I can’t imagine a more insane decision by an NCAA Division I football conference than to invite two teams from a “rival” conference to join.
I’m not naïve. I know college football has been the victim of a hostile takeover by the corporations, who use their lobbying power to usurp the authority of college presidents and their respective conference leaders.
When the Southeastern Conference invited Oklahoma and Texas to join the SEC, the decision upped the ante for conference realignment – we are living in the Age of the Super Conferences, and it stinks. OU and Texas were members of the Big 12 Conference since the merger of the Southwest Conference and the Big Eight in 1996.
When the Big Ten invited UCLA and USC (not listed in order of importance), I was convinced that all reason was lost and that the heart and soul of major college football was hemorrhaging.
Indeed, it is.
Through its history, college football’s appeal was its regional conferences. They were like big neighborhoods where folks could drive from one state to the next without filling up the gas tank five times; they’d mingle in the parking lot and trade barbs with opposing fans and then watch tradition and pride in the making.
What people had was a sense of place – and a sense of time. But, somewhere along the line, the suits were about to turn everything on its head. In 1992, the SEC was the first power five (the term didn’t exist then) to expand when it absorbed Arkansas from the Southwest Conference and South Carolina, which at the time was independent, like Penn State and many others.
Other independent teams banded together to form the Big East Conference. Then, the Big 12 came into being and the Southwest Conference and Big Eight went the way of the buffalo on the prairie. The Atlantic Coast Conference was next to expand, and the talk went on and on about a playoff, but the best that could be done was a Bowl Alliance and later the BCS – until the four-team College Football Playoff was instituted in 2014.
Fast forward to 2023, and the look of college football is surreal. There’s a 12-team playoff coming your way starting in 2024, and another round of conference expansions has stolen the headlines, while the sport continues to look more and more like an ongoing commercial, a never-ending press conference replete with well-rehearsed and well-versed explanations, which, upon further review are nothing more than doublespeak as dollar figures float through the air and the corporate raiders rub their hands together in triumphant celebration.
We knew it was going to happen eventually. Or did we?
I don’t know about you, but college football players and respective supporters of each school have been swindled. It’s a sad time for the sport, no matter how people spin the evolving nature of conference expansion, the Big Ten doing away with the two-division format and ending some longstanding rivalry games in favor of a “let’s play everyone” approach.
I don’t really care that Penn State is hosting USC in 2024. I also don’t care that Michigan and USC will play each other. It was better when USC was playing Washington and UCLA was playing Stanford – when everyone was playing someone they knew and had something in common, like prominent institutions of higher learning that took pride in upholding the virtues of timeless devotion to keeping things as they are.
See what happens when you open Pandora’s Box, when you get what you wished for? You get this: a mess.
I suppose college football is a microcosm of the world that we live in. All is fleeting and nothing is guaranteed to last very long. And no one is safe from intrusion by powerful entities hell-bent on making a financial killing off the naivety and weakness of so-called guardians of a sport that has been a significant part of a country’s cultural heritage.
No, there were never ‘glory days’ in college football. Still, there were ‘glorious times’ in the sport that manifested themselves in its lore, its history, its ambassadors, and, most of all, its players – and its spectators.
To be continued.
