First, a quick update on what we understand to be next with conference realignment. With yesterday’s news that a partial revenue share is what would be offered to Washington and Oregon in the hypothetical where those schools are invited to join the Big Ten, the invitation is now possible, when it wasn’t possible before. This adds a second pressure point besides the Big 12 one, where one or three spots appear to be waiting for the best one or three remaining Pac-12 brands which want them. It also clears up how in the world Oregon, Washington, and Stanford could be left behind in all of this despite being as strong of brands as they are, something that had been confusing and had us curious if Oregon and Washington might jump the line and steal a potential Big 12 spot from someone like Utah. The answer? At least Oregon and Washington likely won’t be left behind.
There’s reportedly another meeting involving Arizona and Arizona State’s leadership tonight, while the Big Ten has reportedly authorized its commissioner to basically go find the revenue number the league can offer Washington and Oregon. We’ve been surprised before by how slow this all has moved, but more has happened in the last two weeks than happened for twelve months, and it’s fair to expect that to continue.
Now, the elephant in the room: What happens to Washington State, Oregon State, Stanford, and Cal?
Stanford is the shocker if indeed left behind, one of the nation’s premier academic schools boasting the best top-to-bottom athletic department in the country and operating from a home in one of America’s ten biggest media markets. Stanford is, though, a weird school in how differently it approaches athletics from everybody else. While most schools put football first, Stanford kind of puts it last. This isn’t true in a measurable sense, but the priorities between sports are so vastly different at Stanford than they are everywhere else in the Power Five. Its students don’t show up all that much for football games. The football program has had success at times but has more often been mediocre, and the team is very bad right now. Meanwhile, Stanford’s other sports dominate. In low-money sports, Stanford is the best there is, and it has been for a long time.
Where Stanford goes, then, is the biggest curiosity remaining, with potential answers ranging from a Big Ten lifeline to independence. Independence in football is doable. Independence in other sports is rare. If anyone can pull it off, it’s Stanford, and in the more individual sports, the ones with “meets”—track & field, golf, swimming & diving, etc.—it should be easy. But Stanford should want a good home for its team sports, its volleyball and basketball and baseball, and it probably doesn’t want to travel too much for those (though if the ACC decided to make the invitation, I’d imagine Stanford would take it). I wonder about the West Coast Conference, the WCC, where Gonzaga is good at more than just men’s basketball and the league is accurately named and the schools are all, to my knowledge, private like Stanford is. In the WCC’s favor, it doesn’t sponsor football and a number of other sports, which could allow Stanford to do its own thing and be independent in those other sports. Working against the WCC, or against this hypothetical partnership, is that all of its schools are religiously affiliated.
Cal is another curiosity, with administrative support for all athletics seeming to be lacking in recent years. They went to the trouble of firing men’s basketball coach Mark Fox, which is a good sign that there’s some level of care there, but Cal, like Georgetown, is having its interest in athletics questioned, and unlike Georgetown it’s happening for Cal at a very bad time. Cal’s broader athletic history, as is the case for most power conference schools, is so rich that it would feel tragic to see them fade from the college sports world. Hopefully, finances and inertia will keep them invested, and maybe a new league will start a renaissance for them. Maybe it’ll go where Stanford goes. Maybe the Big Ten will shock us all and invite the Bears from Berkeley. But for now, Cal is as big a question mark as Stanford, and there’s some reason to believe the Bears could enter something like freefall. (Also, the WCC idea makes even less sense here from a “school type” perspective, with Cal not only big and secular but also public.)
Washington State and Oregon State are in the most straightforward position of the four. The Mountain West makes sense for both of them. They would be on the upper end of the conference academically and in terms of athletic prestige, but they’d fit geographically better than they could fit anywhere else but the Big Sky, and they’ve been closer to Boise State than to USC in terms of athletic capability for a while now. To be honest, too, the Mountain West isn’t a bad place for athletic programs looking to climb. It hasn’t worked yet for Boise State, but both TCU and Utah played their way up out of the Mountain West and into power conference membership. In a sense, BYU did too, and San Diego State came close. Could the whole conference do it at once, ascending to a level rivaling that of the Big 12 and the ACC? Applying the new College Football Playoff structure to a potential nine-conference world, only three conferences will be left out every year, and with two of those routinely going to be the MAC and Conference USA, the Mountain West could regularly fill a seat at the table. In college basketball, the MWC could reasonably be a five-bid league annually. That probably isn’t enough to remake a Power Five, but adding Washington State and Oregon State would give an already solid Mountain West that much more punch, potentially separating it from the Sun Belt and the AAC.
