19 Brands, One Big Ten
Conference expansion: Endorsement model to sub-brands
When Penn State football started Big Ten play in 1993, something felt a little off. Sure, they looked like us, wore plain helmets like us, were the big state school of a big neighboring state with a big stadium who’d won a national championship the decade before. As an Ohio State fan, I should’ve been excited about a local powerhouse coming aboard and raising the bar for the league.
Instead I felt a little sorry for their fans. This wasn’t their fault. For exactly a century they’d been first-class as an independent, racking up bowl wins and sending dozens of the all-time best to the NFL, but even in the early ’80s it was evident to PSU’s enigmatic head-coach-slash-athletic-director Joe Paterno that the future of college football sat in conferences. The thought of a proud program surrendering a pillar of its identity to remain competitive was sacrilege.
The school knew well before it was apparent to us it had little choice. Without a league’s shared negotiating power and revenue, even strong programs back then were a few bad seasons from TV obscurity, hamstringing recruiting, stagnating fan bases, killing momentum. Lacking the singular history and national brand of the other Midwestern indie goliath, Notre Dame, JoePa’s intuition was on the money. After clandestine meetings and botched communications, Penn State joined the Big Ten and everyone came out smelling like Rose Bowls.
It wasn’t long before another Midwestern elite in Nebraska was annexed in 2010. After PSU, we’d learned to accept the unthinkable, but once again it just wasn’t right. To consider their annual clashes with Oklahoma and Texas, so central to the sport’s mythology in the ’60s and ’70s, relegated to VHS tapes and the occasional bowl matchup felt like a bruise we’d cover but never heal. Like their cousins in Happy Valley, Husker fans were left with no viable option but to depart for “stability” in the Big Ten that its university chancellor said “the Big 12 cannot offer.”
A few years later, Maryland and Rutgers—the latter, home to the first-ever college football game—plotted the nation’s first- and eighth-largest media markets onto the conference map. Fast-forward to today, with the arrival of Pac-12 crosstown rivals USC and UCLA plus newly announced border foes U-Dub and Nike U., and just like that, the B1G’s national footprint has gobbled up the USA’s #2, 12, and 22 DMAs.
Now with the country’s top three markets under the original D-1 college athletic association’s umbrella—and all that Hollywood and Big Tech money buried along its newly acquired beaches—we’re about to see TV and NIL dollars flow from LA through Chicago to NYC and back again in swells we might need a decade to fully appreciate.
But what of the Big Ten brand? Not the anachronistic name that draws jokes about the conference’s math skills by holding fast to its 10-team moniker, but the mental story of heartland tradition that counts “integrity, fairness, and competitiveness” as its values? So much to unpack.
The obvious first point of inspection was the new entrants’ effect on conference academics. Call me naive, but I honestly do consider these institutions of higher learning first. Many see pro contract incubators; I see young people and families improved for life as the rule, not the exception. Regardless, with 18 schools under the tent, all but one Big Ten institution are members of the prestigious Association of American Universities, so that was a relief. If the B1G’s gone on a coast-to-coast bender, at least it hasn’t drained its academic soul. All the schools the conference added in the modern era, from Penn State to Washington, would elevate standards at any conference but the Ivy League.
With that box checked, it’s on to brand architecture. Could the relationship between conference and schools—primary and secondary brands—somehow change? We’ve never had an 18-team college league before, so the sheer scale of the new enterprise warrants examination. To start, let’s look at the four most common structures:
NCAA conferences have always represented an endorsement brand model, where the schools and their athletic programs—each older and infinitely more impactful than the league itself—have original, proprietary identities that ladder up to an organization with shared purpose and value props.
This is where the architecture gets interesting. Leagues typically play a support role for members and, except at conference championship time, are happy to take a back seat to the institutions who do all the recruiting, educating, managing, and developing of its intellectual (and physical) capital. The SEC, Big East, and even Mountain West are loud and proud when it comes to co-branding, but they’re still endorsed brand architectures. An athletic league’s sole purpose then is to facilitate the highest winning percentage for its schools with the least exposure to legal, academic, and health risk. If they do their job, all brands and bank accounts benefit wildly.
Contrast that with recent events. With these moves out West, the Big Ten is the first to aggressively spend the brand equity it’s stockpiled after 127 years of winning and innovating. No more messing around. All chips are on the table Bond-style. (That equity will take a short-term loss because of the disruption it’s capitalized upon, but we Americans have sports amnesia that leagues find reliable as Seattle rain. Ask the average hockey fan which teams are in NHL’s Metropolitan Division for evidence.)
Has the Big Ten ushered in a new era of team sub-branding? Think about it this way: what do the in-state rivals of the Universities of Washington and Oregon, Washington State and Oregon State, see and feel as their lifelong frenemies pack up and move overnight to a safer part of town? Did these schools leave the Pac-12 or were they “selected” for a brighter future? Is the B1G logo badge the new Double G of college football haute couture?
When Authentic Brands Group (ABG) acquired Reebok from Adidas for $2.47 billion a few years ago, the only people who cared were the Adidas AG shareholders who took a $1.3 billion bath on the transaction. It happened on the heels of ABG’s purchase of Brooks Brothers and Sports Illustrated. Did anyone you know notice any of those moves? Unless you’re a brand wonk, probably not. It was just business.
