The Big West Conference, like its counterparts across the nation, has been in a state of constant evolution since a sweeping round of college athletics realignment was touched off nearly a decade ago.
The conference has some additional challenges. There’s the relatively limited geographic territory, with a lineup of nine Division I schools that’s confined to California—with the exception of the University of Hawaii—and the lack of football, the biggest revenue generator by far in college sports.
The Big West can nevertheless boast an unusual degree of stability. Its headquarters have been in Irvine since 1978. And Dennis Farrell, a Santa Ana High School alumnus, has led the organization for 25 years.
Farrell’s career at the Big West goes back even further, to 1980, when he was hired as an assistant/associate commissioner.
“I’ve been in this office for 36 years,” says Farrell, who has served as a primary rule interpreter, championship administrator, schedule coordinator and director of the league’s postseason basketball tournament during that span. “I only know of two other individuals working in the same conference office continuously longer than I have.”
That distinction belongs to Mark Womack of the Southeastern Conference, and Mark Rudner of the Big Ten Conference.
The Big West is what’s known as a “mid-major.” That’s a few notches down the pecking order from the Power 5 conferences, a football-heavy powerhouse grouping that includes the SEC, Big 10, Atlantic Coast Conference, Big 12 and Pacific 12.
The nine Big West schools—California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo, California State University-Fullerton, California State University-Northridge, California State University-Long Beach, University of Hawaii, University of California-Irvine, University of California-Davis, University of California-Riverside and University of California-Santa Barbara—are affiliated with the conference in 18 sports, with soccer, cross country, basketball, golf, tennis, and track and field played by men and women. Women also compete in indoor and beach volleyball, softball and water polo, while men play baseball. Men’s indoor volleyball will be added in the 2017-18 season.
Hawaii affiliates with the Mountain West Conference for football, while UC Davis and Cal Poly compete in the Big Sky Conference.
The Big West’s lack of football and its geographic concentration emphasize the widening gap between big-money programs and smaller-budget schools.
“The amount of money they’re generating I think has put the public spotlight on their programs and how they’re spending money,” Farrell says. “It is television driven. The best thing that has ever happened to college sports was ESPN, and the worst thing to happen to college sports was ESPN.”
The media giant has certainly helped bring attention to mid-majors, with seemingly round-the-clock college coverage, but that coverage tends to tilt toward major conferences and schools, hyping up the celebrity aspect of sports and head coaches.
The athletic departments at Big West schools in the 2014-2015 fiscal year generated revenue of $199.8 million, while the conference operating budget was $2.1 million. By comparison, Big 12 member University of Texas’ sports program took in $183.5 million, while its athletic department had overhead of $173.2 million as recent as the 2014-2015 fiscal year, the most recent data available.
The Power 5 conferences combined to generate record revenue of $6 billion as recently as 2015, largely through broadcasting rights contracts and rising ticket prices.
That’s nearly $4 billion more than the other 27 Division I conferences combined.
The Big West generates most of its revenue from broadcasting rights deals with FOX and ESPN. It also pulls in about $30,000 annually from school membership assessments. Some additional funding comes from NCAA grants; a cut of revenue from automatic qualifiers the conference gets in the NCAA basketball tournament; sponsorships and earnings from hosting its own year-end basketball tournament at the Honda Center in Anaheim; and a cut when the stadium periodically hosts an NCAA regional tournament during March Madness.
The FOX contract, which runs through the 2017-2018 academic year, provides a minimum of 20 televised conference events, including the quarterfinals of the men’s basketball tournament and the women’s championship game. Â
The ESPN deal, which runs through the 2020-2021 academic year, provides a minimum of 12 televised events annually on ESPN, ESPN2 or ESPNU, including five regular-season men’s conference basketball games, the semi final and championship games, as well as four broadcasts of other Big West sporting events.
ESPN and the Big West are partners on a 60-game digital package annually on ESPN3.
Big West schools are aiming to develop in-house digital broadcast networks to bring in revenue from live sports coverage, a valuable asset coveted by networks and fans in an age when unique content reigns.
They have a history of quality performances, too. The Big West has claimed 17 team national championships in its history—the most recent in 2006 by the UC Santa Barbara men’s soccer team. Its lone basketball championship came in 1990 when the University of Nevada-Las Vegas toppled Duke University 103-73, the largest margin of victory in a title game in NCAA history.
Cal State Fullerton won the College World Series as a Big West member in 1995 and 2004, and had two titles before then.
The Big West has sent three schools to the College World Series in recent years—UC Irvine in 2014, Cal State Fullerton in 2015 and UC Santa Barbara last year.
In 2015, the conference sent three men’s programs—Cal Poly, UC Northridge and UC Santa Barbara—and two women’s clubs—Long Beach State and Cal State Fullerton—to the NCAA soccer tournament, better known as the College Cup.
That same year, Hawaii advanced to the Elite 8 in women’s indoor volleyball, the only school outside the Power 5 conferences to do so.
Consider those high water marks for a conference and its schools that are overshadowed in California media markets by the likes of University of Southern California, University of California-Los Angeles and Stanford University.
Farrell understands the pecking order and knows the conference will never match the Power 5 in finances, resources and attention—but he’s not apologizing.
“We’re Division I, the highest level of competition in the NCAA, and we want to remain competitive at that level,” Farrell says. “We put our national successes against any conference outside the [Power] 5.”
The Big West was known as the Pacific Coast Athletic Association when it was established in July 1969. The PCAA changed its name to the Big West in 1988 to better reflect its regional expansion with schools in Utah, Nevada and New Mexico. For a few years in the mid-2000s, with the exodus of Idaho University and Utah State, the conference was composed entirely of California schools, including College of the Pacific, but that distinction ended in 2012 when Hawaii accepted an invitation to join the conference.
Pacific left the Big West a year later to join the West Coast Conference.
The Big West headquarters at 2 Corporate Park is a nondescript three-story, 41,545-square-foot building off of Jamboree Road and Beckman Avenue. The conference, now in its 48th year of operation, occupies a few offices on the second floor staffed with 12 full-time employees. One office is occupied by Plano, Texas-based Learfield Sports, which works with the Big West to drum up corporate sponsorships and other support for its annual basketball tournament at the Honda Center.
“When I first started working here, it was the commissioner, myself, a part-time secretary, and that was it,” Farrell says.
OC Native
He is the only one of 32 Division I conference commissioners who has never relocated his family, a remarkable distinction, given the transient nature of college sports.
Indeed, his office is about halfway between the home he grew up in and his current residence in Coto de Caza.
“I’m an Orange County boy—I grew up here and my family has deep roots here,” Farrell says.
His grandfather, Byron Crawford, was elected by the city council in 1927 as the first mayor of Tustin, which had 900 residents at the time.
The world of college athletics holds few resemblances to the landscape Farrell encountered decades ago. He’s had a court side seat in the era of realignment, big corporate sponsorships, the one-and-dones of student-athletes going pro early in basketball, and an expanding football playoff that brings in millions of dollars for participating schools and conferences.
“I’ve seen a lot changes over the 36 years but nothing compared to what happened in 2010,” says Farrell, who hasn’t decided on retirement yet.
“How much longer I don’t know,” he says “It’s been a fun ride.”
