Realignment Bowl: How Texas and Washington changed the college football map

NEW ORLEANS — Chris Del Conte’s white cap is pulled low, partially obscuring his face, perhaps an intent to avoid encumbrances while walking through a hotel lobby teeming with Texas fans.

Scrawled across Del Conte’s hat is a single Spanish word inscribed in burnt orange letters: mañana.

Its meaning — tomorrow — is apropos resting atop the head of a man whose athletic department, the richest in all of college athletics, is soon to grow even more prosperous with an impending move. To Del Conte, tomorrow means the next challenge, the next adventure, the next opportunity or, maybe in this case, the next conference.

Today: the Big 12.

Mañana: the SEC.

For so many across college athletics, Del Conte is the face of the bad guy, the man who made a decision that sparked the most significant and, some say, catastrophic conference realignment wave in the industry’s more than a century of history.

He disagrees with that assessment. But his team’s matchup against Washington on Monday night in the Sugar Bowl is, indeed, a fitting collision of two programs not only both bidding adieu to their current conference but partially responsible for the landscape shift itself. The Superdome offers the stage for a football swan song to their leagues, a teary-eyed but, they say, necessary goodbye.

From both conference realignment and postseason perspectives, the matchup — the Realignment Bowl, you might call it — is a last-of-its-kind showdown, a duel between two of the most storied brands in college athletics competing in what will be the final CFP semifinal game played in the four-team playoff era.

It’s epic. It’s historic.

It’s the final episode of an era of college football.

“It’s a little nostalgic,” said former Washington coach and current CBS analyst Rick Neuheisel. “Both teams are off to what they think will be greener pastures. I don’t think this Big 12 and Pac-12 thing matters to the outcome of the game, but to the fans, it certainly matters.

“These two conferences, one is taking on a new face and one is in the midst of a funeral. I’m sick about it.”

In many ways, Texas’ move to the SEC, leaked in July 2021, and Washington’s move to the Big Ten, announced in August 2023, served as the first and then the final domino of the latest realignment blast, two bookend decisions that sent the college game’s puzzle pieces flying.

But don’t blame the Longhorns, or the Huskies, their athletic directors say. The two schools were only cogs in the churning wheel of college sports, making decisions in the best interest of their programs amid landscape-shifting factors in an industry that has evolved into big business.

While their decisions individually stoked the realignment fires, this was an inevitable and predictable blaze as the college game’s biggest and richest brands consolidated to position themselves for survival in the next iteration.

“As a college sports fan, I love to think about yesteryear and how it was when I grew up, the romance of it all,” said Troy Dannen, who became the Washington athletic director this fall after seven years at Tulane. “But as an administrator, I have to remind everybody to quit looking in the rearview mirror and look around the corner. The one thing college athletics has not done for the last several decades is look around the corner and prepare for what’s next. We tend to live in the past a little too much.

“We are in the middle of an evolution, but we are not anywhere close to the end. We haven’t seen anything yet.”

Why Texas bolted Big 12 for greener pastures

Most know the recent realignment tale by now.

In July of 2021, news emerged that Texas and Oklahoma planned to leave the Big 12 for the SEC starting in 2025, a date now moved up a year. In June 2022, two more colossal dominoes fell: USC and UCLA were headed to the Big Ten.

And then, about 13 months later, the final topples happened when, first, Colorado announced its exit from the Pac-12 to the Big 12 followed by the complete dissolution of the league itself when Washington and Oregon jointly made the decision to leave for the Big Ten.

Did Texas light the flame to what turned into a blazing realignment fire?

Chris Del Conte pushes back on such a notion and points to more than a decade ago when the Big Ten took Nebraska from the Big 12 and Maryland and Rutgers from the ACC.

“Remember now, the Big Ten has added teams from the Pac-12, ACC and Big 12,” he said, adjusting his mañana hat. “Should it be that the Big Ten has been doing this? They affected the ACC. They took two teams. It wasn’t Texas. The Big Ten took a team from the Big 12. Wasn’t Texas. They took four from the Pac-12. Wasn’t Texas.”

But let’s go back even further, Del Conte says. Realignment is not a new trend. The University of Chicago was a 50-year member of the Big Ten until leaving in 1946. In 1966, Tulane left the SEC.

Those two programs left for vastly different reasons than Texas. While Chicago and Tulane left to, in many ways, de-emphasize athletics, the Longhorns are leaving the Big 12 as a way to more emphasize them — most especially football.

During an hour-long interview, Del Conte reveals the two factors that led to the exit: (1) the uncertainty in the future of television broadcasting revenue with the decrease in linear subscriptions; and (2) the 2018 federal tax change that prevented school boosters from exempting donations tied to football premium ticket sales.

