Who's Losing Sleep Over Conference Realignment?

The Latest Craze in College Sports From A Biocultural Perspective

For universities and broadcasting networks, college football is big business, with football being the “revenue sport” at large universities and most decisions for athletic conferences and conference realignment being made with football in mind. I would define conference realignment as the movement of universities to and from NCAA Division I conferences, most often those who participate in the Football Bowl Subdivision. As the sport evolves at break-neck speeds and athletic conferences add new members, geographic proximity is less important than potential media revenue. Universities, afraid to be left in the dust in the wake of multi-billion dollar television deals, search for greener pastures in conferences that promise national recognition and a share of the spotlight. When corporations dictate the landscape of higher education, what could go wrong? Historically, conferences have been made up of institutions from the same geographic region to make traveling easier on student athletes and to encourage regional rivalries, but in the frenzied age of TV-motivated conference realignment, nothing is sacred. Universities claim that the revenue sharing from conference media deals will allow athletic departments to flourish with new facilities and opportunities for athletes, but how often they would get to use these facilities with increased travel demands remains to be seen.

On September 1, 2023, in an oxymoronic move, members of the Atlantic Coast Conference voted to add California and Stanford, formerly of the Pacific-12 Conference, and Southern Methodist University, from the American Conference, hoping to expand their media footprint. While the addition of two Pacific universities to a conference named after the Atlantic Ocean was mocked on social media, ACC commissioner Jim Phillips gushed that it was “a transformational day for the ACC”^[1]. I am sure that it was also a transformational day for his wallet. This is one of the most transparent examples of an economic decision framed as what was best for student athletes, as the AP notes that the merger will “[provide] the ACC a windfall of revenue for its current members” (new members receive smaller shares of media revenue)^[2]. When Cal, Stanford, and SMU joined the ACC, the conference became the latest elite conference to move to a “super conference” model.

Conference realignment is not the only highly criticized cultural shift in the landscape of college sports. The introduction of name, image, and likeness (NIL) deals, allowing athletes to profit off of the use of their personal “brand”, was touted by critics as the way that amateur athletics would die. NIL detractors claimed that paying athletes would “disillusion a public in love with ‘amateurism,’ poison team chemistry, tank smaller schools and leave obscure athletes and minor sports unfunded while a handful of NFL-bound stars in power conferences commandeered megadeals”^[3]. The implication is that universities and their donor bases would find ways to incentivize top athletes to play for their institution, not unlike the NFL and other professional organizations. These criticisms are not invalid; paying for play outright is banned by the NCAA, but sketchy practices and athlete poaching by elite universities are genuine concerns for “mid-major” conferences with smaller athletic budgets. Athletes receiving compensation is the result of landmark Supreme Court case NCAA v. Alston, in which the governing body of the majority of America’s collegiate athletic departments was required to make changes to their limitation on athlete pay. While the NCAA claimed that not paying athletes upheld the spirit of amateur sports, civil rights author Taylor Branch refers to the NCAA’s claims as “legalistic confections propagated by the universities so they can exploit the skills and fame of young athletes”^[4].

With transfer students no longer having to sacrifice playing time in order to change universities, big time NIL offers from campus donor collectives have left a bad taste in the mouths of fans and coaches whose star players have left for better pay. Former App State running back and current NFL player Darrynton Evans referred to this dynamic in a tongue-in-cheek tweet that read “College Football Free Agency is crazyyy! I mean the Transfer Portal 🤣”^[5]. The portal and NIL have created a bit of a carousel of talented athletes transferring between universities not entirely unlike the way that NFL teams trade for players. This is true for larger universities with well-endowed NIL funds, but I work with a small business to create NIL merchandise for student athletes, and we partner with athletes for their influence, not for their athletic performance. Often, these partnerships come with kitschy gimmicks, using clever wordplay on athletes’ names to sell products. This compensation offsets the costs of living outside of the scholarships given by the university, helping to lessen the chances of exploitation as mentioned by Branch.  While NIL has the potential to be lucrative, college athletes are suffering, not from the pains of new money burning a hole in their pockets, but from juggling university coursework with the increasing travel demands of post-realignment conference play. No amount of player compensation can make up for lost sleep and time, and it is important to note that players of any sport do not receive a share of the media revenue checks from their conferences.

