Realignment has produced millions for Arkansas, Rutgers, Maryland and other universities. Has it been worth it?
There may not be any college football players in 2018 who were alive when Arkansas was not in the Southeastern Conference. Most probably do not know there even was such a time.
Since joining the SEC in 1991, the Razorbacks have had just one top-10 finish, in 2011, when their two losses came to the two teams that played for the national championship: Alabama and Louisiana State. Those are two extraordinarily formidable programs that, as a member of the SEC West, Arkansas now plays — and often loses to — every year.
But before 1991, it was a charter member of the Southwest Conference, and for most of the 20th century the only member of the league from outside Texas. Its biggest rival was the University of Texas, and the Razorbacks had several glorious seasons through the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s under Frank Broyles and Lou Holtz. In 25 years under those coaches, Arkansas had 12 finishes in the Associated Press poll’s top 10 and won the national championship in 1964 with two guys named Jimmy Johnson and Jerry Jones on the roster.
Now Arkansas has a problem that seems all too common among teams that have switched conferences in college football’s modern era, usually with money as a prime motivator: It may just be in the wrong league. Rutgers, Maryland, Boston College — are you listening?
“Would it be easier in the Big 12?” said Houston Nutt, the CBS analyst and Little Rock native who played for and later coached the Razorbacks. “Yes. No question. Would it be easier in the Southwest Conference? Yes. No question.
“But that wasn’t the way it was,” he added. “So we embraced it.”
In college football’s modern era, no fewer than 14 football programs have made lateral moves, from one power conference to another, and several more have been promoted from what were effectively midmajors.
The odd configurations created by realignment are familiar to anyone who has heard college football fans’ bellyaches. The Big 12 has 10 teams; the Big Ten, 14. West Virginia and Texas Tech are in the same conference. Michigan now plays Rutgers every year, but Texas and Texas A&M do not meet at all.
Arkansas helped set the template: It severed ancient rivalries and forsook geographical proximity to gain stability and the riches of huge television contracts (the SEC added Arkansas and South Carolina partly to stage a lucrative conference championship game).
From most perspectives, Arkansas’s conference change has proved prescient. As a member of the world-beating, ultraprominent SEC, Arkansas reaped around $7 million more last year in conference payouts than did members of the Big 12, which does not have its own cable network and which will be the most vulnerable conference should another bout of realignment hit in the middle of next decade, when conference television contracts are set to expire.
As for the Southwest Conference, it disappeared in 1996 after years of scandals, with four of its members joining the former Big Eight in the new Big 12 while others dropped to lower leagues. Arkansas might have still had a good claim to inclusion in a Power 5 league back then, had it not left the Southwest early. Or it might have gone the way of its old league rival Houston, which was left out of the Big 12 initially and then two years ago desperately tried to join it but, despite making a strong case, found itself behind the velvet rope.
Teams that changed leagues to stay in a power conference “made a decision to get themselves protected politically, financially and institutionally,” said Mike Tranghese, a former Big East commissioner, who now advises the SEC on men’s basketball.
While running the Big East in the 1990s and 2000s, Tranghese added football powers like Miami, West Virginia and Virginia Tech. But the conference imploded later as several members left for other leagues, mainly the Atlantic Coast Conference.
“The schools that left the Big East for the A. C. and, in Rutgers’s case, the Big Ten did not go to those leagues thinking they were going to win the national championship,” Tranghese said.
In other words: Competition isn’t everything.
Or is it?
Nutt led the Razorbacks to four divisional titles during his tenure from 1998 to 2007, but they resulted in three conference title-game losses. The Bobby Petrino era, featuring that No. 5 finish in 2011, flamed out in scandal. Bret Bielema’s attempt to install a kind of Big Ten South — stout defense, plodding offense — led to a 29-34 record over the last five seasons, including an 11-29 record in SEC play.
This year, the Razorbacks are staring down a particularly bleak stretch. Under a new coach, they are 1-2, with the losses coming to unheralded Colorado State and North Texas. Their next three games are Saturday at No. 9 Auburn; then versus No. 22 Texas A&M in Arlington, Tex.; and then hosting, yes, No. 1 Alabama. A loss in that game would be the 12th in a row to the Crimson Tide.
To be sure, there is not yet a grand unifying theory of the competitive effect of realignment. Rutgers had several strong seasons in the Big East roughly a decade ago, and its overall Big Ten record is 7-21. Maryland was not terrible in the A. C. but has yet to have a winning season in Big Ten play.
But then there is Texas A&M, which won nine more games in its first six seasons in the fearsome SEC West than it did in its last six seasons in the Big 12. Even Nebraska, commonly perceived as a former giant whose power died with the old Big Eight, has fared deceptively well in the Big Ten compared with its final years in the Big 12.
Colorado’s move to the Pacific-12 from the Big 12 is difficult to examine dispassionately, given the Buffaloes’ more generally putrid 2000s. They have a division championship in the Pac-12. Could they have done more in the Big 12? Utah’s graduation to the Pac-12 from the Mountain West has hurt the Utes’ win-loss records only slightly, against superior competition.
Arkansas, because its switch came so long ago, is an underexamined case study.
Nutt, a player and assistant while Arkansas was in the Southwest, looked around the SEC after he took over as coach before the 1998 season. “I could tell it was a very, very difficult league,” he said. “There’s no off-Saturdays.”
As a smaller state, Arkansas for decades fed off the talent of neighboring Texas, considered the country’s top recruiting state. All its major rivals were based there and nearly half its games were played there — an obvious lift for recruiting.
