Conference affiliation hasn’t always been essential in college football. When did conferences really begin to hold the majority of power within the sport?
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With the College Football Playoff National Championship looming on Monday night, the all-SEC final has piqued interest in that conference. Just as it did many times during the BCS era, the SEC is going to walk away once again as the conference of the national champion. And, just like the LSU-Alabama matchup in January 2012, the SEC-on-SEC showdown could also result in a more rapid doubling of the playoff field.
Even casual fans of college football understand the outsized importance of conferences in the sport. Rather than the NCAA, it is these groups of member schools that drive the future of college football. More than any other actor on the scene, conferences can make or break life for individual schools and the sport as a whole.
This was not always the case. Conferences are a long-standing part of college football. They were also optional rather than mandatory for much of the sport’s history. These days, to go independent means a school is either A) undesirable to any other conference, B) Notre Dame, or C) trying to act like Notre Dame.
When did conference affiliation become so critical for the sport. In this week’s SMQ, let’s dive in and look at the history of conferences in college football. First, let’s look at the early history of conference development and then delve into our questions about when conference membership became effectively mandatory within the sport.
The birth of conferences in the late 19th century
Ever since the 1869 intercollegiate battle between Rutgers and Princeton, college football has been an indelible part of campus life that transcends generations. Evolving first in the northeastern part of the country, it spread across the nation relatively rapidly. Within a few decades, many universities in every region of the country were forming teams and arranging games against other local college squads.
As more teams coalesced in certain regions, they began to unite in statewide or regional affiliations. The first attempts at creating leagues rarely register on fans’ radars, as they long ago faded into obsolescence. The first truly transcendent collegiate sports league was the Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Association, which came to life in the 1895 football season.
Five southeastern teams — Alabama, Vanderbilt, Auburn, Georgia, and Sewanee — came together to form the SIAA. The Commodores won the first title in league history with a perfect 3-0-0 record in conference play. The following year, the five-team league grew to 16 members.
Eventually scale became the SIAA’s undoing, as some of its member teams left to form the ACC and others departed to create the SEC. The conference disbanded during World War II, but by the early 1920s it had already faded into a second-tier league for smaller schools. Over the course of its heyday, though, 27 of the current FBS members called it home at some point during the early 20th century.
The rise of the Western Conference
The first conference with real staying power was the Western Conference, which evolved into what we today know as the Big Ten. Its roots stem from the short-lived Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the Northwest. In 1892 and 1893, four Midwestern teams formed the Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the Northwest. Minnesota won the title in both years ahead of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Northwestern.
A few years later, representatives of those four schools along with Purdue, Illinois, and Chicago formed what was officially known as the Intercollegiate Conference of Faculty Representatives. Colloquially it would first come to be known as the Western Conference, and after expansion in 1899 to include Indiana and Iowa it was also the Big Nine.
After World War II, the Western Conference emerged stronger than ever. In 1946, the conference inked a deal with the Rose Bowl to send its conference champion annually to the nation’s oldest bowl game. Then, three years later, the league once again became the Big Ten after the belated addition of Michigan State to replace the University of Chicago. The Spartans joined the league a decade after Chicago disbanded its football program.
Early-adopter status was good for the members of the Big Ten who got into the conference affiliation game ahead of much of the rest of the country. The Western Conference’s example set the stage for more confident departures from independence.
The shifting sands of conference affiliation
While the Big Ten proved stable over time, not every conference enjoyed a solid core group of members. The SIAA, as previously mentioned, suffered from a crisis of scale as it incorporated more and more teams into its fold. Breakaway conferences that featured SIAA members helped cannibalize the oldest interstate conference in the bunch.
Throughout the first decades of the 20th century, college football continued to largely remain a free-for-all of independent programs. Conference affiliation for most schools was fluid and subject to change. Alignment and realignment have long been a tradition in a sport whose most enduring characteristic is change.
The Missouri Valley Intercollegiate Athletic Association, forerunner to the Big Eight, was born in 1907 and brought together the best from the Plains states. The Rocky Mountain Conference was born in 1910 a bit further west. In 1915 the Southwest Conference came online, and a year later the Pacific Coast Conference arrived on the scene.
Over time, some of these conferences would grow and some would stagnate. Members came and went much as they do these days, shifting allegiances and alliances as it best suits each member school. All the while, affiliation became more and more significant as the years wore on deeper and deeper into the 20th century.
Conferences and bowl affiliations
The Big Ten and the Pacific Coast Conference agreed to send their respective conference champions to the Rose Bowl game beginning with the New Year’s Day 1947 edition. Just a decade after it had ceased to be the only major postseason exhibition on the schedule, the Rose Bowl emerged with two like-minded conferences with similar policies on scholarships, amateurism, and educational focus.