As college teams face uncertain futures and daunting away schedules, conference realignment’s potential to disrupt athletes’ physical and mental well being and the rich culture surrounding college sports is concerning. As a biocultural anthropology student, I want to take a two-pronged approach to the subject by examining how increased travel demands from the cultural change of conference realignment impact athlete sleep health and performance and how conference realignment and the move away from regional conferences threatens a thriving culture of sports fandom and rivalry that enriches the industry as a whole. Sports teams and their fans exist in the collegiate ecosystem as organisms with a mutually beneficial relationship, and the health of each is threatened by realignment: for athletes, the physical, and for fans, the cultural. From my perspective as one of the student section leaders at Appalachian State and someone who has helped to grow and cultivate our sports culture, both student athletes and fans deserve to be members of a conference that has their best interests in mind.

Play Clocks and Biological Clocks

Frequent cross-country travel puts strain on an athlete’s academic performance, social life, and emotional wellbeing, as well as putting them at risk for sleep disturbances and their negative impact on the body. Athletic directors proposing superconference style realignment fail to deeply consider how detrimental sleep loss is to the still-developing bodies and minds of student athletes, most of which are experiencing late adolescence or entering the final stages of brain development. The human body runs like a clock on 24 hour cycles of wakefulness and sleepiness, giving the body a chance to rest, repair, and perform essential functions. These cycles are called circadian rhythms, and help to sync the body’s programming with the natural day/night cycle. Our genome helps to regulate our circadian rhythms, and the human body clock is not your grandfather’s clock. Instead of running off of gears, weights, and pendulums, circadian rhythms are controlled by clock genes coding for clock proteins. The levels of proteins rise and fall in relation to light stimuli, signaling for the body to wake up or fall asleep^[6]. These cycles control when the body performs certain functions to maintain itself, and disturbing the delicate sleep/wake cycle has a widespread impact on the body. The effects of performance on the young athlete make sleep an important part of post-game recovery and as important to injury prevention as a proper workout routine.

The two issues most often associated with travel are travel fatigue and jet lag. Travel fatigue is experienced by all athletes and their staff regardless of the length of travel or the crossing of time zones and is caused by the physical demands of travel. Athletes might experience acute fatigue and exhaustion after an individual trip that is particularly long, such as for non-conference travel by a team in a regional conference; fatigue may become chronic if an athlete is traveling long distances repeatedly over a season.^[7] Travel fatigue and jet lag share symptoms including “daytime fatigue, decreased concentration and alertness, sleep disruption, and gastrointestinal disturbances”^[8], all of which can lead to an increase in the risk of illness and injury and have the potential to negatively impact an athlete’s performance. Where jet lag differs is its intensity, episodic nature, and its cause: the rapid crossing of 3 or more time zones; traveling across multiple time zones quicker than the body can adapt results in our internal clocks and sleep/wake cycles becoming desynchronized with the new local time.^[9] Both of these conditions affect athletic performance and the sleep health of athletes and staff, and disturbed sleep affects much more than the irresistible desire to yawn.

Sleep as Risk Prevention

Have you ever woken up, devastated, to an ESPN notification that a player, critical to your favorite team’s success, was benched due to injury? Perhaps you’re a coach, faced with changing your play strategy because one of your key players is in recovery. You might be an athlete who just received word from your medical team that what looked like a brief tumble could end your season, if not your career. When considering what could have prevented this from happening, an athlete’s sleep quality should not be left out of the equation. A good night’s sleep can therefore be considered a form of risk management against serious injury.

