This week, with the approval of the House vs. NCAA settlement, college sports officially split into two. The power conference schools are going to pay their athletes, make their own rules and take the responsibility of enforcement and punishment from an NCAA that was never very good at it in the first place.
Is there fear and resentment across the rest of the college sports landscape about where this is all headed? Of course there is. Schools at the lower end of Division I see a power grab led by the Big Ten and SEC and wonder if the clock is ticking on their conference’s automatic access to NCAA championships and perhaps even a full divorce. To many folks in the smaller conferences, it feels like they’re paying the price for a problem they didn’t cause.
But in a world where it increasingly feels like the new financial realities of the Big Ten and SEC are driving a land grab for postseason bids, starting with the College Football Playoff but undoubtedly trickling down to every sport in the future, this year’s College World Series shows why some traditions are worth preserving.
The eight teams that advanced to Omaha over the last few days represent seven different conferences:
The SEC (LSU and Arkansas)
The Big 12 (Arizona)
The ACC (Louisville)
The Big Ten (UCLA)
The Sun Belt (Coastal Carolina)
The Missouri Valley (Murray State)
The Pac-12 (Kind of. Oregon State played as an independent this season but was crucial in the effort to resurrect a new Pac-12, which will begin play in the 2026-27 academic year.)
Is such a huge conference spread a bit of an anomaly? Absolutely. In recent renditions of the CWS, you’ll see a whole lot of SEC and ACC representation, some strong Big 12 and Pac-12 programs (before it imploded) and your occasional interloper from outside the power conferences.
But this year’s field underscores a very simple point that the SEC and Big Ten would be wise to remember as they go about the business of remaking college sports: At the end of the day, competition is what this is all about. And even if that means you come up on the short end some years, it’s nothing to be afraid of. That’s just sports.
Though we can find a thousand things the NCAA has done wrong on its journey toward the professionalization of college sports, it did one thing that was really genius. In constructing its format for national championship tournaments, it ensured that all Division I conferences would be represented by an automatic qualifier.
This means that when the men’s basketball players at SIU-Edwardsville began last season, they could dream of playing in March Madness. Was there a realistic chance to win a national championship? Of course not. Were they even likely to win a game? Heck no. Were they better than dozens of basketball teams who missed the tournament? According to the computers, they weren’t even in the top 200.
But they won their conference, earned their moment on the big stage and got blown off the court by Houston. That’s what usually happens. But every now and then, you get an upset everyone remembers. Either way, the possibility of that moment keeps those programs viable and those communities invested in college basketball. Overall, it’s a pretty great system.
Folks at those lower levels have good reason to wonder if they’ll keep those automatic bids going forward, not just in basketball but a variety of sports. SEC commissioner Greg Sankey, in particular, has made public comments that could be considered threatening to the notion of equal access regardless of conference size or strength.
Meanwhile, there was talk a few weeks back that the SEC and Big Ten could be interested in a 16-team CFP format where they get four automatic bids each, with the ACC and Big 12 getting two apiece and one going to the top-ranked Group of Five champion.
It seems as if that idea has subsequently died down. Even though the ACC and Big 12 locking in two bids each might have been tempting on the surface, formalizing an existence as second-class citizens would not have gone over well with those fan bases.
If you were to construct the CWS on the same kinds of principles that the Big Ten and SEC have been flirting with this year in their CFP expansion discussions, you’d never have seven conferences involved like this year. And the reason it’s such a timely development for college sports is that it should remind people in the industry why they do this in the first place.
Everyone understands that a true level playing field is impossible, but competition is about more than revenue on a spreadsheet. And when it comes to the structure of Division I, giving an automatic bid to every conference underlines that they are partners in an enterprise whose mission is to deliver a good product – even if a lot of those partners can’t stack up competitively to the mighty SEC.
You can’t deliver as good of a product for the sport – the entire sport – by stacking the deck and using historical performance to engineer future outcomes in your favor.
You can only do it by making the postseason possibility available to everyone and letting the chips fall where they may. Even in a more complicated and professionalized world, you don’t need to apologize for the outcome when you just let sports do its thing.