Amid new conference realignment, UConn’s current position still makes the most sense, AD David Benedict says

The landscape of college athletics is once again moving underfoot, as it has been almost without respite for decades.

With those tremors and shifts, there is a new set of questions and speculation about where UConn, with its unique set of strengths and shortcomings, will fit in the future. While there is nothing to indicate a move from its current affiliation with the Big East is on the horizon, the move of Southern California and UCLA to the Big Ten, of Texas and Oklahoma to the SEC create possibility — or hope? — of a slot opening up into which UConn could fit.

“I don’t think this is anything that UConn should get all that excited about, or worried about,” said Andrew Zimbalist, economics professor at Smith College and a leading expert on sports business. “Obviously, they want to look at options, but I think the kind of options they will have will have a marginal impact rather than a major impact. They’re pretty secure, relative to the football schools in the Power 5 other than the SEC and the Big Ten. They all have massive alterations going forward in their financial life. I don’t think UConn is going to be facing anything like that.”

After the breakup of the original Big East in 2013, football-playing schools went one way, into the American Athletic Conference, and basketball-only schools formed their own conference and bought the Big East name. After seven years, UConn, which had been passed over in several power five conference expansions, made the pro-active move of rejoining many of their former rivals in the new Big East, and going independent in football.

In their first season as an independent, UConn went 1-11. The men’s basketball program has made the NCAA Tournament two years in a row, the women’s program has won the conference championship both years, and reached the Final Four.

“Based on the tenor of the conversation within our fan base, I think we’re positioned the best we possibly can be based on our options,” UConn AD David Benedict said. “People feel very good about the return to the Big East and what that’s meant to our programs and our student athletes and the return of rivalry games, and in terms of competitiveness, it’s done nothing but help us. For the majority of our sports, it’s been great. For football, independence is the best opportunity on the table at this point in time.”

Texas and Oklahoma made their moves a year ago. USC and UCLA moved this summer, making the Big Ten a coast-to-coast megaconference. This leaves the Pac 12, Big 12 and ACC in flux. Do leagues merge? Or expand? Or stand pat with fewer teams and, presumably, a reduction of TV revenue as a result?

“One thing is for sure: The Big 12 is open for business,” new commissioner Brett Yormark told reporters at the Big 12′s media day. “We will leave no stone unturned to drive value for the conference.”

At the ACC’s media day this week, commissioner Jim Phillips said “everything is on the table,” including possible expansion.

“In the end, it has to add value to your conference,” Phillips said. “You can define value in different ways. You can define value from an academic standpoint. You can define value about athletic success and competitiveness. Are they an AAU research institution? You can also define it by money.”

UConn is working to trim a $47 million athletics budget deficit. Its agreement with the Big East would call for a $30 million exit fee, but even the least lucrative of power five conferences, the ACC, distributes nearly 10 times what the Big East does to its schools, roughly $4 million.

UConn’s new football coach, Jim Mora, has told recruits of a goal to join the ACC, according to a report by Hearst Connecticut. Last week, Gov. Ned Lamont, in an off-the-cuff response, tweeted UConn was “good enough to join any conference they want, unless other teams are afraid of them.”

None of this should be taken to mean a move is imminent, or even in the works.

“There’s a responsibility for every athletic director to do the best job you can to put your institution in the best position possible,” Benedict said. “The Big East is the best option we have. I think the Big East has been great for UConn and I hope they feel the same way. I hear very few people talk about conference realignment and UConn any more, where previously, prior to joining the Big East, that’s all people talked about.”

Most conference shifts, most particularly the recent ones, are related to football and TV money. USC and UCLA bring high-powered football and the Los Angeles TV market to the Big 10. The ACC, which has a grant-of-rights agreement with ESPN that runs through 2036, is trying to keep its most successful football programs, perhaps by addressing a revenue gap between what they bring into the conference compared to others by distributing money accordingly.

UConn’s football program, which as not had a winning season since 2010, doesn’t offer a conference football chops, at least not yet, and the 30th-ranked Hartford/New Haven TV market, while significant, is not as likely to attract an invitation in and of itself.

“I don’t think there is a football play for [UConn],” Zimbalist said. “The action right now is in football, it isn’t in basketball. And in terms of basketball, UConn could probably succeed in any of the FBS conferences. Basketball money, of course, is much, much less than football money.”

Football money could mean $200 million, depending on the school, where basketball money, Zimbalist said, tends to top out at $30-35 million. UConn brings some unique pieces, such as its high national profile in women’s basketball, a sport in which TV rights money figures to grow in the coming years, and its growing national competitiveness in hockey and baseball, but these things are not likely to move a conference’s needle either.

However, the one constant in the college athletics landscape has been change, and there are likely more changes to come. What if the ACC loses teams and needs to add, or perhaps form a partnership with another conference?

“One of the things that is likely to happen, just like the Pac 12 lost UCLA and USC, some of the top schools in the other power five conferences are going to be knocking on the door of the Big Ten and SEC,” Zimbalist said. “And some of them are probably going to leave the existing conferences. When they do, the diminished conferences are then going to start looking at schools they didn’t look at before, like UConn. ... It kind of depends on what the ACC becomes. If I were UConn and I were contemplating a move to the ACC, I would like to see an ACC commitment to women’s sports, and women’s basketball in particular.”

What if more schools become independent in football, giving UConn a greater range of scheduling partners? If the ACC, Big 12 and Pac 12 have fewer teams, it could mean they look for more out-of-conference football opponents. UConn is playing at Utah State, Michigan and NC State this coming season, and hosts Syracuse and Boston College.

“Coach Mora and his staff has done a great job of selling independence as a value add for a non-power five program,” Benedict said. “We have schedules that you can’t put together if you’re a group-of-five conference.”

When UConn made its move to the Big East, one of the advantages was to be a reduction of travel costs. Long football trips are more palatable for an athletic department because there is only one game a week. In other sports, those that play several times a week, long trips, such as USC or UCLA traveling between Rutgers or Maryland, certainly create a hardship for those student-athletes.

Maybe the money that comes in from the Big Ten or SEC eases such concerns, or maybe at some future date, football breaks away and forms its own conferences.

“The better question for everyone in college athletics,” Benedict said, “is why do we continue to allow football to determine how every other sport competes within a conference and/or geographics. It doesn’t make sense to me that there is not a viable way to separate them. Because football is unique, different in the way it travels than all the other sports.”

The Big East Conference, which does not have a high-profile media day until basketball season approaches in October, has been quiet during the recent round of realignment. Commissioner Val Ackerman has said the conference must be “nimble,” and with an eye on its next TV deal, is open to the idea of expanding. Basketball power programs like Gonzaga, Dayton, VCU have been mentioned as possibilities, but the conference, like UConn, is staying put for now.

The distant future is unclear as always. In the near term, it seems inevitable that the SEC and Big Ten are separating themselves from the rest, at least monetarily. In June, the data analysis firm Navigate reported conference revenue projections for 2022: Big Ten schools are expected to rake in $57.2 million each, SEC school $54.3 million, followed by the Big 12, ($40.6) Pac 12 ($34.4) and ACC ($30.9).

“Their calculation basically is, we add a market, there are so many households in the market, that’s worth so much in television rights,” Zimbalist said. “On the other side, now we have to divide the existing money we have, which might diminish, amongst one more school. They look at those two tradeoffs, and I don’t expect that Connecticut is going to have options that are really attractive.”

Dom Amore can be reached at damore@courant.com