Sleep deprivation is associated with increased risk of musculoskeletal injuries, impaired bone remodeling, and bone loss. The activity of bone remodeling and repair, performed by bone cell, peaks overnight as the body rests^[10].  If these processes increase during periods of sleep, it makes sense that disturbing the sleep pattern of a student athlete decreases the amount of time their body spends repairing and remodeling their bone structure. Sleep loss and low sleep quality both affect the chances of musculoskeletal injury. Sleep disturbances may also affect how our bodies synthesize proteins and secrete crucial hormones, leading to impairment of the body’s skeletal muscle integrity^[11]. Recovery is supported by processes in the body that promote cellular regeneration, and lack of sleep means our body will take longer to recover. Without adequate recovery, athletes are at risk of overtraining, seen in athletes when they “become progressively fatigued and fail to recover from intensive training sessions, and they may suffer from minor infections and chronic or acute sleep loss is directly correlated to athletic injuries, indicating the role of sleep in the regeneration of damaged muscle tissue”^[12].

 In addition to increasing the risks of injury, lost and unrestful sleep impairs our brain’s ability to make decisions, think critically, and regulate our emotional responses. An athlete may be sleeping the recommended amount but failing to enter periods of quality, restorative sleep, causing them to experience similar levels of daytime fatigue and impaired judgment as an athlete who slept below the recommended duration^[13]. The part of the brain responsible for triggering emotional responses, the amygdala, is kept in check by our prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain located between our eyebrows^[14]. The more tired we are, the less the prefrontal cortex is able to regulate our emotions, leading to emotional outbursts and poor judgment^[15]. Memory is inhibited, making plays you’ve run a million times just out of the mind’s reach. Reaction times slow down, putting you at a disadvantage against the quick timing of a well-rested opponent. Lack of sleep and stressful stimuli feed into each other, with “factors such as stress, travel for matches, nervousness prior to competition, and sleeping in unfamiliar environments significantly [curbing] sleep duration and quality”^[16]. This creates a perfect storm of opportunity for conflict within the team, decreased performance, and poor mental health.

How common are disrupted sleep patterns in the student athlete population? According to the NCAA’s sleep study, in-season student athletes report sleeping an average of 6.27 hours a night compared to the recommended 8 hours, and 61% of student athletes say that they’ve experienced daytime fatigue for three or more days in the past week^[17]. These numbers reflect a population of people whose sleep is overwhelmingly affected by unique lifestyle stressors, and 77% of athletes feel that they get less sleep than their non-athlete peers. As travel demands increase, these sleep problems will only get worse. Appalachian State is, fortunately, a member of a regional athletic conference called the Sun Belt, whose stated mission to prioritize sleep health for World Mental Health Day is as follows:

The Sun Belt Conference is joining forces with a team of esteemed sleep specialists throughout the 2023-24 academic year via Sun Belt Sleep to Rise, an initiative that aims to educate student-athletes, coaches, and administrators on the crucial role sleep plays in both physical and mental health…

Sleep impacts every aspect of the student-athlete experience. Not only does sleep affect the physical wellbeing of student-athletes - including injury prevention, recovery, and immune response - but it is also the best predictor of student-athlete mental health.

In recent years, conference realignment has impacted NCAA Division I. With these changes comes increased travel for student-athletes, which, compounded by competing priorities, will undoubtedly negatively impact their mental health, academic and sports performance.

The Sun Belt Conference recognizes the imperative role sleep plays in the student-athlete mental health equation. With 14 member institutions in 10 contiguous states, the Sun Belt is committed to its identity as a regional conference with a divisional model. This places the Sun Belt Conference in a unique position that prioritizes student-athlete wellbeing. The Sun Belt has already taken measures to ease travel distress for student-athletes by adjusting schedules to accommodate for cross-divisional road trips^[18].

Reducing the amount of time that athletes travel isn’t always feasible, and individual teams should work sleep health into their wellness plans. I think that given the circumstances, the Sun Belt provides a unique case study of a conference that stands in direct opposition to the idea of elite superconferences spanning the continent. The regional conference model reduces overall time spent traveling, lowering the load on an athlete’s sleep/wake cycle, and keeps games close to home, helping to protect another facet of college sports threatened by conference realignment: the culture.

