The Miami metro area has spent much of the 21st century popularizing things that Americans explicitly or implicitly do not like—content creators, cryptocurrency, NBA superteams, etc. Now, the 305 seems bent on degrading the popularity of something that Americans explicitly and implicitly do like: college football.
On Thursday, University of Miami president Joe Echevarria gave an alarming interview to Yahoo Sports’s Ross Dellenger where he proposed numerous paths for the Hurricanes’ football future—none of them in the ACC and none of them good. Working from the contention that life in the conference is impoverishing Miami—home to the No. 1 football and No. 14 men’s basketball teams in the land, mind you—Echevarria espoused thinking that, if taken to its logical conclusion, could render college football a shell of its former self decades from now.
Here’s a look at what Echevarria had to say, where it could lead, and who could stop it.
Miami’s array of futures
“As an [Association of American Universities] research institution, we line up with the Big Ten's profile,” Echevarria told Dellenger. “We have an exceptionally strong profile that compares favorably with leading research institutions across the country. On the geography idea, we line up better with the SEC."
Later, Echevarria told Dellenger that “you cannot lock us into a conference” and openly mused about returning the Hurricanes to the independent status they enjoyed until joining the Big East in 1991. Dellenger reported that Miami and other schools have held media discussions related to potential independence.
The source of the Hurricanes’ ire: a provision in the nascent Protect College Sports Act designed to prevent power conferences from ballooning to more than 20 teams, or merging to create a super league. (Miami is among the schools to sign a letter encouraging lawmakers to increase the proposed cap to 22 teams.)
What happens if Miami makes the leap?
Let’s play out all three of Echevarria’s scenarios: the Big Ten scenario, the SEC scenario and the independent scenario. If taken to their logical conclusions, all three carry considerable long-term risk to the health of college football.
The Hurricanes jumping to the Big Ten or SEC would inherently destabilize the ACC, presumably because a.) the conference Miami is joining would likely be eager to grab another team in order to expand to an even number of members, and b.) that team would likely also come from the ACC. If that team is Clemson or Florida State, or even North Carolina or Virginia (which Dellenger hinted SEC executives like), the ACC would lose two quality brands and slip further down the college football pecking order. Working from that scenario, it doesn’t seem difficult to imagine the gulf between the Big Ten-SEC and ACC-Big 12 axes growing wide enough that a super league becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Which raises the question: If college football evolves into a body nearly identical to the NFL, why would football fans not simply watch the NFL?
If the Hurricanes rejoin the ranks of the independents, it could leave college football in an even worse place. What, at that point, is stopping Michigan or Ohio State—the Big Ten’s two biggest brands—from exiting their league to construct an even more lucrative schedule? What’s stopping Alabama or Texas? With American higher education in the 2020s a profit-driven, every-man-for-himself mess, it seems foolish to assume that academic bonds would prevent athletic programs from striking out on their own.
In that scenario, a patchwork of powerful independents could form a wink-wink super league, and play only each other. Again—college football’s middle class would wither, the sport’s base of relevance would shrink, and fans interested in a regionally diverse game would watch the NFL. Suddenly, college football in 2046 is NASCAR—a second-tier sports concern lamenting that in trying to go national, it left its regional soul behind.
A potential solution: aggressive antitrust regulation
The Big Ten and SEC should thank their lucky stars every day they don’t do business in the European Union, whose aggressive antitrust regulators would’ve cried foul on the conferences’ anticompetitive practices years ago.
This, however, is the United States—toothless on the antitrust front for 50 years now, and particularly toothless toward college sports until very recently. It’s clear that beyond its forays into eligibility and player payments, it is long past time the government involved itself in policing the competition aspect of college sports.
When you think of college sports as being indistinguishable in behavior from most other industries—something fans are now starting to do—you start to ask yourself: how were the ACC, Big Ten and Big 12 jointly able to Thanos-snap the Pac-12 out of existence? Why, in a business predicated on on-field competition, is anticompetitive behavior the norm?
Dellenger in his piece makes hay of Echevarria’s background at Deloitte, one of the Big Four accounting firms—but what if Deloitte had tried to actively destroy the other three (EY, KPMG and PwC)? That wouldn’t fly, and in fact the Big Four have faced inquiries into allegations of past anticompetitive behavior. There is no reason that Miami, the Big Ten, the SEC and college football at large shouldn’t be held to the same standard. The economic and spiritual health of the game depend on it.
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