The Challenge of Loyalty in a Disposable World Part I: The PGLACC
When I was growing up, there was only one day each year when every class in every grade at Alderman Elementary School in Wilmington NC was learning the same thing at the same time: the first Friday of March. That was Day One of the ACC Men’s Basketball Tournament. Teachers wheeled in televisions on carts and we all “learned” who would win the 12 noon first game.
The ACC Tournament in the classroom — an essential lesson in loyalty (Illustration from Our State Magazine)
For those of us living in North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia or Maryland and following college basketball, the ACC was “our conference.” And it was apparently important enough to integrate into the grade school curriculum – at least one day a year.
The world of college athletic conferences has been blowing up since 1984, when the Supreme Court first allowed conferences to negotiate TV deals. I’m leaving a lot out, but in 1993, Penn State joined the ten teams of the “Big Ten” (the conference kept the name). Then the Pac 8 became the Pac 10, which became the Pac 12, all of which is now gone, as is the WAC. I don’t know how many teams the Big 12 has now, but I do know it is not the same as the Big Ten.
Got that?
The next big step in realignment came yesterday, when the Atlantic Coast Conference became what you might call the PGLACC, inviting two new teams from the Pacific Coast, Stanford and Cal Berkeley, and one from the Gulf Coast, SMU (I’m stretching a bit here – Dallas is 600 some miles from the Gulf Coast) to join Notre Dame and Louisville (nestled on the coast of Lake St. Mary’s in Indiana and McNeely Lake in Kentucky) and its current string of teams now stretching from Massachusetts to Florida. The move was in part a “Hail Mary” to protect the conference: ESPN can discontinue its deal with the conference if it dips below 15 teams.
“Loyalty,” according to Stanford’s Encyclopedia of Philosophy (note I am embracing scholarship from the ACC’s latest member), “is constituted centrally by perseverance in an association to which a person has become intrinsically committed as a matter of his or her identity.”
There’s a surprising amount of evidence that our “loyalty” is not what it used to be::
· Loyalty to country (a 2021 UVa poll showed 52% of Trump voters “somewhat agree” with a red state secession from the US and 41% of Biden voters could imagine a blue state secession);
· Loyalty to institutions (the majority of us “don’t trust” higher education, the medical system, organized religion, the media, the criminal justice system, the Supreme Court, Congress or the presidency; see my earlier post on institutional trust);
· Loyalty to workplace (the percentage of people quitting their jobs with no other job in hand, which spiked during the pandemic, is now settling in at 15% higher than its historic levels).
Accurate depiction of the current state of conference loyalty (photo by Hans-Peter Gauster from Unsplash)
Beside those fundamental challenges, sports loyalties may seem to pale. I’m not sure that loyalty to the ACC was ever an “intrinsic” part of my “identity,” but I did feel some responsibility as a young’un to do my research to know the players and coaches, to speak the smack talk, and, when one of “our” teams beat a team from another conference, I felt some pride by association. I stuck by the conference year after year, when it was good and when it wasn’t so good.
Now? In loyalty to its “rich tradition,” the coalition will apparently still be called the “Atlantic Coast” Conference (not me: from here on it is the PGLACC). But it’s hard to imagine that I or other fans will ever have the same passionate rooting interest for Boston College vs. SMU, or Virginia Tech vs. Stanford as we do for Duke-Carolina.
It’s even harder to imagine that, after schlepping across three time zones for a fencing or field hockey match, “student athletes” are going to feel a warm glow of loyalty to their “conference.” More likely they’re going to resent the deal. Thanks to this final(?) money grab, they’ll have even less time to attend class and less time to make memories with anyone not directly associated with their teams.
Can anyone other than (PGL)ACC employees justify this? Not me. I’m out.
And even though I am one of the biggest opponents of elected officials trying to micromanage education, I do have one suggestion: since they’re still hanging around in Raleigh, maybe the NC General Assembly can pass a special provision prohibiting TV’s from being on in classrooms the first Friday of next March.
-Leslie
Next time: the changing world of team loyalty: Fantasy Football and the transfer portal
References:
A good attempt to summarize conference realignment: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/09/01/upshot/ncaa-college-realignment.html
Secession preferences: https://nypost.com/2021/10/01/new-survey-shows-us-is-more-divided-on-politics-than-ever-before/
“Quit rate” trends: https://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/econ_focus/2022/q4_feature1