A Fan Approach to Conference Realignment

From the perspective of a fan and an anthropologist, conference realignment is troubling. One might even say that I am losing sleep over it. College athletics and their associated fan bases have a rich culture informed by their surrounding regions and shared love of the game; often, historic rivalries and games against geographically relevant teams contribute to the creation of distinct cultural identities with their own unique material cultures and symbolism. Think university fight songs name-dropping bitter rivals, signs desecrating rivals’ cherished symbols, and activities meant to strengthen fans’ sense of community by mocking their rivals as a group. Lighthearted banter on social media between fans of opposing teams leads to beers and a handshake after a hard-fought game. You’re more likely to work with people whose alma maters compete in your athletic conference, so a game between regional rivals is also a must-win for water cooler bragging rights.

Once the humor and novelty of the “Big Ten West”, another superconference created by UCLA, Washington, Oregon, and USC moving to the Big Ten Conference, or the Pacific branch of the Atlantic Coast Conference wears off, will viewers be left with a general sense of apathy and feelings of emptiness? A humorous poll by Washington Huskies fan site “UW Dawg Pound” shows that 41% of participants felt “sadness” when UW and Oregon announced their move to the Big Ten^[19]. On conference realignment in general, 72% of Huskies shared the sentiment that it is “a plague upon this earth brought about to make media executives richer at the expense of everything we love about college sports”^[20]. If the circumstances were different, it seems, fans would prefer adding strong programs from surrounding states, promoting regional competition and tourism, rather than searching for greener pastures thousands of miles away in the American Midwest. The American West gets wilder as conferences are remade in media conglomerates’ image, and with this uncertainty comes fears that great rivalries and regional culture will fall to the wayside.

        An apathetic fan culture is not the only problem facing the delicate ecosystem of college sports, although it is an issue that I feel particularly close to. Football games are typically a once-weekly event, meaning that teams can get to and from away games within a weekend, but revenue-generating sports are not the only members of an athletic conference. Those who will feel the brunt of the impact are athletes who play basketball, baseball, softball, or any of the other Olympic sports that have games or matches multiple times a week. The Pacific-12 conference is effectively dead, as all but two of its former members have left for other conferences. Morgan Scott, of the University of Oregon’s softball team, a former PAC-12 member, lamented on Twitter, “Anyone going to talk about all the other sports that play multiple games in a weekend? What happened to [the] mental health of student athletes being important? The balance of practice, travel, school, and having a social life is already hard enough. Why add even more stress?”^[21] Adding the pains of travel to an already booked-and-busy weekend is a recipe for long-lasting exhaustion and fatigue. Sports are also a family affair, and it means a lot for athletes to have their family in the stands watching them play, whether at home or from the visiting section. Another Oregon softball player, Paige Sinicki, tweeted “I picked to play in a high level softball conference where being close to home would allow my parents to come watch my games. It’s unfortunate to hear that my senior year I’ll be playing as far as New Jersey-Rutgers as well as other east coast schools.”^[22] Amidst a sea of opposing colors and unfamiliar faces, being able to know that your parents are there provides an immeasurable difference.

Bringing it closer to home

        This paper has spent a lot of time going over biological data, statistics, and the numbers involved with conference realignment. As an anthropologist, I am often given the herculean task of quantifying the unquantifiable, of explaining the basic building blocks of culture and how we exist within systems. How biology informs culture and how culture shapes our biology. Conference realignment will have a measurable impact on athlete physiology as they sacrifice sleep for travel in the name of the game, and its potential cultural effects are only just beginning. I think that it is important for me to end my argument by illustrating what teams are missing out on by dismantling the regional model in favor of traveling cross-country for a larger paycheck.

DECEMBER 3, 2023 — The countdown has started for the biggest basketball game to come to the Holmes Center in decades, and this game is all anyone could talk about for weeks. Tickets were a hot commodity, and seating in the student section was first-come-first-serve, with one exception. Sixteen seats were taped off in anticipation of the student section leaders (myself included) and members of the Student Yosef Club executive board (to which I am adjacent) who wanted to show up unreasonably early to claim a spot. On a typical game day, we take the stairs down to the front row two at a time, an hour and a half before the game even starts, and shuffle into our unassigned-assigned seats. Mine is number 5. We settle in and greet fellow student section regulars with enthusiasm before scoping out the competition, making mental notes of the team dynamic and any idiosyncrasies that might be useful for heckling. It’s a biweekly debrief, bitching and moaning about classes and work and reminiscing about the ridiculous antics of previous games.

