WCC Commissioner Stu Jackson Sends Up An Alarm About The Future Of College Basketball

And he’s got a point

On Thursday, the ACC and ESPN reached a contract extension that will run through 2036 and which many think, along with some restructuring, will give Clemson and Florida State an incentive to stay with the conference.

Stu Jackson, now the Commissioner of the WCC, said this in a statement:

“Assessing the numerous changes in college athletics and their effects, it appears the autonomy four conferences are seizing more decision-making power. It’s vital for the basketball-focused leaders, and a broader group of stakes-holding decision makers across college sports to build engaged and properly weighted representation as we look forward for basketball and Olympic sports in the wake of these discussions. The future of college athletics and the opportunities for the larger pool of student-athletes requires a diverse collaboration of representation focused on the greater good. Opportunities should not be commandeered by a few to dilute the fairest benefit to all.”

He then told CBS’s Matt Norlander this: “The Power Four conferences are bulldozing their way through this and there hasn’t been much attention paid to them, at least in my opinion, to the potential impact and effects. Their wants, how they’d affect conferences across the NCAA,”

Everyone knows that college sports is changing. We have NIL and instant transfers now and things are moving towards a more professional model. Football is driving it all but the other sports are affected too, not least of all basketball. And when it comes to basketball, the driving force is the NCAA tournament.

The great charm of the tournament is the carnage, the utter unpredictability. You don’t have to be a huge fan to know what these teams did: Farleigh Dickinson. Princeton. Oral Roberts. Saint Peters. UMBC.

But as the money and power gravitates towards the Power Conferences - what Jackson and others now call the Autonomy Four Conferences - it’s not surprising that they want to skew things their way. That’s not to say that it’s right, but is it inevitable? Probably.

We’ve already seen this in football where the playoffs have gone from four teams to 12. Now there is pressure to get more of the Power Conference teams spots in the tournament.

It’s a major risk, though. The complete randomness of the tournament is its charm. You can’t possibly predict a UMBC or Saint Peter’s or just how far they might go.

The other alternative is to expand the event and that’s being talked about more and more and they should be really cautious about that because the event, as it is now, is just about perfect. There is literally nothing else like it and now it gets not just national attention but international as well.

Reducing or eliminating smaller conferences would reduce the randomness of the tournament, and since that’s the appeal, what’s the point?

Besides, as you have probably noticed, while the first weekend is full of upsets, the later stages are almost always about the reps from the major conferences. You might get one Cinderella, but how often do they even get to the championship game?

Not often.

As an example, the NCAA might want to consider what happened in the state of Indiana in a very different sense.

For years, there was only one high school tournament, but at some point, the powers that be moved to four different divisions and four different tournaments.

And just like that, Indiana gave up something magnificent. Has it been okay? Maybe. Is it better? Almost certainly not.

The big conferences need to be very careful about this. It’s easy to understand the allure but the danger is real: you don’t want to kill the Golden Goose. John Calipari touched on this last spring.

“I hope it stays where it is,” Calipari said while he was still at Kentucky. “You know, I know people get mad. They get mad at the committee. You won’t believe this. I’ve been mad at that committee a few times. But you may be mad because of your seed or where they’ve shipped you to. ... But it doesn’t matter who the committee is. We’re all going to be upset...This is a business trip for me. And I’ll say everybody that’s in this thing, I would say they’d say the same thing — keep it where it is. Don’t mess with something that’s great.”