, the point of the Alliance seems to have something to do with the Big Ten and its new co-brands scheduling football games against each other. That’s based on the press release using the word scheduling 25 times. This is its biggest paragraph:
The alliance includes a scheduling component for football and women’s and men’s basketball designed to create new inter-conference games, enhance opportunities for student-athletes, and optimize the college athletics experience for both student-athletes and fans across the country. The scheduling alliance will begin as soon as practical while honoring current contractual obligations. A working group comprised of athletic directors representing the three conferences will oversee the scheduling component of the alliance, including determining the criteria upon which scheduling decisions will be made. All three leagues and their respective institutions understand that scheduling decisions will be an evolutionary process given current scheduling commitments.
And if these three conferences were only announcing, “Our schools are gonna try to play each other in football more often,” everyone would say, “Cool,” and go about their days. And from a non-Thought Leadership perspective, I think that really is all they’re announcing.
But the Big Ten is involved. And the Big Ten has spent the last century wafting integrity fumes from its own press releases. So you better believe The Alliance is “committed to collaborating and providing thought leadership on various opportunities and challenges facing college athletics, including student-athlete mental and physical health, safety, wellness and support; strong academic experience and support; diversity, equity and inclusion; social justice; gender equity; future structure of the NCAA Federal legislative efforts; and postseason championships and future formats,” unlike those scumbags in the SEC!
All these things are good things for college sports admins to spend their time improving. Actually, these are all the things college sports admins should spend their time improving. There aren’t any others.
But — please excuse my cynicism — I wonder if that last item in the Thought Leadership catalogue, the one about championship formats, is actually weighing heavier on The Alliance’s mind than is the opportunity for Louisville and Stanford to collaborate on academic projects, such as pizza apps.
Why?
Well, weeks earlier, the college football world agreed it might be pretty good to expand the Playoff at some point, despite knowing the SEC would frequently gain multiple new Playoff bids every year. After everyone agreed a bigger Playoff sounds pretty interesting, the SEC announced plans to add Oklahoma at some point. This sent everyone into an uproar, because Oklahoma could take one of those multiple new Playoff bids the SEC would already be assured of gaining. From coast to coast, there were calls for Playoff-expansion brakes to be pumped. We’re being too hasty! The SEC might dominate the Playoff, which would be totally different from how things already work! Everyone slow down! I’m not sure why one of the SEC’s Playoff spots going to Oklahoma instead of LSU or Florida sent the other conferences into an Entmoot, but it did. (The SEC is also adding Texas, but that’s a side note, because we’re talking about the Playoff.)
To be fair, this really was a low blow by the SEC, this act of adding new teams just to make money. No other conference would do such a thing. Hey, when is this year’s rivalry game between Colorado and Nebraska? Wait, the Pac-12 and Big Ten added those teams just to make money? Oh. Guess I’ll watch some Big East football. Wait, the ACC devoured the whole thing just to make money? Anyway. It’s really mean when the SEC does it.
With the Big 12 disintegrating, these other three conferences that were already part of a group we call “the Power 5” thus banded together against the SEC’s hegemony, and that brings us to today, the formation of The Alliance of Conferences Who Demand to Be Taken Seriously.
As far as anyone can tell, The Alliance is just an act of branding. It’s a signal to concerned parties that these conferences are Doing Something, rather than resting on their bottoms and letting the SEC carve up the map however it wants.
I mean, the SEC will still carve up the map however it wants, because not even a chance to discuss ethics with Purdue and Oregon State would convince Clemson to turn down an SEC payday. But thanks to The Alliance, Purdue and Oregon State can then play each other in football, or not, it’s cool, whichever.
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