This is not a typical game day. Regardless of the game’s importance, the energy of the student section is decidedly different. The air is taut with the kind of tension that typically precedes a blow-out family fight at a truck stop on the way to Disney World. You can tell that nobody has slept from the way that we’re pettily fighting with one another about everything and nothing. Feelings are sore after the football team’s championship loss to Troy. I’m fighting off a head cold. We’re arguing and bickering like never before, and it would be easy for us to tear down the family we’ve built over three years with a simple word and some spilled popcorn. We grumble and get to our hard-fought seats as the lights dim and the national anthem performance begins, and I start to get the feeling that I’ve been trying to push down at every game, football or basketball, this year.

You see, I’ve been painfully aware that each game brings me closer to graduation, and every time I leave the Holmes Center, where I’ve sat and caused chaos with my friends at almost every home basketball game for three years, it feels like saying goodbye to an old friend. The student section has become a third space for us where we can cool off after a long week and just have fun. This feeling of community extends outside of Holmes or Kidd Brewer to online, where we post memes and jokes about the state of the football team or the quirks of living in Boone. We interact with fans from other Sun Belt schools, jokingly antagonizing each other with regional stereotypes and rivalries that have fancy names like “Deeper than Hate”. The best part about being in a regional conference like the Sun Belt is that there is always a possibility that you will encounter one of these people at a game or will work with somebody whose alma mater is a member of the conference. Each school takes on a character kind of like the area it is surrounded by, whether it be not-quite-Myrtle-Beach in the case of Coastal Carolina or located off of a beautiful drainage ditch like Georgia Southern. We make fun of each other in a way that’s mostly lighthearted, and it’s been heartening to see that fans of rival institutions have our backs when fans of newcomers like JMU take jabs about our university too far. We develop bizarre friendships with our rivals’ mascots.

There’s a feeling of family that extends from the student section to alumni to our teams and staff to fans of other Sun Belt teams. Personal rivalries between fans and players who see each other annually make any Sun Belt game an event (if I had known that our personal rival from Georgia State was transferring, I would have given him more of a show). I fear fan apathy befalling teams who play far outside their region because I have seen firsthand how impactful a quality crowd can be. The Auburn game stood for something so much bigger than I could grasp when I was in the stands. My friends and I, who have become something of student section leaders, would be at men’s basketball games where we were the only students there, and former players have spoken about how disheartening it is to show up and play every week with little to no audience. We went from a group of kids antagonizing the other team to developing friendships with the players, the coaches, and the security staff. From our little band of idiots, somehow the student section has evolved into the Mountaineer Menace, announced with streamers and pyrotechnics before the Auburn game. In photographs from games, you can see our little faces screaming and hollering, but as time passes the crowd grows far beyond that. The team has evolved too, breaking records, moving up in rankings, and even beating that little old SEC team we played on December 3rd.

Conference realignment has the potential to slash crowd attendance. When I think about that, I think about opposing teams’ coaches complimenting our crowd and its energy. I think about players’ moms thanking us for being so supportive of the team. I think about Coach Kerns saying that he wanted us to experience storming the court. That they couldn’t have done it without a crowd like this, that these players deserved it every single game. I think about people I had never met in person before running up to me and hugging me as we stormed the court. I think about our little chosen family, whether you want to call it Student Yosef Club or the Band of Bibbed Boonies, or the Mountaineer Menace.

---

Works Cited

AP News. “ACC Becomes Latest Super Conference, Expanding Cross-Country by Adding Stanford, Cal and SMU,” September 1, 2023. https://apnews.com/article/acc-conference-realignment-expansion-stanford-cal-smu-95e7d6f990dd35a638f9bef72fe96ee7.

