Conference Hopscotch

                The University of Maryland, which is located in the state of Maryland, has joined the Big 10 conference, supposedly a Midwestern conference that had 12 members already. Rutgers University is expected to announce its intention to join the Big 10 as well. Rutgers is located in the Midwestern state of New Jersey.

          The Maryland president made a lot of excuses this week to defend his decision to have his school spend $50 million to leave the Atlantic Coast Conference to join the Big, uh, 13.

Well, sure, this all makes sense. After all, what’s $50 million? Maryland is a public institution with an endowment of $792 million in 2011, according to Wikipedia. Plus the school gets all that tuition money from its students. I guess the school can afford the paltry $50 million needed to make a change to its football schedule. Maybe the tuition will not go up.

The Rutgers president will soon make the same excuses for his school leaving the Big East Conference, but Rutgers can get out of the Big East for as little as $11 million. What a deal.

This is a silly time for collegiate sports. Schools have been changing conference affiliations like a one-legged kangaroo looking for a place to rest. San Diego State University, another publically-funded school, has announced its intention to join the Big East in a few years, if the Big East still exists by then.

Other schools have made similar moves.

Maryland’s announcement this week made the move to the Big, uh, Midwest Conference sound like a good financial move. It isn’t. Baseball, softball, track, cross country and other non-revenue sports teams will now have to travel consistently longer distances just to play conference contests than ever before.

And it is the travel that is the important consideration. The athletes on these college teams are supposed to be students. They will miss more class time than in previous years and even those that are good students will struggle to keep up with their class work due to more time on airplanes, in airports, on shuttle busses and differing time zones.

There needs to be a voice of reason somewhere in the world of the NCAA. There never has been such a voice in the past, but we need one now. College athletic teams should be members of regional conferences. Some will have bigger reputations and richer television deals than others. Welcome to the real world.

The students that play on these teams are increasingly under scrutiny for their academic performance and progress. That scrutiny is about half a century late, but it is increasing now and that is a good thing. Institutions of higher learning, such as Maryland or San Diego State, fail to take the academic futures of their students into account when they begin making long distance travel plans for conference play.

It is wrong, wrong, wrong to treat students this way.

 

Thanks for reading.