Don’t alter conference names just yet

This new math they’re pushing in college these days just doesn’t add up.

At last count — and the numbers are always subject to change — the Big 12 Conference will have 10 teams come 2011, while both the Pac-10 and Big Ten will have 12.

Somewhere, a professor of logic helplessly weeps.

“Somebody is going to have to spend some time on [recalculating] these conference names,” chuckled former SEC commissioner Roy Kramer, himself quite an agent of change in his day.

“But at the rate of change, I don’t know if it would be worth it now.”

College athletics has just emerged from a most unsettling period, one ruled by wild conjecture. The membership of major conferences seemed to be thrown into the jet stream, becoming the subject of speculation with no geographic or cultural rationale.

Welcome to “Survivor: NCAA,” where alliances are brittle and ever-shifting.

We, in this part of the country, could look upon all the chaos with haughty detachment. Sure, there were some fantasy scenarios afloat — Texas A&M or Florida State to the SEC? Pitt or Syracuse to the ACC? But in the end, folks in these parts were content to stand pat.

“I always felt, and I still feel, the SEC is the dominant conference in the country,” said Georgia athletics director Damon Evans.

“The ACC came out fine,” said that conference’s former commissioner, Gene Corrigan.

Speaking of a reported $155 million-a-year deal the ACC reached with ESPN in front of all the expansion talk (doubling conference revenue), Corrigan concluded, “There is no reason for those people not to feel good about where they are.”

So, Nebraska moves to the Big Ten. Colorado goes west to the Pac-10, joined there by Utah. Boise State slides into the Mountain West.

All in all, no biggie, right? Not compared to some media reports that foretold of conferences cannibalizing each other, until only a few giant corporate entities remained to rule the world.

Don’t get too comfortable.

“Nothing is more constant,” said Chuck Neinas, “than change.”

Neinas should know about impermanence. Now a consultant, he used to be commissioner of the old Big 8 Conference, which dissolved in 1996.

Evans, the Georgia AD, typifies the college administrator caught up in a competitive frenzy for conference supremacy.

Yes, he was speaking to his conference commissioner, his university president and his peers around the SEC all during the recent upheaval, exploring options. These were serious, time-consuming considerations, he said.

He expressed concerns about the fate of traditional rivalries as those rivals potentially drift off to different conferences: “I think the Oklahoma-Nebraska rivalry might be gone, and I go back to the days of [OU’s coach Barry] Switzer versus [Nebraska’s Tom] Osborne. I didn’t want us to blow up everything,” Evans said.

He fretted over just how much of its soul college football was prepared to sell in the pursuit of the ever larger television package: “I don’t want money to be the sole thing driving this.”

(That sentiment was echoed last week when Georgia State football coach Bill Curry told a radio interviewer, “When greed is the motive, the big get bigger and the small get smaller. I think it hurts college football.”)

But, of course, Evans and all college administrators must, in the spirit of unfettered capitalism, consider all the possibilities of expansion. They are all well aware that the Big Ten, with its own subscription television package, has designs on widening its market. And that the Pac-10 has big ambitions to grow outward in anticipation of building its own subscription network. There is a powerful arms race mentality involved in college athletics these days.

Behind Kramer, the SEC last expanded in 1991 with the addition of South Carolina and Arkansas. The ACC added FSU that year and later tacked on Miami, Virginia Tech and Boston College. Further expansion for either conference is hardly a mandate now.

“Growth is not for everyone,” said Neal Pilson — former head of CBS Sports, now a sports media consultant — zeroing in on the SEC’s standing. “The existing TV deal [$205 million a year] is very lucrative for 12 schools. Yeah, you could go to 16, but where’s the money? I don’t think ESPN or CBS would pay a quarter more for four more teams.”

As the dust temporarily settles, there still is no clear vision for what the college landscape will look like just five years from today.

At one extreme, there is the Super Conference scenario in which the 64 largest programs band together into four conferences, even possibly forming a governing body separate of the NCAA. “I think that’s very real,” said Gary Stokan, the Atlanta Sports Council president. “To a large extent [those big programs] have built the brand of college football.”

Could that then even spawn a football playoff? “With the four champions you could have a nice semifinal and final. You and I could put that together in an hour,” Neinas said.

At the very least, most observers expect periodic reshuffling, occasional sniper attacks on the status quo in which one opportunistic conference picks off a stray from another to strengthen profile and profit margin.

Counting may not be a strong point of remade conferences such as the 12-member Big Ten. But the only numbers that really matter reside on a balance sheet, so, until further notice, the evolution will continue.

Take a knee, catch your breath and prepare for the next reinvention of big-time college sports.

“We are at a resting point right now, but I’m not going to say things are not going to shake up in the future,” Evans said, spinning off into even more possibilities.

“You still have Notre Dame out there. And, if it were to join the Big Ten, that’s a major coup. And it remains to be seen how it will work in the new Big 12 with Texas being the dominant team, getting the lion’s share of the revenue. How well will that sit with everyone over a period of time?

“You can never sit back and say things won’t change.”

The new Pac-10 (actually 12)

South*: Arizona, Arizona State, Colorado, USC, UCLA, Utah.

North*: California, Stanford, Oregon, Oregon State, Washington, Washington State

The new Big 12 (actually 10)