The Big Ten commissioner visits MSU tennis on Feb. 9, 2020 in East Lansing. Photo courtesy of Dale G Young.
—The Big Ten, Atlantic Coast Conference, or ACC, and Pac-12 have announced an agreement between the conferences called The Alliance, which will lead to annual matchups between teams within the conferences in football and men’s and women’s basketball as well as future federal legislation efforts and future decisions within the NCAA.
The Alliance will focus on having marquee non-conference games between the conferences that will increase the strength of schedule for each team in the conference.
The agreement also said that the three conferences will be working together to promote a healthy future for college athletics, looking out for the best interest of student-athletes and universities within the Big Ten, ACC and Pac-12.
“Student-athletes have been and will remain the focal point of the Big Ten, ACC and PAC-12 Conferences,” Big Ten Commissioner Kevin Warren said in the press release. “Today, through this alliance, we furthered our commitment to our student-athletes by prioritizing our academics and athletics value systems. We are creating opportunities for student-athletes to have elite competition and are taking the necessary steps to shape and stabilize the future of college athletics.”
The scheduling of inter-conference games will begin as soon as contractual agreements for each university are met. For example, MSU does not have an open non-conference game for football until 2024 with previously scheduled non-conference opponents in 2022 and 2023.
The announcement of the alliance comes on the heels of conference expansion in the Southeastern Conference, or SEC, as Texas and Oklahoma look to join in the coming years. The SEC and Big 12 were not included in the alliance.
The message from the three commissioners was to promote a healthy future for college athletics as a whole and making sure that decisions were being made with the best interests of student-athletes in mind, rather than using money as a driving factor.
“The historic alliance announced today between the Pac-12, ACC and Big Ten is grounded in a commitment to our student-athletes,” Pac-12 Commissioner George Kliavkoff said in the press release. “We believe that collaborating together we are stronger in our commitment to addressing the broad issues and opportunities facing college athletics.”
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