A closer look at conference philosophies on broad-based athletics

Michigan beat UCLA in the 2019 Baseball Super Regionals.

On Tuesday, the ACC, Big Ten and Pac-12 announced their “historic” alliance, but didn’t offer a single detail about how this alliance plans to alter the course of history.

There will be a scheduling component for football, men’s and women’s basketball, and maybe some Olympic sports. And the three conferences, with their young commissioners, claim to have similar stances on many topics, including academics and sponsoring broad-based athletic departments.

We’ll get into academics another day, but let’s spend a little time on broad-based athletic departments.

I crunched some numbers and one thing is true: Schools in the Big Ten, Pac-12 and ACC do in fact, on average, sponsor more sports than schools in the SEC.

But there’s more to be learned from the numbers. Here’s a quick overview of each conference, followed by some analysis.

Big Ten

Average: 23.71

High: 33 (Ohio State)

Low: 19 (Northwestern)

Pac-12

Average: 22.50

High: 33 (Stanford)

Low: 17 (Colorado, Oregon State, Washington State)

ACC

Average: 22.10

High: 29 (Boston College)

Low: 17 (Georgia Tech)

SEC

Average: 19.88

High: 22 (Kentucky)

Low: 16 (Vanderbilt)

Big 12

Average: 18.13

High: 21 (TCU)

Low: 16 (Kansas State)

AAC

Average: 17.09

High: 19 (Memphis, USF)

Low: 16 (ECU, Tulane, UCF)

Note: Wichita State, a full member that does not sponsor football, sponsors just 15 sports.

My biggest takeaways from this data

• Texas and Oklahoma fit right in with the rest of the SEC teams when it comes to the number of sports they sponsor. Texas sponsors 20 and Oklahoma sponsors 21. There are nine current SEC teams that also sponsor either 20 or 21 sports.
• What jumps out is that every Big 12 school would fall below the average in the Big Ten, Pac-12 or ACC. Conference realignment conversations are always focused on football, and rightfully so, but it’s worth noting that this may be an additional factor deterring the Big Ten, Pac-12 and ACC from adding any of those schools or including them in their alliance.
• As for where the Big 12 goes from here, most of the popular candidates would fit right in. Boise State, Cincinnati and San Diego State all sponsor 18 sports, the same number that half of the remaining Big 12 teams sponsor. BYU, Memphis and USF are just above at 19, while Houston and SMU are just below at 17. UCF comes up a little short at 16, though that’s the same number as Kansas State.
• There’s an interesting chasm going on within the ACC. There are 5 schools that sponsor at least 25 sports (Boston College, North Carolina, Duke, Notre Dame and Virginia), and there are six schools that sponsor fewer than 20 sports (Clemson, Syracuse, Wake Forest, Pittsburgh, Miami and Georgia Tech). That’s a pretty big disparity that makes you wonder how many of the ACC schools don’t actually share common values with Big Ten and Pac-12.
• The Big Ten and Pac-12 are pretty unified on this topic. In the Big Ten, 13 out of 14 schools sponsor at least 20 sports. In the Pac-12, that number is 9 out of 12.

Ranking teams by overall athletic department success

Stanford won the Director’s Cup an amazing 25 years in a row.

Since we’re talking about the quantity of sports sponsored by each athletic department, it’s also worth looking at the quality of those programs.

Every year, the NACDA Directors’ Cup is awarded to the top overall athletic program. North Carolina won the first cup in 1993–94, then Stanford reeled off an incredible 25 wins in a row. That streak ended this past school year when Texas won.

To get a sense of which athletic programs have been the most successful, I took a look at the Top 10 of the Director’s Cup standings for every school year since the cup began in 1993–94. (No cup was awarded for 2019-20.)

I assigned 10 points for a first-place finish, 9 points for a second-place finish, and so on, down to 1 point for a 10th-place finish. The total number of points for each school is listed in parentheses.

Here is a list of the Top 25 schools.

1. Stanford (268)
2. Florida (182.5)
3. UCLA (173)
4. Michigan (130)
5. North Carolina (126.5)
6. Texas (109)
7. Southern Cal (77.5)
8. Ohio State (71)
9. Penn State (52)
10. Georgia (42)
11. Arizona (36.5)
12. Virginia (36)
13. California (28)
14. Duke (24)
15. Florida State (20)
16. Nebraska (19)
17. Texas A&M (18)
18. Notre Dame (16)
19. Arizona State (14)
20. LSU (9)
21. Tennessee (7)
22. Washington (6)
23. Oklahoma (5)
24. Alabama (4)
25. Minnesota (4)

Just missed the cut: Arkansas (3), Oregon (3), Kentucky (1).