Law: College conference realignment could carry significant consequences for baseball
New York TimesPac-12 teams have won 29 College World Series titles, more than twice as many as the No. Players in these new coast-to-coast conferences may end up dealing with far more travel — both in terms of miles and time spent — than they originally bargained for, especially if conferences like the Big Ten and Big 12 don’t shift to some kind of geographically limited schedule by utilizing divisions or pods. The four West Coast teams joining the Big Ten are over 2,500 miles away from East Coast-based Rutgers and Maryland — a coast-to-coast flight is six hours westbound and at least five hours eastbound. Maybe we see home-and-home series in the same season — UCLA at USC one weekend, USC at UCLA another weekend — although home-and-home series haven’t been a part of college baseball in at least 20 years, with conferences large enough that no team would have to play an opponent two weekends in the same year. The geographical absurdities of this round of conference realignment are actually the tip of a much larger iceberg; although the problems it poses for non-revenue sports are real, there’s a broader issue here of schools letting short-term revenue gains dictate all kinds of policy, further undermining those claims that college athletics were the sports of amateurs and shouldn’t be sullied by anything so unclean as actually paying the players doing the work.
History of this topic
College football realignment recap: Who’s switching conferences this summer?
New York Times
Column: Can the Big West become college baseball’s foremost conference out West? Here’s the pitch
LA Times
College baseball notebook: Conference tournaments to decide NCAA automatic bids and many at-larges
Associated Press
Oregon State, Washington State ponder next moves after getting left out of college reshuffling
Associated Press
ACC having early discussions on potential addition of Cal, Stanford: Sources
New York Times
How will Oregon and Washington impact Big Ten basketball after latest realignment?
New York Times
After Big Ten moves, will conference realignment trickle down to Group of 5 again?
New York Times
USC and UCLA rock college sports by leaving the Pac-12 for the Big Ten
LA Times
‘There was no warning’: D1 schools are dropping baseball. What does that mean for the sport?
New York Times
Shortened MLB draft will create a roster logjam for college teams
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