Mick Cronin, the head coach of the UCLA Bruins basketball team, is not a fan of realignment in college athletics.
Cronin has spoken out in the 2024-2025 season about the hassles, frustrations and competitive disadvantages that realignment has created. Particularly how it’s affected UCLA, with travel complications from being based in Los Angeles and traveling to Indiana, Illinois, Nebraska, Minnesota, Maryland and so on. All while those teams in the Midwest can make just one trip to Los Angeles to play SC and UCLA, along with one trip to the Pacific Northwest for Oregon and Washington.
READ: UCLA Coach Goes Off On New Big Ten Travel Schedule
It’s one thing to complain about the travel, and another to complain about the underlying reasons for realignment. And that’s exactly what he did after the Bruins beat Washington on Friday night.
“All I know is we’re at SC Monday, correct? So, we’ve got to get home,” Cronin said during his postgame press conference. “We’re going to get home at two in the morning, three in the morning. We should’ve just had this game at midnight. I mean, when you sell your soul to television, that’s just the way it is. That’s college sports. We’ve sold our soul to television.
“So, we’ll get home in the middle of the night, get some rest, and prepare as best can to play a team that played on Wednesday. Probably took Thursday off and is focused on us while we’re up here. So, there’s a lot of inequities in this thing. I’m sure at some point later in the year, it’ll go our way. I haven’t found that yet, but I’m hoping. You would think law of averages,” Cronin said. “But great win for us.”
UCLA head coach Mick Cronin went off on how realignment in college sports has hurt programs like his with travel and rest. (Kirby Lee-Imagn Images)
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Mick Cronin Is Right About Television Taking Over
He’s right, of course. College sports is now entirely about television, with the in-person experience, realistic conference geography, timing and commercial load now purposefully designed around the convenience and audience of broadcast partners.
Realignment has made the product of college athletics more valuable and desirable as conferences sell their rights. It’s simple; adding the two Los Angeles schools to the Big Ten made the Big Ten more valuable for television. Same with Texas and Oklahoma in the SEC.
The actual outcomes within those conferences are almost entirely irrelevant to the value of the product. Broadcasters don’t care who wins, the inconvenience to fans or teams, or the difficulty of cross-country travel in college. But they do care about having more interesting games for television audiences to watch.
That said, Cronin should know that by now and deal with it. Yes, UCLA and USC are at a disadvantage. All you can do is deal with it, until the inevitable collapse of the entire model into one 60-75 team super conference at some point down the road.
And sure enough, UCLA came back to LA and beat USC on Monday anyway.
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