In the process, everyone won. The two conferences guaranteed their champions a high-level opponent on the most hallowed bowl stage in the sport. And the Rose Bowl, venerated as it is, benefitted as well by ensuring it would be linked with two prestigious conferences.
This affiliation would become critical a half-century later, when both the Bowl Coalition and Bowl Alliance faltered due to their inability to get the Big Ten, Pac-10, and Rose Bowl to join the attempt to crown a definitive No. 1 team at the end of each season. After two failed attempts, the BCS finally succeeded in drawing the two conferences and the bowl game into the fold.
At that point, conference affiliation was cemented as critical. Join the right conference and potentially have a shot at a national title. Join the wrong conference, and even perfect seasons were left wanting more reward for the effort.
The long and lasting significance of independence
Especially on the east coast, conference affiliation is a relatively recent phenomenon. For the majority of the sport’s history, independence has been both desirable and a legitimate path toward glory. Until the 1990s, teams like Penn State, Miami, Florida State, and Notre Dame won national titles without winning a conference crown.
A landmark 1984 United States Supreme Court ruling, however, would soon prove to be the death knell of independent relevance in the sport. With the NCAA no longer the arbiter of all television deals, teams suddenly needed to negotiate to broadcast their games in an increasingly tuned-in society.
By 1992, when the SEC added Arkansas and South Carolina and expanded to a dozen teams in two divisions, independence was fading into a bygone relic of the sport’s past. Miami had joined the Big East a year earlier, Florida State joined the ACC, and Penn State became the 11th member of the Big Ten.
Now, independence is a black mark for most teams. Only Notre Dame and BYU actively eschew conference affiliation, due mainly to the fact that these parochial schools can court nationwide audiences of the faithful. Teams like Army, Massachusetts, and New Mexico State have far fewer natural advantages to get by as independents in the current system. The last independent national champion, Miami in 1989, won its title nearly three decades ago.
The modern state of affairs in college football
Three decades ago being affiliated with a conference was optional. It is now a prerequisite to success for pretty much every team not named Notre Dame, and even that success has faded in recent decades.
Now, though, it isn’t just about membership within a conference. During the Bowl Championship Series period of the sport’s history, being a member of the right league became a critical factor for success.
Take a team like TCU. Just over two decades ago, they were bounced out of the dissolving Southwest Conference. Unlike fellow SWC members such as Baylor and Texas Tech, they failed to land a coveted spot in the merger with the Big Eight to form the Big 12.
Conference affiliation these days matters greatly.
So the Horned Frogs spent many years bouncing around from league to league. After the collapse of the SWC, TCU landed in a 16-team version of the WAC. When the league’s original members defected to form the Mountain West after 1998, TCU hung around for two more years before leaving to join Conference USA in 2001. By 2005, they had reunited with their former WAC counterparts in the MWC.
TCU made it to two BCS bowls as a member of the Mountain West. But the closest they managed to come to a title game berth was the 2009 season where they finished third in the final BCS standings behind Alabama and Texas. More than a decade and a half after being left out of the group, the Horned Frogs finally joined the Big 12 in 2012.
As a member of the Southwest Conference, TCU was among the powerhouses of the sport. Once that league collapsed, membership in the WAC and C-USA rendered some strong Horned Frogs squads as nothing more than afterthoughts. MWC membership made TCU look a little more impressive, but it was the leap to the Big 12 that really made TCU truly a national contender in up years.
Final thoughts on conferences and independence
These days, conference affiliation is everything. Over the 1990s, a delineation between haves and have-nots coalesced into the automatic qualifying status that was a big part of the BCS’s success and its downfall.
With the death of the Big East, the six power-conference leagues of the BCS era became the Power Five in the College Football Playoff system. That leaves five other FBS conferences languishing outside the playoff, instead considered Group of Five schools for euphemistic purposes.
As TCU as well as Louisville and Utah learned over the past decade and a half, getting into the right league can make all the difference for a program’s long-term outlook. Contemporaneous to the rise of Boise State and other mid-major powerhouses, the Cardinals and Utes joined the Horned Frogs in playing their way into a big-time realignment.
Less than 20 years ago, these three teams were scraping out perfect seasons just to get a token appearance in an undercard bowl. Utah and TCU managed to Bust the BCS as mid-majors. Louisville was never able to crack into the system before joining the Big East.
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A new league can mean a new world of opportunity for a program. Twenty-five years ago, conference affiliation was not nearly as paramount a consideration as they are in the 21st century of the sport. If conference membership wasn’t critical for most programs, we’d still be able to count dozens of independent programs rather than needing only one hand to do so.