Updated Monday 10/20/2003 8:51 AM

COLLEGE SPORTS...OR DIVORCE COURT?

by Bruce Marshall, TGS Extra!!! Editor

Of all of the comments we have read regarding the recent conference-switching in college sports, we thought one in the summer by Duke basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski, who opposed the shuffling of the existent conference deck of cards, was the most appropriate. "There's a reason," said Coach K, drawing an analogy, "that the USA doesn't have states in France or Venezuela."

And there's a reason why conferences formed affiliations in the first place. Not that it seems to matter much anymore.

Forgive us for digressing for a moment, but for a long time, we (and most others) viewed conference alignments in college sports as almost-sacred alliances. Changes, if any, were made at glacier-like speed. After all, we could count all of the major alterations in conference alignments in the '60s, '70s, and '80s on one hand. There was South Carolina leaving the ACC for independent status in 1970. The now-defunct Southwest Conference added Houston in 1976. The Pac-10 expanded in 1978 by adding Arizona & Arizona State from the WAC, which in turn invited San Diego State (from the PCAA), plus independents Hawaii & Air Force, to fill its gap. Georgia Tech joined the ACC in 1981. For almost 30 years, that was it.

Now, fast-forward to a bit more than a decade later, and the college conference landscape is quickly becoming unrecognizable from its former self. Several long-term, and some shorter-term, alliances have been broken, many of those in the past few months. These days, conference commitments seem to have about as much substance as the wedding vows between Dennis Rodman & Carmen Electra. Courts are now entering the fray, as jilted universities, and conferences, seek legal recourse. Whoever said divorce wasn't messy, anyway?

The peculiar dynamics of the conference-switching phenomenon have their roots in a single factor--and it's not money per se. Instead, it's greed, and the reluctance of the BCS (Bowl Championship Series) schools to stage a post-season college football playoff, similar to the March basketball extravaganza that generates hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. The BCS schools simply do not want the NCAA getting similarly involved on the gridiron level--thus taking a big cut of the proceeds, as the governing body does in hoops. We'll cover that angle more thoroughly in a few weeks. The off-shoot of all the switching is a conference football championship game (available to 12-team loops), first introduced by the SEC after its expansion (Arkansas & South Carolina) in '92 and later copied by several others, acting as another big-game payout for conference teams. Though, ironically, the conference title games pale in comparison with potential revenues from a full-fledged playoff.

What we're left with, for now, is a conference-raiding environment that at times seems better-suited to a board game. But it's all very real, and as this particular soap opera continues to unfold, we thought it would be interesting to check with our sources and outline what we might expect to see, in the coming months, from the two conferences most impacted by recent events.

ACC...With Boston College officially on board, joining fellow Big East summer defectors Miami-Florida and Virginia Tech, the ACC's transformation is now complete. The interesting side-bar of the raid on the Big East was that Virginia Tech was not an original target. Credit Virginia for the league changing course, as sources tell us that the Cavs, with North Carolina & Duke also casting "nay" votes to expansion in the summer, were pressured by the state legislature to also vote "nay" (and thus blocking any expansion) unless Tech was included in any ACC additions. The Big East school now left on the "outs" is Syracuse, an original ACC target but, to its credit, acting as something of a glue in trying to keep the Big East viable.

Big East...With BC, Miami, and Virginia Tech all moving, and Temple being kicked out of the football side of the loop after next season, all eyes are on what the Big East will do next. Most sources expect the league to reinvent itself as an 8-team loop for football and 16-team league for hoops. UConn joins as a football member next year; Louisville and Cincinnati are expected to be lured from Conference USA. That leaves one more football spot to be filled, with Central Florida, South Florida, Navy, East Carolina, and maybe a reinvited Temple (?) potential alternatives, with DePaul & Marquette joining in hoops. Whether that will be enough to keep the Big East involved in the BCS equation (to be renegotiated soon) remains to be seen. Of course, there are still some in the region who dream of Notre Dame saving the day and aligning itself full-time with the Big East (as it does in hoops and other sports), though sources tell us the self-serving Irish are unlikely to comply. And others still dream of what might have been regarding Penn State, the longtime flagship of eastern football that regrettably fancied itself a bigger fish than the rest in the region and stayed independent when the Big East was formed. Interestingly, had the Nittany Lions stayed put, the main reason for their '93 jump to the Big Ten (a chance at the big-money Rose Bowl) wouldn't have been as big a factor, as the Bowl Alliance and BCS subsequently offered other schools a chance at the biggest-money bowls. Ironic as it now sounds, Penn State might have been better served in the Big East.