Football television revenue and football ticket donations are the two most significant ways that major college athletic departments generate revenue. For instance, in 2022, the Texas athletic department brought in $240 million. Texas gets $60 million annually in donations from boosters to go to premium seating — roughly one-quarter of its budget. Another 15% came from television distribution.

Texas has 20 sports. As is the case with many universities, two of those generate revenue: football and men’s basketball. The potential impact and decrease in Big 12 television broadcasting revenue and ticket donations were at the heart of Texas’ conference shift, he said.

In 2021, he presented his board and president with “a menu,” he called it, on the landscape, including information on how the decrease in linear subscriptions could impact future broadcasting revenue and the Big 12’s impending TV deal. But perhaps the most important item concerned Texas’ home football schedule.

“You can no longer write off your tickets,” Del Conte said. “[It] used to [be], you gave me $15,000 and you had 10 seats, you could write off 80% of that. That money is what I use to fund the entire athletic program, all of our sports. We built a whole history of scholarship seating. That was to support all of our teams. Well, they took away that deduction. It is now an entertainment spend (for a booster). Well, who you play matters now. That entertainment spend is now I’m paying $15,000 and can no longer write it off ... Well, who are you playing?

“I have one rival game in Dallas. Who am I bringing to DKR? Those are the types of conversions that I lay out to my president and chairman of the board.”

The SEC recently released its 2024 football schedule, including new additions Texas and Oklahoma.

“I got Georgia and Florida at home,” Del Conte said with a sweeping smile and a somewhat maniacal laugh.

College athletics at an inflection point

Troy Dannen was at Tulane when Washington made its decision to join the Big Ten. He views the move as a necessary step for the betterment of the university.

He looks at the latest wave of conference realignment as an inevitability. If Texas and Oklahoma hadn’t left the Big 12, this would have all happened — at some point.

“Something was going to happen that would have been a domino that forced other things to fall behind it,” he said. “We all expect our presidents and boards to make these decisions in our own institution’s interest. You can say that’s part of the problem why college athletics has changed and evolved or devolved in the last decade, but our campuses aren’t looking out, nor are they charged to look out, for the good of the whole of the enterprise. That’s been delegated to commissioners, delegated to executive directors and others.”

Conference realignment is only a spoke in the turning wheel of college athletics.

It’s a byproduct of much more pressing issues within the industry. College athletics is in the midst of its most transformative time. Legal losses in court are forcing the NCAA and the conferences to provide more freedom and compensation to athletes.

The biggest change — athlete employment or revenue sharing — is around the corner. Conference realignment is not only a money grab for the sustainability of school athletic departments. It’s a chase for funds that will likely be required to go to athletes.

Last month, in a stunning reveal, NCAA president Charlie Baker released a proposal that would create a new FBS subdivision requiring schools to directly pay athletes.

“I think President Baker’s proposal, for me, is no more than symbolic of how far we have yet to go in the evolution of college athletics,” Dannen said. “I don’t think where he’s at is anywhere near a means to an end. It’s a path or a stop to the end, but things are going to be a lot different. Whether a full employment model or revenue sharing, the financial and operational model in college athletics is going to be dramatically different in the next two to three years.”

Is conference realignment now over for now? No way, administrators say. Just look to the ACC. Florida State, in a lawsuit filed against the ACC a week ago, is working to exit the conference — a chase for more revenue.

Whatever form of athlete compensation arrives in college athletics, it will be the “cornerstone” for realignment decisions, Dannen said.

“At some point in time, there is no more revenue. At some point, you have to decide how to allocate existing revenues,” he said.

The ACC is a good example of the next issue rising to the surface of college sports: uneven inner-conference revenue distribution.

“You see the ACC changing the model within a conference of how revenues are allocated amongst schools,” Dannen said. “That may portend the next domino of what happens with the conference structure and grouping and organization of schools.”

'Mañana' starts with the Sugar Bowl

Back in the Marriott lobby, the Longhorns’ team hotel, Chris Del Conte is moving through hallways full of Texas fans, that hat of his pulled low.

The magnitude of Monday’s game isn’t lost on him. He took over at the university in 2017 with the goal of turning around the behemoth that is Texas football. Before this season’s run, Texas had one 10-win season in the last 13.

But Monday’s game is more than just about Texas.

As the Longhorns and Huskies collide in the Superdome, be sure to soak it in. It’s the dusk of an era of college sports and it’s the dawn of a new one.

“Mañana,” Del Conte smiled.