Notre Dame Athletic Director Jack Swarbrick Sums Up What's Happened With College Football | 08/23/23

I like the fact that he supports the idea of more regional scheduling and NOT separating football from the rest of the sports. 

I see it this way: Football is the driving engine for most FBS athletic departments and it subsidizes all other sports except men's basketball and, in a few, rare schools, women's basketball. 

But if football is separated from the other sports, the biggest football schools will essentially monopolize the media market with largely national leagues/conferences. The smaller football schools are likely to get a smaller piece of the pie. The larger football schools will thus have more ability to subsidize their non-revenue generating sports than the smaller football schools. 

So now imagine regional conferences for non-revenue generating sports which have been separated from football. They are created to save travel costs and travel time for the athletes. Such conferences are likely to be composed of bigger football schools and smaller football schools. First, the bigger football schools have the competitive advantage over the smaller football schools because they have so much revenue from football that they are better able to subsidize their non-revenue generating sports programs. 

But another problem is that, in such conferences, the small football schools will actually be subsidizing the bigger football schools. Why? It costs money to run a conference and the sports played in each conference. So the smaller football schools will have to play in a regional, non-revenue generating sports conference with bigger football schools, all the while bearing the costs of running the conference along with the bigger football schools, thus spending their money just so the bigger football schools can play regionally and defray the costs of their non-revenue generating programs. 

So say usc, UCLA, UW and uo earns piles of cash playing football big ten, and ASU, UA, UU and Colorado do that in the big 12, and Stanford and Cal do that in the ACC (?!?) and OSU and WSU play in the Pacific Moutain Conference, earning about a $1.98 in football revenue every year. If the Pac 12 is reconstituted for baseball, the other 9 schools that play baseball (CU doesn't) will have a huge competitive advantage over OSU and WSU because of the money generated by their football teams. In addition, OSU and WSU will have to share in the costs of running the baseball conference, thus defraying the baseball costs for the other 9 schools just so they can play regionally. 

It sounds like a rip off to me. 

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