Pac-12 teams have won 29 College World Series titles, more than twice as many as the No. 2 conference, with longtime member USC leading the group with 12 championships on its own — more than all of the ACC’s members have combined. The conference may soon cease to exist, however, as eight of its 12 members have committed to leave for the Big Ten or Big 12 for the 2024-25 academic year, chasing shares of ever-bigger TV contracts. Right now, this looks like a great deal for football, and for the various universities’ top lines, but with what we know now, it seems to be a net negative for college baseball as a whole. While a lot still remains to be determined, we can already see several significant issues that will impact college baseball, especially when it comes to managing the in-conference schedules.
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Players in these new coast-to-coast conferences may end up dealing with far more travel — both in terms of miles and time spent — than they originally bargained for, especially if conferences like the Big Ten and Big 12 don’t shift to some kind of geographically limited schedule by utilizing divisions or pods. The four West Coast teams joining the Big Ten are over 2,500 miles away from East Coast-based Rutgers and Maryland — a coast-to-coast flight is six hours westbound and at least five hours eastbound. West Virginia is about 1,600 miles from new Big 12 conference-mate BYU and even farther from the two Arizona schools. If UCLA has a weekend series at Rutgers, they’re either taking a Thursday night redeye or flying at the crack of dawn Friday so that they can get to the ballpark in time. Either way, it’s just bad for your body, and certainly not conducive to peak athletic performance or peak cognitive function. Missing classes is just one part of the academic experience for student-athletes, and the added travel with less sleep will also affect study time and time for working with classmates.
There’s also the cost factor, and while these schools are all flush with TV cash, that money is for other sports far more than it is for baseball. For schools where baseball is a non-revenue sport, it could easily be at risk of cuts. Conference USA now has schools as far apart as New Mexico State and Liberty (about 1,500 miles between them), and while all of these schools have proud baseball traditions, only one of their 10 projected members for 2024 ranked in the top 50 in attendance in 2022: Louisiana Tech with 2,515 fans per game. Baseball is not a big moneymaker at any of these schools, and the cost to run the team will go up because of travel. Will Jacksonville State or Middle Tennessee still want to foot the cost of a baseball program if travel expenses jump another 10 percent or more? What about 20 percent? We’ve seen plenty of schools drop baseball in the last few years; Boise State, Furman, North Carolina Central, Chicago State and La Salle have all cut the sport since the start of the pandemic, all citing costs as a major reason. Making the sport more expensive threatens to push more teams into that category, or could force them to perhaps follow Navy’s example of splitting conferences — Navy is in the AAC for football, but in the northeastern Patriot League for most other sports, including baseball. Neither of these outcomes helps baseball players, or helps the sport as a whole.
There are four pretty significant baseball schools now without a home, currently stuck in what is now the Pac-4. I don’t understand a baseball world where Oregon State (three NCAA championships), Stanford (two), Cal (one), and Washington State (um … they were runners-up in 1950) aren’t in a major conference. Every day they aren’t in a major conference makes them vulnerable in recruiting — in adding new commitments and in keeping the ones they already have. The most sensible option is off the table, with their former conference mates now split between two other conferences. They could stay geographically close with the Mountain West, which currently has 11 teams between Colorado and the Pacific Coast, or try to pull teams in from that and other conferences like the West Coast Conference (Pepperdine? Gonzaga?) to build the Pac-12 back up, although it seems like Stanford at least might have given up on that possibility. The worst idea, however, is the one that’s already in the rumor mill — that Stanford and other schools would take a bath just to join the ACC. That’s the Atlantic Coast Conference, with zero teams outside of the Eastern Time Zone and only two schools in states that don’t border the Atlantic Ocean. Desperation makes people do irrational things, I guess.
Finally, some schools have sustainability offices or other environmental initiatives that will have to respond to the increased carbon footprint of many of their athletics teams from more frequent and longer flights. Air travel accounts for about 4 percent of human-induced climate change, and improvements in fuel efficiency for airplane engines have not kept up with increasing demand. Longer flights are more efficient on a per-mile basis, but still have a larger impact on the climate than shorter ones, and any additional flights a team might take will add a substantial amount to its carbon footprint because so much fuel is burned while a plane is on the runway. The University of Maryland has a climate action plan that promises carbon neutrality by 2025, and the school has offset all university-related air travel emissions since 2017. That just became more difficult and more expensive with these expanded conferences — those trees aren’t just going to plant themselves.
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There are possible remedies at hand, although as yet we have no indication from any conference what they might do with their baseball schedules. I mentioned above the possibility of geographically based divisions or pods that limit long-haul flights. Under this arrangement, the four new Big Ten teams would always play each other … and poor Nebraska would probably get stuck playing the four West Coast teams, or something along those lines. The Big 12 is even less suited to accommodate such a plan; BYU, Arizona, Arizona State and Utah will be the only baseball schools west of Texas/Oklahoma in the conference, and West Virginia, Cincinnati and UCF will be the only schools east of the Mississippi. Perhaps there are ways to line up some of these series, such as having a West Coast school go east (or vice versa) for both weekends of spring break, so they can at least avoid two cross-country or similar flights, although that may not be what the players are looking for. Maybe we see home-and-home series in the same season — UCLA at USC one weekend, USC at UCLA another weekend — although home-and-home series haven’t been a part of college baseball in at least 20 years, with conferences large enough that no team would have to play an opponent two weekends in the same year. That opens additional problems, like how to handle conference tournament seeding or postseason rankings if, say, one team in a small pod is much stronger or weaker than the others and the schedule becomes even more unbalanced.
Money has always ruled college sports, despite specious claims of “amateurism” and attempts from everyone from college coaches to the heads of the NCAA to distract us from how much money these student-athletes were generating for their institutions. Now it’s more out in the open, with bigger dollar figures to get our attention and NIL money making it clear just how valuable these athletes’ labor is to their schools. The geographical absurdities of this round of conference realignment are actually the tip of a much larger iceberg; although the problems it poses for non-revenue sports are real, there’s a broader issue here of schools letting short-term revenue gains dictate all kinds of policy, further undermining those claims that college athletics were the sports of amateurs and shouldn’t be sullied by anything so unclean as actually paying the players doing the work. Perhaps the NCAA or some of these coast-to-coast conferences will find ways to mitigate the heavy travel they’re imposing on baseball players, but I’m not holding my breath.
(Top photo of Stanford Cardinal center fielder Brock Jones: Dylan Widger / USA Today)
