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To subscribe, please click here “A conference should not sprawl across the United States like kudzu overtaking an untended garden,” says University of Toledo President James Holloway. When he was studying nuclear engineering at the University of Illinois in the early 1980s, the name “Big Ten” stood for the actual number of conference members. Four decades later, it’s a coast-to-coast superconference of 18 in which Maryland, a 2014 addition, travels 2,760 miles to Seattle to face Washington, a Big Ten member of two years. Many panelists long for a return to the days before Cal and Stanford competed in the ACC and Central Florida-BYU was a Big 12 game; when leagues were made up of “like universities with geographic proximity,” as former NCAA President Judy Sweet puts it. “Maybe not sooo far back as the old Big 8, Pac-8 and Southwest Conference,” says Rick Allen, Illinois’ assistant AD for compliance from 1980-97, “but back to the days before you had conference teams spread all the way across the country.” Adds Holloway: “Student-athletes should not have their studies disrupted by excessive travel with its attendant negative impacts on health, intellectual acuity or athletic preparation. Nor should coaches and their staffs. And unlike some others who support this notion, I would not exempt football.” Brad Dancer would. The Illini men’s tennis coach’s extreme makeover calls for conferences to be realigned geographically — eight to 10 per league — in every sport but the biggest moneymaker. “Football is a unique animal in that the major schools only travel to five away games per year. They charter flights where their efficiency is almost perfect,” Dancer says. “A large portion of the other sports — basketball included — play significantly more games. Geographic rivals create tremendous passion between the fan bases. Travel time and costs would decrease and shrinking a conference down to around eight to 10 schools gives more institutions more opportunity to win conference championships. “The coaches associations in each sport would define the conferences and have the opportunity to make adjustments throughout seasons to create the most equitable and efficient conferences.” THE FINE PRINT Lengthy trips, now an annual occurrence in supersized conferences, have taken a big bite out of athletic departments’ budgets. How big? We obtained itemized breakdowns of four basketball teams’ travel in 2025-26 via open-records request: