Three weeks ago, the Atlantic Coast Conference’s University of California at Berkeley Golden Bears football team dealt the Southeastern Conference’s Auburn University Tigers a shocking 21-14 loss in Auburn’s Jordan-Hare Stadium. 

The story is not the long-overdue upset win, but the conference. Obviously, Berkeley is nowhere near the Atlantic Coast, but is nonetheless in the conference, and that’s because they recently left the Pacific 12 Conference. 

The new abundance of situations like this oxymoronic Atlantic Coast Conference is ridiculous and needs to end.

Programs changing athletic conferences is not taboo, in fact it is common – the University of Nebraska at Lincoln and the University of Colorado at Boulder left the Big 12 in 2011 for the Big 10 and Pacific 12, respectively. 

College sports, and football in particular, often change. In 2014, the National Collegiate Athletic Association did away with the 23-year-old bowl championship in favor of the College Football Playoff, which got a $5.4 billion dollar media deal. College football’s large profit margins were the driving force behind all these changes and more.

In December 2020, the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network offered the Southeastern Conference a $3 billion media deal, dwarfing all previous media agreements. Then, in June 2021, the NCAA issued a landmark ruling allowing student-athletes to profit off of their name, image, and likeness. 

In July 2021, Oklahoma University and the University of Texas at Austin announced they would leave the Big 12 for the Southeastern Conference. The Pacific 12 lost 10 teams last year. 

This year, the College Football Playoff expanded from 4 to 12 teams, generating another $7.8 billion in television revenue. Just about everyone involved in college football, and colleges especially, got paid like never before in the span of the last four years.

The problem with all of these changes is that the money is not worth the problems. Each one has progressively made college football less of an American tradition and more of an American industry. That industry generates outlandish earnings for itself and outlandish problems for everything and everyone else. 

Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley, and Southern Methodist University are all members of the Atlantic Coast Conference. New Jersey’s Rutgers University now has to face the University of Southern California and the University of California at Los Angeles in conference athletics. 

This doesn’t mean anything for football players at the University of Virginia, who make tens of thousands of dollars on their likenesses as part of a highly-funded program. A game or two on the West Coast does not inconvenience the football program. 

Conversely, every other athlete and team at that University, making no money in programs with far less funding, are hassled by it. 

The University of Oklahoma won’t lament making a couple extra million dollars every year; that privilege is reserved for the Oklahoma fans who must travel to Mississippi, not Kansas, just to see a game. 

Furthermore, now that players can profit off of their name, image, and likeness, the relationship between schools and student-athletes has become dangerously unclear.

That matter in particular attracted the attention of former Auburn football coach and current United States senator from Alabama Tommy Tuberville. The senate is now considering legislating a code of regulations for the university-affiliated groups of businesses and boosters which pay student-athletes for their name, image, and likeness, officially titled “NIL Collectives.”

This upheaval can be ended. If the Football Bowl Subdivision – the group of the top nine conferences and independent teams – were to separate from the NCAA, the football money would cease affecting other collegiate sports to such an outlandish degree. 

The Football Championship Subdivision – the lower tier of Division I football – along with Divisions II and III could remain with the NCAA. Those making a profit would continue to do so, with an added benefit: they, and all the other low to no-profit sports, could return to their previous structure and conferences. 

This would eliminate the situation where the University of Virginia track team is forced to miss three days of school to compete in Berkeley. With the Bowl Subdivision not thinning its enforcement capacity, the NCAA could focus on ensuring fair play under its umbrella.

As beneficial as this divorce would be for everyone else, it would be far better for high-level football. The FBS would be able to collectively draft new regulations geared exclusively toward football, freeing itself from the red tape that is the NCAA’s selectively-enforced, highly onerous, and sporadically-changing regulations. 

It would be free to settle the football teams into whatever conferences it desires, and to sign variable, incentive-based, or even tiered media contracts, thereby eliminating the high-stakes game of musical chairs that takes place once a decade between the current athletic conferences.

Perhaps most importantly, the relationship between organization, institution, and the individual could be very clearly defined, meaning the fear of imminent congressional action or judicial intervention on the NIL issue instantly dissolves. Pulling this divorce off means extensive contract litigation, but it would have all of the popular support needed.

University of California at Berkeley began playing fellow Atlantic Coast Conference opponents on Sept. 21, making the odyssey from the East Bay to the East Coast: Tallahassee, Raleigh, and Pittsburgh – all more than double the distance than their furthest trek in the Pacific 12 days. That won’t sit well with fans for long, and if it’s divorcing the NCAA or losing the fans, there’s only one right answer.