The ACC’s announcement on Friday to add Stanford, Cal and SMU as members starting in 2024-25 further consolidates elite athletic programs into four of the five Power Five conferences.
The Pac-“12” is now left with only Washington State and Oregon State as programs committed (for now) beyond next season.
The consolidation continues a pattern that began earlier in the summer when Colorado bolted for the Big 12 and, in two ways, could carry major legal ramifications for college sports.
The first is via antitrust scrutiny.
In NCAA v. Alston (2021), the U.S. Supreme Court held that NCAA members and conferences unlawfully conspired to not pay athletes for academic-related expenses. The opinion, written by Justice Neil Gorsuch, notably cautioned the Court was concerned only with “NCAA and multiconference agreements.” He stressed individual conferences (and their member schools) could agree on rules restricting athlete compensation without running afoul of antitrust law.
The Supreme Court’s reasoning was predicated on the presence of conference competition. Although Gorsuch described the NCAA as exercising “monopoly control,” he reasoned that an individual conference restricting competition is not as worrisome, since there are other conferences. If athletes don’t like one conference, they can join a school in another.
Would the Supreme Court feel as certain about conference competition if the Power Five became the Power Four or the Power Three?
That’s a question that could be...
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