But conference and collegiate athletics M&A is not just business. Let’s be real for a moment please. When P&G sold Pringles to Kellogg’s, social media didn’t ignite with fury and sky-is-falling rhetoric as it sure as hell did when Pac-12 crown jewels USC and UCLA signed the dotted line in Chicago two years ago this week. There are only so many conglomerates and a finite supply of quality offerings.
Money changes hands of course, but surely college sports can’t be cold, hard business can it? It’s the best four years of one’s life spiked with an acute sense of location identity. It’s grandparents, parents, kids, and grandkids. A cycle of life where marriages are proposed and ashes spread. The stuff of heirlooms, first words spoken and last rites whispered. Yeah it’s a business, but it’s sacred.
For reasons bordering existential, a college sports brand will never be transactional to its “customers,” no matter how many times we see the revenue numbers. This is why we bellyache but ultimately let conferences get away with their mutant chess. Because they know they can. Companies like P&G and Nestlé own brands just as billionaires own NFL teams, but only a school and its students, alumni, and fans can own Badgers, Golden Gophers, Huskies, or Ducks. A conference then is merely a bubble-wrapped amplifier.
Until it isn’t. The Pac-12 has long been the Big Ten’s strongest and most historic ally. Since the end of WWII, they’ve sent their best teams (modern bowl rotations notwithstanding) to meet in the Rose Bowl, the original bowl game and UCLA’s home field. This is not realignment. It’s consolidation. The Pac-12 was wounded and its old pal pounced, which sucks as a Big Ten fan. I love that league—probably because they were a few thousand miles away from us with decidedly un-Midwestern stadium backdrops, 72° F November kickoffs, and exotic cheerleaders—but the economics couldn’t hold. So the B1G did what it felt it had to do to remain competitive for the long term—what Penn State did 30 years ago, only from a position of power. Oklahoma’s and Texas’ emigration to the SEC in 2021 helped expedite what was going to happen anyway, so here we are.
Sidenote Alert: At the tweed-coat-with-leather-elbows level, school presidents and faculty strangely stand to benefit from stronger athletics performance. To wit, for the two school years following WR Gerard Phelan’s reception of Doug Flutie’s Hail Mary against the Hurricanes in 1984, Boston College fielded 30% more student applications. In what is now known as the “Flutie Effect,” Harvard marketing professor Doug J. Chung’s 2013 study, The Dynamic Advertising Effect of Collegiate Athletics, showed that applications increase by 17.7% when a mediocre team rises to greatness, while schools wishing for a similar outcome without a winning team must either drop tuitions by 3.8% or flat-out hire better faculty. Higher demand means higher tuitions. Turns out losing is both sucky and expensive.
Now then, for the fans, what will it do to Saturday mornings? We grabbin’ EWR-LAX roundtrips for an in-conference game? What’ll happen to the Grandaddy of Them All? Will a Spartan-Trojan mascot-rivalry be a thing? Time will tell, but more than a few fans have already made up their minds.
“Saturday mornings just felt like the Midwest in a way you only understand if you grew up there,” said Corby Winer, a die-hard Michigan State Spartan living in New York City. “Now the league represents both coasts and the two largest metropolitan areas that have nothing to do with Midwest anything. The Big Ten has abandoned all that made it the Big Ten.”
You’re not alone Corby. No one I know of, at any age or NCAAF interest level, is a fan of this stuff. We feel like we’re letting down the generations that came before us and did all the hard work. Then we come along, maxi-monetizing it with a few calls from a golf cart. College football is one of the few genuinely American sports traditions, older than all but baseball, so it feels a lot like we’re mounting a giant unicorn horn to a perfect vintage Mustang. Even for those not on the raw end of the deal, we feel fan-violated.
But it’s not like the B1G invented conference realignment. Schools (endorsed brands) did. In 1971, South Carolina left the ACC after years of “Tobacco Road bias” to go independent until joining the SEC in 1992. Decades on, during the BCS era from 1998 to 2013, a whopping 78 schools switched conferences, three new conferences were born, and three died. Doing something is guaranteed to piss off your fan base in the near term, but doing nothing could be a death sentence. Not being the only kid left standing when the music stops is a powerful motivator.
“Really, (college sports) is much more of kind of the Wild West in terms of get as much revenue in and spend as much as you can,” executive director Tom McMillen of LEAD1, formerly the Division 1A Athletic Directors Association, told USA Today in June. “I mean, the professional leagues have some mechanisms that constrain the enterprise. College sports doesn’t have that. … The mentality is winning and the mentality is do whatever you can, and if you have to incur some bills—you know—kick the can down the road.”
Conference realignments among the top programs may be running out of oxygen. It looks for all the world like we’re heading toward a two-conference system, cut along North and South lines, where formerly endorsed brands are bestowed sub-brand status from on high and absorbed forever into league fabric. The College Football father will emulate the NFL son. Everything else will fade to minor league status.
If that’s the case B1G, can we just get to 20 schools with Notre Dame and Stanford and be done with it?
Thanks,
A loyal customer
Steve Susi works in brand and enjoys the Ohio State Buckeyes football program.
