Last week, big news came out of the Big Ten conference as UCLA and USC both announced plans to move to Big Ten country in 2024. Sports media descended on the storylines as well as speculation of which teams from other conferences might make similar moves, or even the potential of a Pac-12/Big Ten merger sometime in the future.

However, college athletes–the people whom conference realignment arguably affects the most–went unnoticed in the media flurry, which is a huge oversight, especially considering they don't get a say in such mergers. Not to mention, conference realignment can be just as jarring for the athletes as it is for coaches and sports fans. Here are just three ways that conference realignment impacts college athletes.

1.) Conference realignment affects travel. Now, athletes from the Southwestern U.S. will have to travel to Michigan and Big Ten athletes from the northern U.S. will have to travel to Southern California on a fairly regular basis. Although it's easy to look at access to free travel from the outside and envy these athletes, it's important to remember that when you're competing on a college team, these trips aren't vacations–competing at the D1 level means such trips are business trips. You arrive at your destination, compete, and leave. Travel also involves a lot of wear and tear on the body, especially for athletes who are dealing with injuries or who need access to a full training room and special equipment to feel and perform at their best.

Related: Rate your Coaches, Facilities, and Campus Visits

2.) Traveling also affects academics. Because athletes will be traveling across the country more frequently, they will have to miss more class and do more homework on busses and planes which is less than ideal. It also calls the idealist notion of “student-athlete” into question. After all, when college athletes have to fly thousands of miles multiple times a semester and miss classes nearly every week, they're functioning as what Isaiah Thomas famously coined “athlete-students.” Balancing academics and athletics is hard enough and increased travel only complicates this already difficult relationship. Plus, the business emphasis on such decisions further denies the so-called educational mission of the NCAA and college sports industry.

3.) Recruits don't sign up for conference realignment, and this is important when scholarships come into play. When you are being recruited, you have a good feel for your skills as an athlete and how they mesh with your teams and conferences of choice. If you commit to a team and that team then switches to a more competitive conference, you're essentially being duped. You didn't sign up to compete in a more difficult conference or against more competitive recruits that your coach will inevitably seek out to stay competitive. This all puts an athlete's scholarship at risk if they can't perform to a level they never agreed to meet in the first place.

Conference realignment isn't just a big change for college sports fans and coaches. It's also a lot for the athletes to handle, and in more ways than one.

Katie (M.K.) Lever is a former Division 1 athlete and current doctoral candidate at the University of Texas at Austin where she studies NCAA discourse and policy. She is also a freelance sportswriter and creative writer on the side. She is the author of a new book Surviving the Second Tier available on AMAZON. Follow Katie on  Twitter and Instagram: @leverfever.

* Originally published on July 6, 2022, by Katie Lever, Ph. D