You don’t have to dig too deep in any mess these days to find lefties from Hollywood and academia at the heart of things. Or sometimes a principled conservative fighting them.

That’s certainly the case now with the latest round of football conference musical chairs. And with it, the old sport may be losing much of its fun, tradition, rivalry, and sportsmanship,

Sheer stupidity explains a lot of what happened, but there is also something more sinister at the heart of it in my opinion . The Mouse and his evil four-letter network, EPSN.

The big-money era of college sports began in the 1980s after the NCAA lost control over TV rights in a famous court case. With cable TV millions, ESPN and its broadcast sister, ABC, started signing up every big football and basketball conference. They also subsidized the proliferation of holiday season bowl games.

But the Disney Corp. bought ESPN/ABC, getting them in bed with the same people who brought you affirmative action and DEI: the college presidents.

With cable TV money stagnating in the 2000s, even for sports programming, Disney pursued a strategy to weed out all but the highest TV ratings schools from its patronage. (Not unlike how Paul “Bear” Bryant used to overrecruit players, then ruthlessly cut all but the best. Getting rid of the players he no longer needed was the main reason for his infamous summer “two-a-day” practices)

Disney’s ESPN had TV deals with all the “Power 6” conferences 20 years ago, but in my opinion quietly sought to wreck two of them, the Big East and the Big 12, by encouraging other conferences to poach their members. This started in 2003 when the ACC took Miami (led by Donna Shalala), BC, and Virginia Tech, then gathered steam in 2011 when Texas and Oklahoma threatened to move to the Pac 12. Colorado, Missouri, and Texas A&M did eventually leave.

However, one guy threw a monkey wrench in all this. The president of Baylor, Ken Starr, the renowned lawyer, was going to be out in the cold, along with several other schools. He threatened to sue Texas and wage scorched-earth warfare in the state legislature if the Big 12 did not stick together. He got his way and then invented the modern “media rights” deal for the Big 12. Each school’s home game TV rights would be sold off in long-term contracts, making it nearly impossible to leave.

The Big East also recovered. It added some excellent football/basketball schools that just needed a major conference affiliation to crack the major bowl games. The Big East’s TV deal was coming up at the end of 2012 and Disney was either stuck paying them lots more money or watching a competitor get the now highly rated conference. So, of course, in my opinion, they got their puppets in the ACC to poach some more teams, Pitt and Syracuse, just as the Big East was trying to expand.

That set off the panic that finished the old Big East. ESPN even had the temerity to air a crocodile tear documentary on the conference, never once explaining who actually killed it.

ESPN also had to wait out Ken Starr’s media rights contract, but they struck again in 2021, encouraging the SEC to take Oklahoma and Texas and finally wreck the Big 12. That conference though, has proved too feisty, finding still more members and negotiating another solid TV deal. 

Seeing what Disney was up to years ago, the Big 10 conference took matters into its own hands, setting up their own profitable cable TV system and carefully building the most lucrative of all multi-outlet TV situations, independent of Disney. The dunces who run the PAC 12 though, were not so smart, doing nothing while the TV money dried up. UCLA and USC eagerly took refuge in the Big 10 last year, and with six more leaving, it is virtually defunct.

So, Disney got its wish, there is just a “Power 4” and they can pay everybody else peanuts to broadcast their games. The ACC, Disney’s most willing accomplice, also finds itself in the Mouse’s straitjacket. Not trusting each other (who would?) the ACC presidents signed the mother of all Ken Starr media rights deals, lasting until 2037. But the payout from Disney is a pittance compared to what the SEC will receive the next 10 years.

Way too late in the game, the greedheads who run Florida State and some other ACC schools are now trying to break their unbreakable contracts and go elsewhere. Good luck with that.

A little free legal advice to these ACC college presidents: You are stuck in the ACC; no court will let you break your media rights contract. You made an outright sale of your property, it’s over and done with.

You all do have an excellent anti-trust lawsuit against Disney, though. I am sure there are tons of material in your files on all the collusion and restraint-of-trade carried out over the years with ESPN executives. Given the federal courts’ willingness to impose anti-trust on college sports, that would be a winner, if you can stand the scandal and embarrassment that would come your way.

Barring that though, I think we ordinary college football fans will just have to wait about a decade for the cable TV funds to run out. The internet and the streaming services are destroying the current TV sports model.

College football can then get back to a bunch of normal-sized regional conferences. With the new playoff system, a few conferences no longer control the best bowl games, anyway. The rationale is ending for the monster coast-to-coast conferences. Even the Chief Mouse, Bob Iger, is looking to unload ESPN/ABC.

If only we could take all those greedy liberal college presidents down to Junction, Texas and put them through a couple weeks of “two-a-days.”  

Frank Friday is an attorney in Louisville, KY.

Image: ESPN