Big 12 Commissioner Bob Bowlsby got down to the nitty-gritty in his comments at the Big 12's football dog and pony show, and he didn't practice Swofford-esque politeness either. Check his bad self out:
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- "Enforcement is broken. The infractions committee hasn't had [an FBS] hearing in almost a year, and I think it's not an understatement to say cheating pays presently. If you seek to conspire to certainly bend the rules, you can do it successfully and probably not get caught in most occasions."
- "We certainly are operating in a strange environment in that we have lawsuits, plus we have the [O'Bannon v. NCAA] lawsuit. I think all of that in the end will cause programs to be eliminated. I think you'll see men's Olympic sports go away as a result of the new funding challenges that are coming down the pipe. I think there may be tension among and between sports on campus and institutions that have different resources. It's really unknown what the outcomes will be."
- "It is hard to justify paying student-athletes in football and men's basketball and not recognizing the significant effort that swimmers and wrestlers and lacrosse players and track athletes all put in. Football and basketball players don't work any harder than anybody else; they just happen to have the blessing of an adoring public who is willing to pay for the tickets and willing to buy the products on television that come with the high visibility...We have both a legal obligation and a moral obligation to do for female student-athletes and male Olympic sports athletes just exactly what we do for football and basketball student-athletes. I don't think it's even debatable."
Last point first: you can't have it both ways. If the Olympic programs are eliminated, you're going to get down to three programs pretty quickly - two basketball programs and football.
And world-class Title IX headache because you'll need about 100 female athletes to keep from being sued.
So then you have the tension between containing costs and the ridiculous distances conference rivals now are expected to travel.
Some conferences will solve this by putting non-revenue sports into localized divisions. For instance, the ACC could have three for baseball - one southern, one central and one northern. The Big Ten could have, say hockey in a Midwest division and an East Coast branch.
Football and basketball meanwhile will fly above that en route to far flung money-making opportunities.
He's basically right though: financial pressures in the new environment are going to force schools to make more choices than have already been made and a lot of programs will be cut. Moneymakers will be kept and our guess is the cheapest programs to run will be kept to keep Title IX requirements satisfied.
As for the cheating: we're sure he's absolutely right about that, and given the rich history of rule-breaking by the Situational Ethics Conference, we'd fully expect the SEC schools to be taking full advantage of the NCAA's enforcement paralysis. Since the Big 12 is partnering with the SEC, along with the Big Ten, PAC-12 and the ACC for more power, he can't really point fingers. But it's not like the Big 12 is competing with the MAC or the Southern Conference for players.
One of the things that really hasn't been discussed about autonomy is how the NCAA will handle enforcement.
Will it be handled as it's traditionally been handled? Or does autonomy mean a different enforcement structure for the power conferences?
Bowslby has exposed a tension which really hasn't been discussed. It's been there between the Big Ten and the ACC on one side, insisting on at least academic integrity and (mostly) the SEC on the other.
We would have expected the PAC-12 to gravitate to the ACC and Big Ten on this, and the Big 12 to more or less take up the SEC's argument. But realignment may make strange bedfellows, and at any rate, the bottom line remains the bottom line.
Compliance and academic integrity may make for a dispute, but in the end, as UNC has recently taught us, not much interferes with the bottom line.