The college football threat to Team USA

Team USA is well on its way to securing its fourth straight gold medal crown at the 2024 Paris Olympic Games on Aug. 11, an honor it has secured every four years since China won at the Beijing Games in 2008.

As impressive as Team USA’s performance was, however, trouble looms on the horizon. And not necessarily from a foreign country.

Since the 1970s, when Olympic officials recognized they needed to develop a pipeline of talent to compete with Eastern Bloc countries that were investing heavily in young athletes, Team USA has turned to the existing NCAA infrastructure to help train and develop future medal winners.

As of this writing, Stanford and Cal have 23 and 14 medals, with more on the way. The Atlantic Coast Conference overall has 58 medals, which, if the ACC were a country, would put it in second behind only Team USA.

Of course, the only reason the ACC is winning the medal count among other conferences is conference realignment. Cal and Stanford are founding members of the Pac-8, which became the Pac-10 in 1978, which became the Pac-12 in 2011, which ceased existing just this year. This is the first Olympics ever that Cal and Stanford are in the ACC.

The death of the Pac-10 and the Big East and the Big Eight before is due entirely to greed and college football television dollars. To maximize revenues, ESPN has pushed the most lucrative college brands to shed their less marketable conference counterparts and form super conferences that have no geographic or historic coherence.

When conferences had some geographic element, the riches produced by college football completely subsidized Olympic sports like swimming, track and field, water polo, and beach volleyball. But now that ESPN and college football athletes are capturing more of that revenue, and now that conferences have no geographic constraints, many schools are being forced to stop funding Olympic sports.

The University of Southern California and the University of California, Los Angeles, have world-class beach volleyball teams that competed in the Pac-12. But it just makes no sense to send a beach volleyball team, or water polo team, from Los Angeles to Piscataway, New Jersey, to play the Rutgers beach volleyball team, especially since Rutgers doesn’t even have one.

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Enter something called the Mountain Pacific Sports Federation. Founded in 1992, the MPSF provides a league structure for Olympic sports like track, gymnastics, and water polo that are being increasingly abandoned by conferences due to college football-driven conference realignment. Even before adding the USC and UCLA beach volleyball programs for the 2024-2025 academic year, the MPSF had already sent more than 100 athletes to the Paris Games.

Maybe the MPSF will be enough to save enough Olympic programs from the chopping block created by college football realignment. Maybe not. But schools across the country are cutting athletic programs, all for greed, and that is a huge loss to millions of college athletes.