Central Queensland University, Appleton Institute for Behavioural Science, Adelaide, SA, Australia, Michele Lastella, Zozan Onay, Central Queensland University, School of Health, Medical and Applied Sciences, Brisbane, QLD, Australia, Aaron T. Scanlan, Central Queensland University, Human Exercise and Training Laboratory, Rockhampton, QLD, Australia, Nathan Elsworthy, et al. “Wakeup Call: Reviewing the Effects of Sleep on Decision-Making in Athletes and Implications for Sports Officials.” Montenegrin Journal of Sports Science and Medicine 9, no. 2 (September 1, 2020): 65–71. https://doi.org/10.26773/mjssm.200907.

Darrynton Evans [@ItzLiveee]. “College Football Free Agency Is Crazyyy! I Mean the Transfer Portal 🤣.” Tweet. Twitter, December 4, 2023. https://twitter.com/ItzLiveee/status/1731792862809817407.

Janse van Rensburg, Dina C., Audrey Jansen van Rensburg, Peter M. Fowler, Amy M. Bender, David Stevens, Kieran O. Sullivan, Hugh H. K. Fullagar, et al. “Managing Travel Fatigue and Jet Lag in Athletes: A Review and Consensus Statement.” Sports Medicine (Auckland, N.z.) 51, no. 10 (2021): 2029–50. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40279-021-01502-0.

Jenkins, Sally. “Perspective | Those NCAA Doomsday Scenarios about NIL? Instead, It’s Proven to Be a Cleanser.” Washington Post, September 3, 2021. https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2021/09/03/college-athletics-nil-ncaa-endorsements/.

Morgan :) [@Morgan_Scotty11]. “Anyone Going to Talk about All the Other Sports That Play Multiple Games in a Weekend? What Happened to Mental Health of Student Athletes Being Important? The Balance of Practice, Travel, School, and Having a Social Life Is Already Hard Enough. Why Add Even More Stress?” Tweet. Twitter, August 4, 2023. https://twitter.com/Morgan_Scotty11/status/1687611701976289280.

Paige Sinicki [@paige_sinicki]. “I Picked to Play in a High Level Softball Conference Where Being Close to Home Would Allow My Parents to Come Watch My Games. It’s Unfortunate to Hear That My Senior Year I’ll Be Playing as Far as New Jersey-Rutgers as Well as Other East Coast Schools.” Tweet. Twitter, August 4, 2023. https://twitter.com/paige_sinicki/status/1687603515760488454.

Simon, Eti Ben. “Why Just One Sleepless Night Makes People Emotionally Fragile.” Scientific American, November 1, 2023. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-just-one-sleepless-night-makes-people-emotionally-fragile/.

Sousa Nogueira Freitas, Luísa de, Flavia Rodrigues da Silva, Henrique de Araújo Andrade, Renato Carvalho Guerreiro, Fernanda Viegas Paulo, Marco Túlio de Mello, and Andressa Silva. “Sleep Debt Induces Skeletal Muscle Injuries in Athletes: A Promising Hypothesis.” Medical Hypotheses 142 (September 1, 2020): 109836. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mehy.2020.109836.

“Sun Belt Conference Celebrates World Mental Health Day with Launch of Sleep to Rise Campaign,” October 10, 2023. https://sunbeltsports.org/news/2023/10/6/general-sun-belt-conference-celebrates-world-mental-health-day-with-launch-of-sleep-to-rise-campaign.aspx.

Swanson, Christine M., Wendy M. Kohrt, Orfeu M. Buxton, Carol A. Everson, Kenneth P. Wright, Eric S. Orwoll, and Steven A. Shea. “The Importance of the Circadian System & Sleep for Bone Health.” Metabolism, Interactions of Sleep and Metabolism: Exploring Mechanisms, Technology, Clinical Practice and Research from Bench to Bedside, 84 (July 1, 2018): 28–43. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.metabol.2017.12.002.

Thacker, Dalton. “Amateurism vs. Capitalism: A Practical Approach to Paying College Athletes,” n.d.

“The Time of Our Lives.” Accessed December 10, 2023. https://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/basics/clockgenes.

Vrooman, Max. “Fan Sentiment Survey: Washington’s Move to the Big Ten.” UW Dawg Pound, August 4, 2023. https://www.uwdawgpound.com/2023/8/4/23820793/fan-sentiment-survey-move-to-the-big-ten-uw-washington-huskies-football-pac-12-oregon.

---