FORT COLLINS — John Weber is loving CSU’s move to the Pac-12’s neighborhood Wednesday. The idea of the Big 12 Իthe ACC Yeah, not so much.
“It makes no sense to me to make, at this point in time, a decision that no one can ascend or descend,” the Rams athletic director told The Denver Post recently. “That’s irresponsible.”
Our conversation had turned to the Protect College Sports Act, which could soon be up for a vote in the Senate. And, specifically, its impact on “Group of 6” schools such as CSU.
Weber likes a lot of what’s in the bill. Save for Section 205. If the Protect College Sports Act becomes law, it could lock in conference membership at the highest level of college sports as is. The musical chairs at the top of the NCAA food chain would come to a screeching halt.
Section 205 of the Protect College Sports Act, as written, prohibits collegiate conferences that generate at least $700 million in revenue from merging with one another or adding new members.
The Big 12, ACC, SEC and Big Ten are all expected to meet or exceed that benchmark in the ’25-26 fiscal year.
“If you look at the attributes of (our) university as a whole — 34,000 students, 277,000-plus alumni, strong academics, , great college town, great facilities, all that stuff,” Weber stressed. “We look just like a Big 12 school. That’s exactly (a) Big 12 school, right?”
If not, it’s pretty darned close.
“Now we have to consistently deliver better on the athletics leg of that stool,” Weber said. “But it’s certainly something that we want to make sure we keep in our sights. And we continue to work toward the opportunity (that’s) there for CSU to ascend.”
Weber’s not trying to stick the Rammies’ cart before any horses, just to be clear. He’s just learned, post-COVID-19 pandemic, that universities would be nuts to burn any bridge with a bigger payout on the other side of the gorge.
CSU isn’t exactly walking gingerly into its Pac-12 phase on Wednesday, either. Jim Mora, plucked from a successful run at UConn, is now the highest-paid coach in the newly reconfigured conference ($2.4 million), with higher expectations to match. Canvas Stadium is getting a new rug for the first time in about seven years. Moby Arena has a new court coming. Last month, during the university’s annual “Day of Giving,” athletics raised $1.5 million in donations over 24 hours. Weber said his first “Giving” two years ago brought in $67,000.
“There have been some things that maybe somewhat quietly, maybe some not somewhat quietly, (that) are, I think, pointing towards some real momentum,” Weber said.
Including, he added, his new league.
“The huge thing that’s going to help us going into the Pac 12 (is that) every single one of our games is on linear (platforms),” the CSU administrator said. “That’s massive … the opportunity for us to compete and have people watch us, that’s where the value comes … eyeballs matter.”
Rivalries matter, too, even with television networks pulling the strings for college sports behind the scenes and chucking geography out a sixth-story window. Weber made a point of preserving the Wyoming series as a non-conference enterprise, but Air Force looks to be in the rearview mirror. And we’re still three years away (2029) from a renewal of the Rocky Mountain Showdown with CU.
“I know (Buffs athletic director) Fernando (Lovo), actually, from (his time at) New Mexico,” Weber said of the new CU boss. “We have not had a conversation around the future of the Showdown … we’ve talked about other things, we haven’t talked about that yet … It’s not a, ‘No’, it’s not a, ‘I’m not interested.’ Literally, we just haven’t talked about it yet.”
In the meantime, he’s hoping the conversations in Washington continue about Section 205 of the Protect College Sports Act.
“(We’re) serious about the work that we’re doing. We’re serious about our move to the Pac 12. We’re serious about the future of the Pac 12,” Weber said. “(But) if you lock in membership there — that is, I think, problematic for a whole lot of people. There are members in those conferences that are not there by intent.”
Realignment since 2021 has made for strange bedfellows all over the map — the four former Pac-12 powers snatched up by the Big Ten; Stanford and Cal, bastions of the Bay, in the Atlantic Coast Conference.
Yet the new Pac-12 is a particularly curious marriage of oddball brethren.
The football membership, in particular, is rooted in provincial programs that were snubbed by the Big Ten, Big 12 or ACC (Washington State and Oregon State) during their latest acquisition phase, or “big” mid-majors (Boise State, Fresno State, CSU) that never quite made the cut to join the big boys, despite repeated pitches.
“That sort of an approach (in Section 205) has the possibility of harming what really is our core mission of higher education,” Weber continued. “It’s groundbreaking research, and it’s educating our youth. And if we look at it through that lens, if you are consolidating athletic, and therefore marketing, power within a relative few, it’s not unreasonable to think that you could be challenging the educational research missions of a whole lot of schools, right?”
Although 205 at present feels more specifically targeted at the largest football brands in the ACC (Clemson, Miami, North Carolina), several of which have been, or will be, on the radar as potential SEC or Big Ten additions. Let’s put it this way: If the Buffs got an offer to join the Big Ten next week, you couldn’t get them to Columbus or Ann Arbor quick enough.
In the meantime, the so-called lesser schools in the Big Ten and SEC — think Minnesota, Ole Miss, Purdue, Vandy, Northwestern, etc. — see the Protect College Sports Act as a means to keep their powerful leagues intact. Sources told Ross Dellenger of Yahoo Sports recently that those conferences want provisions in the act that prevent an outside entity or broadcaster from cherry-picking the most-watched college football brands to form a national Super League or College Premier League. (An arrangement that might be beneficial for, say, CU and North Carolina, who hired “viral” coaches in Deion Sanders and Bill Belichick, in part, to enhance their television appeal.)
“Our opportunity to compete at the (FBS) level enables our ability to attract more people to CSU,” Weber noted. “‘People’ includes students, it includes faculty, includes a lot of people that make this enterprise go. And (the Protect College Sports Act) is going to be incredibly important to not just CSU, but a whole bunch of schools that would be in that bucket.”
