The dominos have just started to fall, but they began rocking in the wind years ago.
As much as some people would like to blame Notre Dame or Penn State, the chain reaction now reshaping college football resulted more from a gradual evolution than a pivotal push. For the past quarter-century, the game has been surrendering to television inch by inch. Realignment in TV's image was always just a matter of time.
Some said it was a concession to progress in 1965 when NBC pursued the Orange Bowl to move to prime time. But it was really the first in a series of white flags. Once TV money became more important than gate receipts, today's headlines were inevitable.
"Once, TV was a novelty," said Arkansas Athletic Director Frank Broyles, whose school voted to join the Southeastern Conference last Wednesday. "But as the dollars kept accelerating, and we started to depend on it, I guess we sealed our own fate."
The future remains murky, but the one certainty is change. By the mid-1990s, perhaps sooner, major college football will consist of a smaller group of schools, consolidated into a handful of superconferences arranged for the sake of TV dollars. A new era is at hand, with new rules. While the SEC and Metro Conference battle it out for expansion teams, the 76-year-old Southwest Conference fights for its life.
The SEC, Big Ten, Pac-10 and Atlantic Coast Conference will survive and prosper because they control TV sets, but the SWC, Big Eight and Western Athletic Conference need to merge or expand to survive. Perhaps the most telling sign of the new times is the viability of the proposed Metro. If all 16 teams considering the new league signed on, it would control 35% of the nation's TV homes - nearly twice the Big Ten's audience - and immediately have more clout than any other league.
"TV sets mean power," said Ken Haines, vice president of Raycom, the Charlotte-based television syndicator that formulated the Metro plan.
The game on the field may not change, but some of the traditional rivalries that make college football great will disappear. The bowl system will have to adapt, but even then its survival may be short-lived, as the biggest domino, a Division 1-A playoff, could soon be toppled.
"We're looking at a future full of unknowns," said Brigham Young Coach LaVell Edwards.
Notre Dame pushed it all into motion in February. Given a different twist or two, the future might have begun in 1981, when the College Football Association first raised TV as a dagger. The group threatened to pull out of the NCAA's TV package and go it alone, but the existing structure was preserved after the schools decided possible NCAA probation outweighed TV freedom.
Had fear not outweighed greed, the future could also have started in 1984, when the Supreme Court gave individual schools the opportunity to assign their TV rights. But the uncertainty of the new era made most schools afraid to trade guaranteed revenue for potential pots of gold.
When Notre Dame bolted the CFA package to sign a separate deal with NBC starting in 1991, however, college officials began to appreciate the future's shaky underpinning. In those weeks following Notre Dame's departure, when the SEC considered leaving the CFA, the disintegration of the game's status quo seemed immediate.
The CFA probably would have collapsed without the SEC, and the teams able to compete at the highest levels of the game - both on the field and in the television wars - would have shrunk by perhaps a third almost overnight. Without the SEC, the rest of the CFA members couldn't have sold their games to The Weather Channel. The SEC's decision to stay, at least in the short term, defused the situation. But a lifeboat mentality began to emerge.
"If it all falls apart, we're going to have to do what's best for us," said Oklahoma Athletic Director Donnie Duncan. "We'll make it. We'll go out and sell the Nebraska game, the Colorado game, the Texas game. But the day may be coming when we let the market dictate where the television money goes."
By the time Penn State consummated its marriage to the Big Ten in June, the dominos were falling with little regard for tradition. The SEC unveiled plans to add four to six teams. But Arkansas would come at the expense of the Southwest Conference's stability, perhaps its survival. Officials at Texas and Texas A&M said it would be hard for them to stay without Arkansas, a school that represents about one-fourth of the league's revenue. SEC officials said privately they would welcome both Texas and Texas A&M.
"We would be very cognizant of what that means to us," Texas Athletic Director DeLoss Dodds said. "We would protect the University of Texas however we had to."
Even the Metro Conference, which doesn't sponsor football, has been running scared. The Metro fears its demise as a basketball league because key members Florida State and South Carolina are being courted by the SEC. As a defense, the Metro is discussing a football conference that would stretch from New York to Florida and go head-to-head against the SEC in recruiting defending national champion Miami. No conference seems immune. Talk continues concerning the Pac-10 reaching into the Big Eight for Colorado, the ACC going after Syracuse and Pittsburgh, and the Big Eight taking in Brigham Young.
The rumors have taken on a musical chairs quality. Nobody wants to be left without a seat when the music stops. Problem is, no one seems to know when that might be. Until recently, insiders tossed around 1996, the year after current television contracts expire. Six years seemed like enough time to work out the scheduling kinks, but it also gave the changes a far-away tint.
But then Broyles dropped the bombshell that may put the whole process into fast-forward. When Arkansas' move to the SEC became imminent, Broyles casually mentioned the Razorbacks' plan to withdraw from the SWC next spring, join the SEC in all sports except football in 1991-92 and play for the Sugar Bowl in 1992. With the schools who would form the new Metro talking 1992 as well, everyone's timetable could be shortened.
"Arkansas going to the Southeastern Conference creates an atmosphere where people push the panic button a little bit," said NCAA executive director Dick Schultz.
"Being an independent in football may not be viable in the future," said Syracuse Athletic Director Jake Crouthamel. "If everyone else is in a conference, it's going to be next to impossible to get a schedule."
If the CFA TV plan collapses, schools will find themselves scrambling for TV dollars. Those 63 schools are committed to the ABC-ESPN contracts, which run through 1995, but sources say SEC officials have discussed pulling out early if expansion goes as expected, or if a Federal Trade Commission investigation goes forward. A 17-month investigation is expected to culminate in an FTC hearing in September, the first test of the legality of the CFA contracts.
If the SEC goes out on its own, the CFA package surely would collapse, leaving leagues such as the WAC and the Big Eight without TV packages and the corresponding money.
"In that case, most of the schools in our league would be forced to cut back, probably to de-emphasize," BYU's Edwards said. "We just don't have the TV sets to make WAC football a viable sell."
Market economics is dictating the upheaval. In the first half of the century, most of the existing conferences sprung up according to geography and rivalries. To the extent money was important, programs relied on ticket sales to pay the bills. Then came television, and the idea that the prosperous should share the profits with the poor.
It now seems that college football's form of socialism has run its course: Bring something to the table or go away hungry.
"We've been propping up some of these schools for a long time," said Oklahoma's Duncan. "There comes a time when you've got to look out for yourself or get trampled on."
Copyright 1990 by Keith Dunnavant