A week ago Sunday, with college football revenue sharing and the Olympics both in the spotlight, Front Office Sports (FOS) ran a feature on the Mountain Pacific Sports Federation (MPSF), a six-employee organization built to serve as a conference for college sports teams who would otherwise face independence. Like the SEC or the Allegheny Mountain Collegiate Conference, the MPSF is a college athletic conference. Unlike those other two, membership in the MPSF comes à la carte. The MPSF has no full members. Instead, individual teams are members of sport-specific leagues. Air Force is an MPSF member in fencing and men’s gymnastics. USC is in the MPSF in beach volleyball, men’s volleyball, and men’s and women’s water polo.
The FOS piece focuses on how the MPSF could help keep an important Olympic pipeline alive, providing conference homes to sports left conference-less by realignment. The core example used is USC beach volleyball. The Pac-12 sponsored beach volleyball. The Big Ten doesn’t.
We’ve talked about the potential for à la carte conferences before. We talked about it less than a month ago. We fear it might not be an ideal outcome:
“…If the Big 12 creates a separate basketball market, away from football, the path towards similar movement will be established. The legal process will become simpler. It will be easier for schools to group themselves in more precise ways than it ever has been before. The result could be conference alignments which would make this coming season’s look quaint: Duke in the Big Ten in basketball but the Big 12 in football. Cal State-Fullerton into the SEC in baseball. South Carolina men’s and women’s basketball in separate conferences.”
Today, though, we’re not worried about an MPSF-ification of college sports. (To be clear, the MPSF is good. Providing homes for homeless sports so that Air Force can keep sponsoring fencing and USC can keep sponsoring men’s water polo? Great stuff.) Today, we’re curious about an alternate possibility.
We don’t know much about college football revenue sharing’s steady state. We don’t know when it will be reached. We don’t know whether the House v. NCAA settlement will be the vessel which makes it happen. Most importantly, we don’t know how much revenue will be shared. One narrow possibility, though, is that players successfully capture the value they create. What would this mean? It should mean less money for those players’ schools. Theoretically, it could mean a lot less money.
How will schools respond to this? It depends. It depends on the proportions of the steady-state revenue split. It depends on the growth trajectory of college football. It depends on whether schools find themselves in golden handcuffs, reliant on huge sums of money that are suddenly diverted to players. If the golden handcuffs situation arises, expect a real super league. But if revenue sharing becomes significant and becomes significant fast enough, there’s an angle here where we could see reverse realignment. There’s an angle where Utah could say, “We’re spending a lot of money to go play UCF. What if we got together with Arizona and ASU and tried to start a league with Washington State?” College football’s pie is pretty large right now, and right now, schools take home their whole slice. Soon, though, they’re going to give up part of that slice. If what they’re left with is small enough, they might start viewing college football in fundamentally different ways. The marginal value of the Big 12’s conference quality might not matter so much to administrators in Salt Lake City.
I don’t think this is where it’s going. I think the golden handcuffs are far more likely, although I can’t say I know what that will mean. For nostalgists, though, it’s a nice thing to think on. Even very recent nostalgists who forget that Utah and Washington State have hardly ever been conference foes.
Miscellany – Baseball
- Credit to the White Sox. After sinking to such lows that even we and the Oakland Athletics were blasting them (the A’s played Taylor Swift’s “22” pregame as the Sox went for consecutive loss number 22), the White Sox broke the streak. They lost this afternoon, dropping them to 28–89 on the year, but last night, they were victorious. Will another streak begin? Probably, but it should be shorter. The likeliest thing is that they split their two games this weekend.
- Framber Valdez came close to a no-hitter, but Corey Seager still has his pride even as the Rangers fall off the map. The Astros ended up taking that series two games to one, pulling back even with the Mariners ahead of tonight’s games.
- Dylan Cease had a weird night, pitching one inning before a three-hour rain delay in Pittsburgh. From the sounds of it, though, the Padres are either going to keep him on his normal schedule, give Matt Waldron some extra rest, or push Joe Musgrove’s IL return back to Monday. I think they have to do two of those things, in fact. Who comes out of the rotation with Musgrove back? No word on that yet. It’d be a little surprising if the Padres stuck with six men, given the Dodgers might be within reach, but they do have a stretch of 18 games in 18 days coming up soon, so maybe they’re hoping to give Martín Pérez an extended audition before deciding between him and Randy Vásquez.
- The Orioles put Grayson Rodriguez on the IL this afternoon with lat discomfort right after the Twins saw Joe Ryan exit his start early with a triceps issue. Neither of those teams is in a particularly comfortable place with their rotation. Tough break for the AL East and Central’s second-place teams. Making matters worse for the O’s, the Yankees took Game 1 of today’s doubleheader against Anaheim. Making matters better for the Twins, the Guardians were swept in their own doubleheader by the hot–as–their–own–desert Diamondbacks.
Miscellany – Miscellany
- Jim Harbaugh’s first punishment has come down, and it’s for the recruiting and practice violations. He got a four-year show-cause penalty with a one-year suspension attached, meaning if any college hires him in the next four years, they must immediately suspend the man for a full season. It would be surprising if he tried to get back into college football in the next four years—even if his NFL return flames out, it would be a quick about-face—but he’s only 60, and he’s not exactly conventional. What I don’t know is whether he has any route to appealing this ruling if interested, and if so, when he would have to do that. Could he wait until a return is on the table? Or does he have to do it now if he wants that option in 2027?
- The NCAA expects to start awarding “units” for the women’s NCAA Tournament, which means conferences will get payouts in accordance with how far their teams advance. There’s some thought that this could help mid-majors start catching up in a sport currently thoroughly dominated by established powers. Will it? Their schools might need to win first. Part of the challenge these schools face is how stratified women’s basketball always is. Very few double-digit seeds win in women’s hoops. Units are tied to how many games teams play. Units will be much smaller than they are for the men’s tournament, at least as long as the market waits to see whether growth in women’s basketball’s popularity can be sustained. If growth is sustained, the NIL market should also rise. Eventually, the level of competition should rise, because that’s what we’ve seen in other college sports as their popularity has grown. Until it does, though, I don’t know that this really helps anybody in the MAC.
