It's Not You, It's Me. The Cost of Breaking-up in a Time of College Football Conference Expansion

Another example of the excesses of college football comes in the form of the $7.5 million buyout which Syracuse paid to enable themselves to leave the Big East on July 1, 2013.

http://advancedmascotology.com/completed-team-pages/syracuse-orange/

Syracuse does not have a successful football program. The Big East as a whole has consistently been the least successful of the BCS conferences. The same cannot be said when it comes to basketball in the Big East. With Jim Boeheim at the helm for the past 30+ years, Syracuse has fielded one of the premier basketball programs in the country. The fact that they have played in what was widely considered the toughest basketball conference in the land made their consistent success even more impressive.

Nevertheless, if you need any proof of the pecking order that exists in college sports, look no further than the disintegration of the Big East. The changing landscape of college football was enough to motivate two of the founders of the Big East to bolt for a more secure football home in the ACC. Chatter about removing the Big East’s automatic BCS bowl bid has permeated throughout college football circles. The risk of being left out of the big-time college football money weighed more heavily on the collective mind of Pitt and Syracuse than anything they had built in the Big East basketball-wise.



(Granted, with North Carolina and Duke as their ACC welcoming party, there won’t be much if any drop-off in basketball competition for Syracuse in the new-look ACC.)



http://collegesportsinfo.com/2011/10/12/big-east-when-is-
enough-enough-and-how-cusa-can-help/



So, $7.5 million dollars. These buyouts have become so commonplace that they are reported on as a sort of rite of passage with no regard for what that money could have been used for instead of paying off a scorned conference. There is little if no outrage. Sure, it is a contractual requirement that the departing university must pay up. At least there is some sort of law when it comes to expansion. That being said, the departing university could just fulfill the terms of their contract and then depart for free and use that $7.5 million for something worthwhile. Or is $7.5 million just not that much money anymore? I understand that big-time universities like Syracuse receive millions of dollars from various sources and $7.5 million is not going to build a new business school building on campus. Nevertheless, it is still $7.5 million dollars wasted to pay off the Big East so that Syracuse could leave the Big East sinking ship a little early.