Op-Ed: USC and UCLA won ugly when they defected to the Big Ten

What with Russia’s onslaught on Ukraine, the Supreme Court’s onslaught on liberality, the GOP’s onslaught on truth and democracy and the never-ending onslaught of senseless gun violence, last month gave new meaning to the term June gloom. For many of us, sport remains a great escape from all that. A salve. And then on June 30 came the kicker: USC and UCLA would depart the Pac-12 Conference for the Big Ten in 2024.

“That can’t be right, ” I texted a friend and fellow UCLA fan. “No way.”

Then the Times confirmed it. Way.

Just like that, some 100 years of tradition — a word used a lot by both universities — was out the window, essentially destroying the Pac-12 for the other 10 member universities, including UCLA’s big sister, Cal. No more regular, meaningful competition with Stanford, Oregon and Washington, Utah or the Arizona schools. Really?

What in the names of Tommy Trojan and the gutty little Bruins is anyone thinking? Who benefits here?

The powers that be, namely, USC and UCLA’s respective athletic directors, Mike Bohn and Martin Jarmond, claim the move will provide “student athletes” with better start times for football games and thus more national TV exposure.

Sure, West Coast teams have always suffered a bit from what in the east are late start times, but no one ever suggested this was a life-or-death situation, one worth ditching your conference over. Not to mention forcing student athletes to take absurdly long flights to games, meaning more hotel rooms, more time spent away from campus and academics — remember them?

As for the fans, what fans? Trojan and Bruin fans may be scattered everywhere, but the vast majority are in Southern California. Who among them is going to fly to New Jersey for a Rutgers football game, let alone a swim meet or a gymnastics competition? Maybe those few boosters who have private jets, that’s who.

Welcome to yet another episode of “Follow the Money,” this one all about the millions the Big Ten’s TV deal allows it to parcel out among its member schools annually. By one estimate, the deal could be worth $1 billion in 2024, with a per-school take of more than $60 million on average. As opposed to a little more than $30 million offered by the Pac-12 in the last year before the pandemic. That extra $30 million-plus is a lot of “resources,” as Jarmond put it, and UCLA wants you to know that its real motivation was altruistic, keeping “non-revenue” sports on campus. Uh-huh.

And then there’s the power play, on a shrinking playing field. The Southeastern Conference has been running away with college football in recent years, and the Big Ten has pumped a lot of iron to stay level. While they’re trading blows, the ground is shaking and shifting beneath everyone else. Just last year, Texas and Oklahoma bolted from the Big 12 to join the SEC, providing a paradigm for someone at USC.

According to The Times, that someone was apparently none other than Rick Caruso, the shopping-mall-developer-cum-politician who until February happened to be chairman of USC’s board of trustees. That would be the same Caruso who was a lifelong Republican until he decided he wanted to be mayor of Democratic L.A. Evidently, he’s not averse to switching loyalties.

Over on the UCLA sidelines, the Pac-12 defection just looks like abject fear — of letting its crosstown rival move on to bigger things and defaulting on a massive debt piled up by its athletic programs.

The 42-year-old Jarmond, in only his second year at UCLA, has deep roots in the Big Ten, where he was assistant athletic director at Michigan State and Ohio State. For him, the Big Ten is tradition. In a shaky interview with ESPN, he sounded like a man trying to explain why he had traded his childhood sweetheart for a plus-one with a trust fund.

Bohn, meanwhile, was born in the Midwest and grew up Midwest adjacent, in Colorado. He has had more ladder-climbing AD jobs than you can shake a USC drum major’s sword at. At the University of Colorado, he was instrumental in bringing the Buffalos into the Pac-12. Bohn giveth and he taketh away. He’s an empire builder — his own.

Neither AD is a match for the biggest behind-the-scenes players: Fox and ESPN, stealthily manipulating a game of big-money Monopoly. Which raises a few questions: Are we OK with college sports being more or less run by television networks? Is it cool that student athletics are more or less in thrall to corporate behemoths? Is it win at all costs? Is this the standard by which these academic institutions want to be measured?

Lest we forget, where there are winners, there must be losers. Jon Wilner of the San Jose Mercury News, who first reported the conference-switch story, says he thinks it’s the beginning of the end for major college football programs at Cal and Stanford in the Bay Area. “Fox and ESPN will pay for the football programs that generate ratings and are most likely to land in prime TV windows,” Wilner said in a Q and A published in the Mercury News. “Neither Bay Area team clears those bars.”

USC and UCLA do clear those bars, for the win. But they have surely lost something in the mercenary process. Call it character. Some will cheer, certainly; others might call it winning ugly.

What may it all portend? “At some point in the near future,” Wilner added, “college athletes likely will be declared employees, or pseudo-employees, and receive compensation from the schools for their services. There’s no chance Stanford would ever do that, and we doubt Cal would take the plunge. On both campuses, the faculty would revolt like it’s Paris in 1789.”

And what does that tell us about USC and UCLA?

Tom Christie, who graduated from UCLA with a degree in film and television, divides his time between Los Angeles and Berlin.