Welcome To The Procedural Acrimony of Conference Realignment
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The Ugly Fallout of Conference Realignment
Executive Summary
After the initial wave of conference realignment announcements, backlash and fallout took center stage as leagues and their members fought in public about departure dates and terms as well as participation bans from championships for switching allegiances.
The America East Conference, Horizon League and the Colonial Athletic Association all caught public heat for banning departing league members from upcoming championships.
The moves, critics argued, unfairly punished current student-athletes for university decisions far out of their control.
Many of the leagues imposing such postseason sanctions typically only send one member to NCAA championships, which means the ban effectively ends NCAA tournament hopes for departing member schools.
The primary reason for the frustration among leagues losing members was the short notice — many conferences have financial penalties and other punishments in place if a member sets a departure date sooner than the required notice period.
The Horizon League, which banned Missouri Valley Conference-bound Illinois-Chicago from winter and spring sports championships, received criticism for punishing UIC, but counter-critics say the conference penalized UIC for breaking a rule UIC proposed to Horizon League members nine years ago.
The fallout from the initial announcements of conference realignment showed the difficult realities of the transformation of top-flight college sports as conferences try to keep their footholds in a rapidly-changing landscape.
Part I of the backlash and fallout to Oklahoma and Texas departing the Big 12 Conference to join the Southeastern Conference was the aftershock realignments in a number of Division I leagues.
Part II? The fights over how to break up. They are very public — and increasingly ugly.
Welcome to the procedural acrimony of conference realignment, which is ever-present in the rapidly-shifting landscape of college sports and far more than just the initial announcement of schools changing leagues.
In the past few months, multiple conferences at the Division I level banned departing member schools from postseason conference championships because they violated league exit protocols in one way, shape or form. The punishments, thought to be cruel by critics and a byproduct of breaking league rules by the critics of those critics, have become the latest source of arguments over the treatment of student-athletes in college sports.
The fallout is only going to get more contentious from here.
Here’s how the cycle goes: School or schools announce conference affiliation changes. The soon-to-be former conference follows league protocol and excludes departing members from conference championships. Major social media uproar ensues. The conference meets with its member school presidents and upholds the initial ruling. Everyone continues to be mad.
Leagues have also pulled hosting rights from departing members and changed venues for league championships when the host says it is leaving the conference.
This is the underbelly of conference realignment, and like most issues in the contemporary media environment, it has divided college sports observers. Outrage over the exclusion of student-athletes, who have nothing to do with university decisions, from conference championships, turns red-hot each time a league follows through on its ban of departing members. There is also a counterargument to that, in which observers and conferences argue that leagues are merely following policies they’ve always followed.
The entire cycle has created fascinating insight into the politics of modern college sports.
The latest in the long line of conference quarreling: Conference USA, which will reportedly lose Marshall, Old Dominion and Southern Mississippi to the Sun Belt Conference at the end of June. The schools say Conference USA won’t engage them on their departure plans, and ESPN reported Friday that Conference USA is building fall sports schedules for the 2022-23 school year as if the three programs will still be in the league.
"It's not going to be an amicable split," a source told ESPN. "It's gotten ugly, and I assume it's going to get uglier."
The Horizon League upheld its postseason championships ban on Illinois-Chicago after the university announced its plans to join the Missouri Valley Conference sooner than the league-member-agreed timeframe for departing members. UIC made public its frustration with the decision, chastising the conference for punishing its student-athletes.
The kicker in that story? UIC’s chancellor, according to reporting from the Indianapolis Star, proposed the very rule the Horizon League enforced in banning UIC’s teams from the postseason. The policy, implemented in 2013, requires one years’ worth of notice from any school leaving the Horizon League or otherwise face a $500,000 fine and a conference championships ban.
Star columnist Gregg Doyel wrote at length about UIC’s situation, siding with the Horizon League:
“This is so unfair, what’s happening to the Horizon League. Its reputation is being crushed right now, around the country, when this story has one (and only one) guilty party: UIC.
“The kids at UIC? The swimmers who won’t be coming to Indianapolis this week, the basketball players who won’t be coming next month? The tennis players, golfers, sprinters? Especially the seniors? They’ve done nothing wrong, no, and if you want to feel badly for those kids, by all means, do that. That’s called empathy.
“Just make sure, if you’re angry about what’s happening to them, that you direct your anger in the right direction: at UIC. That’s called accuracy.”
In that same story, Horizon League commissioner Julie Roe Lach, the former leader of NCAA enforcement, said “there’s a significant ripple effect” when schools leave conferences because of the impact on “scheduling, lost league opponents, figuring out more non-league opponents, lost TV games.”
“That’s why the one-year notice seemed reasonable to allow members who wanted to leave for a different neighborhood, so to speak, to leave in a collegial way,” Roe Lach told the Star.
The America East Conference and Colonial Athletic Association faced similar criticism over decisions to exclude departing members from their league championships. The AEC is, ironically, losing league power Stony Brook to the CAA. The CAA kept James Madison out of its postseasons.
"This decision was not made lightly, and the Board of Presidents recognizes that some may disagree with it," the America East Conference said in a statement, citing a 17-year-old league rule previously used to ban Boston University out of the 2012-13 league championships. "The Conference has an obligation to prioritize the remaining members who are committed to the league's advancement and the student-athletes who compete at those institutions, now and in the future."
The criticism of conferences depends on the context, but the overarching complaints stem from the decision to keep student-athletes, especially college seniors, from participating in conference championships.
USA Today columnist Dan Wolken, among the most vocal in sports media in his criticism of conferences, wrote in November that postseason bans make up the worst of college sports.
“We should know better than to look toward college sports looking for logical solutions to problems, for cooler heads to prevail or for grown-ups to actually look out for the welfare of the so-called student-athletes as much as they like to pretend they do.
“But what we should never expect — and shouldn’t tolerate — are decisions that harm college kids out of pure spite. And that’s exactly what’s happening right now in the Colonial Athletic Association as one of the league’s founding members, James Madison, prepares to exit the conference.”
The punishment, Wolken continued, has been in place for years and has not yet deterred schools from switching leagues. It also, again, hurts student-athletes who have nothing to do with conference affiliation and politics around that. The argument against postseason exclusions is similar to the argument against postseason bans as a form of penalty for NCAA rules infractions.
That rule was recently changed, with the NCAA’s new constitution including language to discourage postseason bans as a form of punishment because they unduly impact student-athletes who had nothing to do with the infractions in question.
Perhaps, when the dust once again settles on conference realignment, universities and leagues will revisit some of their policies in handling member departures. Until then, the fighting over the implementation of postseason punishment will grab headlines.
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