GLUBIAK: Ancient Eight stays true to its name

Put yourself in the shoes of the Horned Frogs of Texas Christian University for a moment.

The Horned Frogs were members of the Southwest Conference until its disintegration in 1996, after which they joined the Western Athletic Conference. Five years later, in 2001, TCU left the WAC for Conference USA. In 2005, TCU changed conference affiliation again, this time spurning Conference USA in favor of the Mountain West Conference. Just this past summer, the Horned Frogs decided to switch again, announcing that they will be members of the Big East Conference starting next fall.

Confused? You should be. That’s five different conference affiliations in 15 years. And TCU is by no means isolated in its shifty feet of late. In many ways, the Horned Frogs have been reacting to a national firestorm across the NCAA landscape, most recently evidenced by Syracuse and Pitt’s surprise announcements last week that they were jumping the sinking ship that is the Big East (surprise, TCU!) for the suddenly stable Atlantic Coast Conference.

Now let me ask you this: Can you imagine Columbia playing in any conference other than the Ivy League?

Absolutely not—the Ancient Eight, unlike the Big Ten (11 members going on 12) or the Big 12 (10 schools going on nine going on who-knows-how-many), actually has the number of member institutions its name suggests, and that’s the way it’s going to stay.

The Pac-12 is going to stay put at 12, the league recently announced, spoiling the scheming of Texas, Oklahoma, Texas Tech, and Oklahoma State to take their collective football prowess (and TV rights) west from the Big 12, which now may be in the buyer’s market (heads up BYU) after looking like a skeleton league for weeks.

Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Penn, Princeton, and Yale. That’s the Ivy League. That’s it. In the 57 years since the league’s inception, the membership has not changed.
This in a day and age when college sports have become so tumultuous and warped that NCAA president Mark Emmert recently felt compelled to emphasize to an audience of collegiate athletics directors, “We need to find serious ways of driving forward our message that we are in the business of education and development of young men and young women.”

While it seems a sad state of affairs when those intentions need to be clarified, you can’t blame Emmert for his comments. When Texas A&M announced plans to leave the Big 12 for the Southeastern Conference in August, the Aggies reopened questions about conference realignment that surfaced in 2010 when Colorado and Nebraska chose to leave the Big 12 for the Pac-12 and Big Ten, respectively.

Some think the Big East and Big 12 may merge, while others think West Virginia is headed to the SEC. With Pitt and Syracuse now on board, the ACC has 14 schools and has hinted it wouldn’t mind two more to make 16—with Notre Dame being the ultimate prize and Rutgers and UConn waiting at the door, hoping to get invited.

At the heart of the whole mess is TV money, and particularly the revenues generated by these schools’ football squads. Basketball has largely taken a backseat, with the Big East—the nation’s best hoops league—taking an absolute beating. Also in the backseat: the very ideals that Emmert tried to emphasize. Somewhere between the zeros in the TV deals these major conferences are hoping to sign, the idea of getting an education while playing collegiate sports got totally lost.

Put yourself back in the shoes of the Horned Frogs. This time imagine you are the TCU women’s soccer team. Starting next fall, you are slated to play in the Big East. That means road trips to places like Syracuse and Milwaukee and South Bend to play conference foes.

I can say from experience that road trips to play schools in different regions of the country are a blast—but a cross-country flight every time you take the field against a league opponent? That’s a lot to ask, particularly if you’re talking about midweek games. And why is the women’s soccer team going to be flying to the northeast over and over again next fall? Because the Big East is supposedly a better fit for the TCU football team. The thinking goes that TCU, taking advantage of the Big East’s automatic BCS bid, would have a better chance in its new conference of getting a bid to a big-time bowl and millions of dollars in revenue to go with it.

But this is not an angry column about TCU’s move. You could argue that, should its football team get a BCS bowl bid, the money it would reap would benefit everyone in the school’s athletic department, including the women’s soccer team. The point is that at schools like TCU and many, many others across the country, the factors driving decisions about conference affiliations are football and dollar signs, in some order.

Not so in the Ivy League, whose membership has never been in question. Maybe as a result, the conference has managed to steer clear of the black marks the most recent moving and shaking has left on many of the involved schools. In an age when the NCAA president is scrambling to restore collegiate athletics’ image, the Ancient Eight looks great, simply for being eight.

Zach Glubiak is a Columbia College senior majoring in history. He is a member of the varsity men’s soccer team.
sports@columbiaspectator.com