College football is fumbling on climate

Conference realignment is a nightmare for emissions.

Happy Friday! And welcome to Planet Days, a green newsletter for a greenwashed Planet.

If you’re new to Planet Days, on Fridays I occasionally send out a three-minute read on what it means to go green. Previously, I’ve written about topics ranging from recycling bins and lawns to electric vehicles and trains.

This week, I thought I’d combine two of my favorite topics: College football and climate change.

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USC plays Texas at the L.A. Coliseum in 2017. Credit: Adam Reeder/Flickr

Whether you’re a Michigan Wolverine or a Georgia Bulldog, chances are, you’ll have your eyes glued to a TV for three-plus hours tomorrow. That’s because every Saturday, tens of millions of people in the U.S. tune in to watch college football. 

And to cash in on all that viewership, the conferences that make up these teams have lately signed massive TV contracts worth billions of dollars, sending millions of those dollars back to the universities every year.

Seems like a pretty good deal, yeah? Unfortunately, what’s flying under the radar here is the climate impacts of such a trend: 

• As schools race to get in on the action, they’re bidding to get into the conference with the best TV deal — shaking up what used to be regional conferences to play teams all over the country. And that shakeup, known as conference realignment, is leading to thousands of extra miles of travel. 

Take the Big Ten Conference as an example, which has historically comprised 10 Midwestern teams. In recent years, the Conference has added four schools from the East Coast and the Great Plains. With that expansion, the geographic (and carbon) footprint of the Big Ten has also grown: 

• The longest distance between schools used to be 700 miles (University of Minnesota to Ohio State University).

• After the addition of Nebraska, Rutgers, and Maryland in the early 2010s, the longest distance became 1,300 miles (University of Nebraska to Rutgers University).  

But those miles are peanuts compared to what will soon be the new Big Ten: In June, USC and UCLA, two Los Angeles teams, agreed to join the historically Midwestern conference.  

• For those keeping track, the distance between L.A. and Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, is ~2,750 miles. 

A spokesperson from Penn State University, which joined the Big Ten in the 1990s, confirmed to me that all sports teams would be affected by the Big Ten’s Southern California shakeup, multiplying the climate impacts of athletics travel. 

In other words, not only will football teams make the trek to Los Angeles once a year — so will volleyball, swimming, golf, and 25 other sports teams. 

Previously, teams could jump on a bus from Pennsylvania to Ohio; but it’s no longer reasonable when the bus ride is 40 hours long and each student has classes to attend. More planes will be flown, and with it, more emissions released into the atmosphere. 

It’s unclear whether environmental impacts are ever considered in conference realignment. When asked via email about such impacts, the Penn State spokesperson simply said that student welfare was considered. 

The Big Ten Conference never returned my multiple requests for comment.  

Though the Big Ten, with its sunny California additions, is the easiest target for such climate negligence, conference realignment is playing out out all over the country:

• In 2024, Texas and Oklahoma will join the Southeastern Conference (SEC), a conference historically limited to schools from Louisiana to Florida.  

• Next year, Cincinnati, UCF (Central Florida), Houston, and Brigham Young University (Utah) will join the Big 12, a conference historically limited to Plains states (FiveThirtyEight has a great visual on how conference geography has changed in recent years).  

Supporters of conference realignment will naturally point to the progression of the sport: How regional conferences made sense in the age before television or national broadcasts. And in sports, you never want to be the “Get off my lawn” guy, shaking your fist at any notion of “progress.” 

But when change will add up to millions of tons of avoidable carbon emissions to a climate already in trouble, such progress should be condemned for what it is: A nonsensical approach that puts money ahead of the student athletes it serves and the Planet it plays on. 

It’s not just the future of a game at stake here. It’s the future of the Planet. And right now, we’re fumbling our best chance to keep it liveable.