I do wonder, though, if there’s a third way, one where the Pac-4 can stick together and operate from a position of power. It likely depends on the timelines of media rights deals, and the Mountain West made clear in the SDSU spat that it wants to fight like hell on these (maybe foreseeing a situation like this), but I wonder what a league would look like with these four schools plus some combination of Mountain West members, stronger schools in the University of California system, Gonzaga, and the wildcard of SMU. It seems logistically torturous, and possibly financially infeasible due to those TV timelines, but basically, I wonder if Stanford could build itself a conference, and I wonder if it would.
Runs, Runs, Runs
The good news for the Cubs is that they’ve smoked the Reds each of the last two nights, seeing two separate starting pitchers who statistically appeared prime for regression and making that regression happen fast. The good news for the Cubs is that they’re now fifth in the majors in run differential, and are also fifth in runs per game, ahead of even the Orioles and Astros in each. The bad news for the Cubs is that the Padres are right behind them in that run differential piece, pointing towards positive regression of their own, and that despite obliterating so many pitches each of the last two nights, they still need to win this fourth game against the Reds to have made up any ground on the division leaders over the week so far. Oh, also, they’re playing the best team in baseball this weekend and Marcus Stroman just went on the injured list.
The schedule gets a lot easier once the Cubs get through the Braves. They have to play a potent but flopping Mets team, and then a likely playoff team in the Blue Jays, but after those two series they get twelve straight games against the White Sox, Royals, Tigers, and Pirates before closing out August against the Brewers. A harder stretch awaits in September, but if you could script the easiest path to a playoff berth from here for the Cubs, knowing they’re two games over .500 right now and knowing finishing ten games over .500 is expected to be what it takes to win the Central, they’d win tonight, go 9–3 in that mid-August stretch, and win one more of the other remaining games than they lose. In reality, of course, it won’t be that simple, and in reality, 86 wins might not be the magic number. But the point is that if the Cubs can stay ahead of the Padres through Sunday, they should be in great shape to make noise, and winning tonight would both support that cause and accelerate what’s hopefully a Cincinnati Reds decline.
Jameson Taillon has pitched so well in these last five starts that his FIP is now a respectable 4.63 after sitting at 5.25 entering July. Luke Weaver, meanwhile, is the rare Reds pitcher who’s not expected to regress in a negative direction, but thankfully he enters carrying a 6.80 ERA, 6.12 FIP, and 5.81 xERA, so any positive regression shouldn’t really feel like it.
We Keep Winning Bets
Lastly for today, an update for those who follow our bets: We keep winning! We grabbed another one this afternoon thanks to the Giants, giving us more than 15 units of cushion as we stare down the rest of the calendar. One caution on the moneyline side of things: We have a terrible track record on MLB picks in August and September. It’s a small track record, but it’s bad.
Thankfully, we do have a great track record on futures, and those continue to look headed for profit. It’s odd that the Astros have leapfrogged from being one of the most overpriced teams to a positive-value team solely thanks to the Verlander trade, but we won’t complain as long as it lasts, and ideally, they’ll fade from here anyway, because they’re one of our biggest liabilities as the portfolio stands with these few months yet to go, joined by the Reds, Dodgers, Guardians, Yankees, and Rays to varying degrees and in differing ways.
Overall, we’re edging closer and closer to being back even all time, and we’re looking at MLB postseason scenarios where we should be able to get nine teams into the twelve-team playoff field who present us with profitable paths. We’ll keep watching diligently, and things can and do change, but it’s been a good year. Thanks to those who’ve borne with us through these last eighteen months in the red.
