Is The Recent College Realignment Good Or Bad For The Student Athletes?

There have been a lot of different opinions and perspectives on the recent realignment in college.

When thinking about college teams switching conferences, it’s easy to just look at it from one perspective and think it’s an excellent move for sports. Now I say sports because when colleges do these types of things, the main focus or influence is always about what’s best for the sports teams. More preferably the football teams. Not including the two main sports, football, and basketball, there are 22 other sports in college. Before doing my research, I was one of those fans who didn’t think about the rest of the sports and only thought about how it would be great for these other great teams to join a more competitive conference to benefit those players and coaches. But what about the other players and coaches from all the other sports?

Let’s talk about the teams that have joined other conferences recently. The first two teams to reach out for this possibility were the Texas Longhorns and the Oklahoma Sooners in July of 2021. Fast forward a couple of years and now we have a total of eight teams that have left the Pac-12. Oregon, UCLA, USC, and Washington have joined the Big Ten while Arizona, Arizona State, Colorado, and Utah have joined the Big 12. That leaves the Pac-12 with only four teams in their conference: Cal, Oregon State, Stanford, and Washington State. One of two things will happen with the Pac-12 now. either the remaining teams will all join another conference as well and there will be no more Pac 12, or they have other smaller colleges from the smaller conferences join the Pac 12.

Looking at it from a geographical standpoint, it doesn’t make sense if you look at the map of the teams. The only two teams that wouldn’t be traveling very far are Texas and Oklahoma. The SEC is mostly comprised of teams in the south, so both teams make a lot of sense to move to that conference and not much will change. When it comes to the rest of the teams that changed, that’s where it gets weird. The four teams joining the Big Ten are all teams from the West Coast and they’d be joining teams in the Midwest, which means a lot more traveling. The same thing goes for the other Pac-12 teams joining the Big 12. More traveling means less time to rest.

Let’s go more into detail about traveling and having less time to rest and sleep. People seem to forget that when you play sports in college you are called a student-athlete. The other thing people forget is that being a student comes first. Fewer than two percent of college athletes even go pro. In other words, they will now be worrying more about traveling to farther locations to play a game and have less time for their studies. A lot of these athletes are also not there solely for their respective sport. there are a lot of them who got full-ride scholarships and are using that as an opportunity to go to school and get a great education that they otherwise would not be able to get without that full-ride.

Those are my two main negatives for this new realignment. Now let’s take a look at some positives. There will be a lot more top-tier matchups now. instead of teams having to worry about being able to schedule hard non-conference opponents, they will be playing them every year now. You have the Longhorns and Sooners joining the SEC, which means they will be matching up against teams like Alabama and Georgia every year. Oregon and USC will be playing teams like Ohio State and Michigan every year as well. So instead of watching these top teams play against inferior opponents at the end of the season for easy wins, the games will be a lot more competitive. Before, every team played up to four non-conference games and would always schedule teams that weren’t even close to their level. now with the three main conferences, the SEC, Big Ten, and Big 12, having 15 or more teams, It would make sense to schedule maybe one or two non-conference games.

Instead of being mad, this is happening, we should just be happy we’ll be seeing more competitive games. it’s unfortunate for all the other sports, but they can’t say much when the football and basketball teams are the ones who fund all other sports since they bring in almost all the revenue for the colleges. Let’s just embrace the change and visit this topic again in a few years to see how things have truly changed.