In the 1940s and 1950s, the Pacific Coast Conference and the Big Ten formed a sort of alliance. Most famously, beginning in 1946, they agreed to a contract with the Rose Bowl for one team from each conference to play annually. The two conferences also worked together as a voting bloc within the NCAA. They generally agreed on most issues and advocated for more faculty control of college sports and a true “amateur model” that rejected athletic scholarships and recruiting. This contrasted from the Southern Conference and the Big Eight, based in the Southern Plains states, which had long embraced athletic scholarships and recruiting.
The Midwest and West Coast schools favored stronger NCAA regulatory powers and the 1948 Sanity Code — which banned off-campus and alumni recruiting, demanded equal admissions requirements for athletes and limited the amount, source and type of financial aid colleges could award — while the Southern Conference and the Big Eight did not. For a moment, the regional divide threatened the future of the NCAA as the Southern conferences threatened to walk away. A feeling of superiority among some fans emerged as they looked down upon the blatant commercialization of Southern schools.
During the mid-1950s the PCC and Big Ten also began applying pressure for changes in the NCAA’s new television plan, which initially restricted the number of college football games broadcast annually to 20. They thought their schools did not have enough televised games and jointly advocated for a regional broadcasting model to highlight several schools rather than favor big-name programs from the South. Although critical of commercialization and recruiting, they were concerned that the NCAA’s TV plan limited their revenue and their ability to promote their schools to potential students.
This fight exposed how the two conferences readily abandoned their idealistic views when they felt like those values put them at a disadvantage, even as they remained committed to using their collective leverage to shape NCAA policy.
Ironically, the vision of athletics embraced by the PCC and the Big Ten prompted USC and UCLA to abandon it in 1957. Both had faced accusations of impropriety tied to paying players. The allegations splintered the conference, which theoretically still clung to an idealistic view of amateur athletics that did not include scholarships or recruiting — despite most of its members violating these rules. USC and UCLA felt hamstrung by the conference and its hypocrisy. By 1958, the conference had collapsed, and the strained relationship prevented some former members from even communicating with one another.