Gymnastics was your example. And they do often travel for one-on-one meets.
Detroit to Oklahoma City is a 5-6 +/- hour flight depending on stops and then about a 30-minute bus ride. Not far? I disagree.
Stanford women’s basketball played a tournament in the Bahamas, has played South Carolina, Tennessee, UConn, etc.
For 2023-2024, the Stanford field hockey team plays at Ohio State, at Michigan State, at New Hampshire, at Maine, at Vermont, at Bryant (RI) and at UMass Lowell. And Maryland, Rutgers and Penn State come to Stanford.
Stanford could join the ACC. Their teams travel plenty already.
Maybe, but how long is Stanford willing to go without distributions? OR/WA took half-shares for the duration of the upcoming contract, but they didn’t commit to the B1G until they received assurances that they would be full-share members starting with the next contract (2030 or so). Stanford doesn’t bring enough media value to be worth more than a small fraction of a B1G share - minimal national interest, small alumni base that is not hyper-focused on football, etc. etc. If Stanford were willing to permanently forego conference media-rights distributions and fund athletics from its endowment, then the idea becomes more palatable.
BUT, even if you could work out Stanford as No. 19, then you have the problem of who would join with them as No. 20. Definitely not Cal, whose athletic department is a mess competitively, financially, administratively, you name it. The only real answer is Notre Dame, which has been dodging the entreaties of the B1G for a hundred years. If ND is ever open to B1G membership, then Stanford suddenly becomes a likely addition.
Olympic sports are an issue, but I still think the biggest problem with this is money. To get a MWC school to join for 2024, the exit fee is $34M; for AAC, the fee is reportedly $18M. Other than possibly SMU, none of the candidate schools (Boise, San Diego St, Memphis, etc.) could afford to cover this themselves, and neither could Cal/Ore St/Wash St, so the question is whether Stanford is willing to put up $100M+ to put together a conference that it doesn’t really want to be in anyway. Not likely.
If the Pac-4 want (or need) to stay together, the better way is to pre-arrange with a supermajority from either the MWC or AAC to dissolve one of those leagues (negating the exit fees) and then invite the conspirators to join the Pac-4. This would require a high degree of trust among conspirators, as departing schools would be at the mercy of the Pac to keep its promise and invite them (having destroyed their prior conference home). It think the magic number for dissolution is 9 in the MWC, not sure about AAC. The outcome still isn’t great for Stanford, but at least they didn’t pay anything to make it happen.
It’s the university presidents who make the decision – the academic nerds – not the athletic directors. That’s why Stanford is attractive to Duke and UVA and GA Tech, etc. Interesting insights here with a former ACC Presidents Chair from a little over a week ago: https://youtu.be/BxZjjyReZSU
I wasn’t even considering the cost of exit for schools moving into a ‘new’ PAC-12. Rather I was looking at it only from Stanford’s perspective. A media deal for a conference of the remaining PAC-4 schools plus MWC and/or AAC schools would generate little TV revenue. The MWC and AAC schools just aren’t very interesting in that respect and the result would be completely unworkable for Cal and not a significant number for Stanford.
Such a conference also isn’t workable in the long run for either Stanford or Cal if they want to remain FBS schools. I think that a collapse from Power 5 to Power 4 is inevitable at this point, it isn’t a matter of if but rather when.
Recruiting is dead in the water until this is resolved. CalFord have to have a landing spot before teh transfer portal open back up, at the very latest. That is the last second for ‘pencils down’.
Some of the country’s oldest and most prestigious schools make up the Ivy League. They are:
Brown University
Columbia
Cornell
University of Pennsylvania
Harvard
Princeton
Yale
Dartmouth
They rank among the top 20 NCAA Division 1 schools within the NCSA Power Rankings. And according to the NCAA, more than 8,000 student-athletes compete every year for these schools.
Most choose the Ivy League for its ultra-high level of competition in both athletics and academics. If an Ivy League school is on your target list, note that these schools do not award academic or athletic scholarships.
Financial aid is based on needs determined by the financial aid office at each school. Some schools will change their financial aid options yearly based on your grades and sports performance.
Totally agree. I can’t construct a scenario even if MWC or AAC schools did join the remaining 4 PAC 12 schools where that new conference could be considered a Power 5.
It was a fast and mind boggling turn of events that has led to Stanford being left out in the cold. Lots of people who were at fault, or short sighted, or just didn’t do their job very well.
But it’s about football. They are FCS, formerly 1AA. In other sports D1 but other sports don’t matter.
If they did, wed still have the greatest basketball conference ever - the Big East - with Syracuse, Pitt, BC etc to go along with Gtown, Nova, St Johns, Providence etc etc.
I imagine Stanford and Cal are doing just fine. Women’s lacrosse? Sign me up even though there is no conference (need 6 schools to have a conference, and OSU and WSU don’t have teams). Swimming, crew, sailing? Plenty are still willing to take a chance and an admission ticket to Stanford.
How the PAC 12 did basketball was to travel to the two schools that were the closest to each other, so CU would play Cal and Stanford the same weekend away, and then those two schools would travel to CU and Utah for a weekend play. The PAC 12 tournament was always in Vegas. They could continue to do that in another conference, such as Wisconsin and MInn in the B1G, or two or three schools in/near Florida. Now would other schools from the southeast be willing to fly across country to do that every year or every other year? Sounds like they are voting no, that they don’t want to do that for basketball or any of the other sports. Maybe for football.
FCS is still D1 football. I agree that Stanford doesn’t want to play FCS but that doesn’t make the Ivy league not D1. And of course all the other sports are in D1 and sometimes win national championships.
If a school is in D1, it can’t ‘play down’ in any sports It can play FCS or Pioneer football, but it can’t, for example, play D3 soccer. Usually if the school doesn’t want to play a sport in D1 it will have club teams.
I think the Pac 12 will finish out this year and then the remaining 4 schools will either invite others to join them or find new homes. OSU and WSU make a lot more just hanging out in the Pac12 than they would switching to MWC. The MWC may be able to pick up some more money in TV contracts since many of the markets are also Pac 12 markets.
FCS is he former 1AA. They do on occasion play D1 schools - usually for fluff and payoffs - but sometimes there’s huge wins - such as the 2007 App State (FCS at the time) victory over Michigan.
They (FCS) have their own playoff and championship.
But I think all the points are made. We can move on.
This isn’t about Lacrosse - there’s zero financial incentive for a Stanford to join Ivy.
FCS is D1, but the “lower half”. FBS is the “upper half”. FBS teams can count at most one win against an FCS team toward the minimum number of wins for bowl eligibility, so FBS teams looking for “easy victory” opponents typically schedule one FCS team.
FBS has its own hierarchy, with the “power” conferences which have preferred bowl placement versus the other conferences.
How so? The PAC 12 doesn’t exist after this year as of right now. The current PAC 12 media deal ends this year, and with no conference or new media deal for 2024-25 right now, the administrations are quite concerned.
As many have talked about here, there are large penalties for MWC teams to leave that conference, penalties larger than any new media deal for a remodeled PAC 12 is going to pay annually.
If the PAC 4 joined the MWC, those revenues are significantly less than the 4 remaining PAC 4 schools have been making, and would result in those 4 schools needing to cut some sports (according to them).