West Coast college sports fans at crossroads

Welcome back to Volume II of Heart to Heart, the column where we dissect college athletics through the lens of mental health.

Before we get to our athletes, though, we need to check in with our fanbase — the people who praise the physically gifted, funnel hundreds of thousands of dollars into sports programs, travel across states to watch their favorite players, create entire personalities based on following a specific team, pin their entire journalistic career on whether sports are still a pillar of society’s entertainment…

Let’s not worry about the last one right now, though.

College sports fans have been put through the wringer this summer. One after the other, West Coast universities announced their goodbyes to the Pac-12 in search of a larger stage and brighter lights.

USC and UCLA fans knew this was coming. The announcement from these Los Angeles schools started a trend, or perhaps opened a door, into the Big Ten conference that was previously shrouded in darkness. That door has since been blown open.

If you stay connected to college sports through football alone, you’re living your best life. New media rights deals, more money, better players coming to play for your school and accessible streaming makes the sport much more exciting.

But as the saying goes, “mo’ money, mo’ problems.”

Pac-12 loyalists are grieving the good old days when a Saturday night football game was just a day’s drive away. They now face a fork in the road: unwaveringly support college football despite the nagging sensation that the sport is one of only a few benefiting from this change, or stop watching altogether in the hopes that conference realignment shifts back toward prioritizing region over monetary reward.

But we’ll all still watch, no matter how screwed up college athletics get. We’ll root for our school and we’ll boo our rivals. We’ll watch games that we can stream easily on ESPN or FOX Sports and not on the Pac-12 network with its hidden fees and lacking coverage. Loyal West Coast fans don’t want to hear that their favorite programs could play their last games without taking advantage of lucrative media rights deals in other conferences.

It’s an impossible problem.

The immoral truth is that no matter which conference USC plays in, people will always be watching. I say immoral because while football benefits from this change, many other sports that USC hosts are getting screwed.

Football plays one day per week, smack dab in the middle of the weekend. Times vary, sure, but Saturdays are for tossing the pigskin around and cracking open a cold one with the boys (this is sarcasm; I’m trying to be a woman in sports).

For sports like soccer, games take place on a Thursday before the work week has ended. Baseball games take all three days of the weekend to complete a series. Basketball’s March Madness runs right through midterms, and only the toughest matchups get scheduled on weekends. Tennis concludes on Sundays, leaving less than ample time for flights back to Los Angeles.

The college athlete’s mental health is at risk, and the reward will not be reaped equally across sports teams. Where football players thrive in the national spotlight, other athletes are burned by the fluorescents.

We are placing all of our bets on football, and for good reason: They rake in the most cash. But what do we do when college football ceases to exist? The Pac-12 is just about gone. For most schools, that disturbing fact is good for college football, but at this rate, isn’t college football on its way out, too?

Sure, the teams are still represented with school colors, mascots and miniature fan bases that mob stadiums like our very own L.A. Memorial Coliseum every Saturday. But the competition is shifting away from simply playing football for your college to entering a miniature National Football League as an 18-year-old kid.

Transfer portal. Name, image, likeness. Conference realignments. Media rights deals.

These buzzwords all favor one collegiate sport – football – a sport we all watch, scream at the top of our lungs for and look forward to all year long. As sports fans, can we justify the dissolution of less streamed, less followed, less praised sports teams getting screwed over by the one that “reigns supreme”?

Whether you’re a die-hard college football fan or rarely make it past the tailgate on Saturdays, remind yourself the next time you’re at the Coliseum that football isn’t the only college sport you should support. During our final days in the Pac-12 conference, savor the games played in our own time zone against familiar foes. We may miss these moments during cold nights or on red-eye flights back East next year.

Dana Hammerstrom is a junior writing about the mental health of collegiate athletes, as well as the emotional pressures they face, in her column “Heart to Heart.”