Conference Realignment: A Century of Redrawing the Map

Conference realignment in college athletics is often framed by current observers as a crisis specific to the last decade, a departure from an older stable order. The framing is incorrect. Conference realignment has been a recurring feature of American college athletics since the earliest conferences were founded, and the current round of realignment, dramatic as it has been, fits into a pattern of periodic redrawings that stretches back more than a century.

The first major conference realignments were effectively conference foundings. The Big Ten, originally called the Intercollegiate Conference of Faculty Representatives, was founded in 1896 and has added and removed members through its history. Michigan left the conference in 1907 and returned in 1917. The University of Chicago withdrew from football in 1939. Penn State joined in 1993. The Big Ten's current membership is the result of more than a century of accumulation and departure, and no period of the conference's history has been static.

The Southwest Conference, which at its peak in the 1970s and 1980s was one of the most powerful conferences in the country, collapsed entirely in the 1990s and disappeared as a football conference in 1995. The Texas universities that had been its core members dispersed to the Big Eight (which became the Big 12), the Pacific Coast Conference structure (which evolved through several configurations), and other destinations. The disappearance of a major conference was notable, but it had analogs in earlier periods of college athletics and was not unprecedented as a structural change.

The Atlantic Coast Conference, the Big East, and the original Pacific-10 all experienced major realignments in the 1990s and 2000s that changed their membership, their geographic scope, and their competitive character. The Big East's basketball identity split from its football identity and eventually produced two separate conferences. The ACC added Miami, Virginia Tech, Boston College, and eventually Louisville, Notre Dame (for most sports), Pittsburgh, and Syracuse, transforming from a Southeastern regional conference into a much broader footprint.

The current round of realignment, with the Big Ten expanding to the Pacific coast and the Southeastern Conference expanding into Texas and Oklahoma, is the most geographically sweeping in the sport's history, but it is not qualitatively different from the earlier rounds. The driver has always been the same, the combination of television revenue opportunities and competitive positioning, and the effect has always been the same, the sorting of major programs into revenue-sharing arrangements that reflect the current commercial reality. Understanding the current realignment as one more round in a long history, rather than as an unprecedented event, helps contextualize what is happening and what is likely to happen next.