This is the dumbest game of Risk I’ve ever seen.
Not to get all Old Man Yells At Cloud here, but this latest round of college sports realignment has just pushed me over the edge, and it’s pretty clear that I’m not the only one. I’ve read enough stories and columns on this topic over the past few days to know that much.
A system that got a little bit screwy a decade ago with the ACC’s cannibalization of the greatest college basketball conference ever created (the old Big East) and gradually more so with head-scratchers like “Rutgers to the Big Ten” and “Missouri to the SEC” got really messed up last summer when Los Angeles-based rivals UCLA and USC both decided to leave the Pac-12 for the Big Ten. In recent days, that system completely blew itself up and took the Conference of Champions along with it.
Oregon and Washington to the Big Ten — which somehow has held onto that name despite getting set to expand to 18 schools. Arizona, Arizona State and Utah to the Big 12 (which is expanding to 16 but apparently keeping the name).
I have yet to see anyone pretend that these moves are motivated anything other than TV money for football, and that’s good. Because these moves are at least 1,000,000,000,000% motivated by TV money for football. If it was about anything else, then we wouldn’t be sitting here with Stanford — an elite academic institution and the top collegiate athletic department by any non-financial measure of success — effectively homeless and drifting toward mid-majordom.
Sure, the new landscape provides networks with several compelling football “rivalries” in the near future. Ohio State against USC. Michigan against UCLA. Oklahoma versus Alabama. Georgia against Texas. That’s great; I’m sure all of those games will draw plenty of eyeballs and make television executives happy.
But did those have to come at the expense of every other sport?
When the suits who run the Big Ten, SEC and Big 12 were busy pillaging other power conferences in an effort to beef up their football brands, did they consider the softball player who will have to take red-eye trips from Piscataway, New Jersey to Eugene, Oregon to make it back for a Monday exam after a weekend series? Or the swimmer who has to watch a recording of an anthropology lecture while trudging back to Salt Lake City after a meet in Morgantown, West Virginia?
Hardly any of the athletes in those sports are on full scholarships; they’re mostly paying their own way for the right to compete at the highest level. And most of them probably didn’t sign with UCLA thinking that they’d have to catch up on classwork during road trips to Bloomington or West Lafayette or College Park, Maryland.
Conferences used to make geographic sense. The old Big Ten and SEC did. The old ACC and Big 12 did. The Pac-Whatever and the Southwest Conference did too, while they existed.
Now, nothing makes sense.
If the NCAA — which spent years and millions trying to keep so much as an extra ketchup packet out of athletes’ hands while protecting the interests of the rich old men profiting off of those athletes — cared one bit about keeping up the lie that they look out for the people who will “go pro in something other than sports,” they’d rein in this circus with the quickness.
Make college football break off from everything else. All of the “desirables” — the schools deemed worthy by those paying for broadcast rights — get placed into a Premier League-like setup with its own playoff system. Those who get left out (hello, Purdue and IU) can go into a second-tier division with a separate championship setup. I’m sure somebody smarter than me — or even dumber than me — can figure out a decent way to make it all work. I mean, Notre Dame has managed to keep football separate from its other sports forever. Why can’t other schools do the same?
Can we please please please return every other college sport to a happy place with regional rivalries and manageable travel? Can we get Georgetown-Syracuse basketball back? Kansas-Missouri? Oregon-Oregon State?
I know some of you aren’t old enough to remember just how much games like that mattered. But trust me — you’re missing out. We all are.
As Morgan Freeman said near the end of the greatest movie ever made: “All I want is to be back where things make sense.”
Somebody — please make it all make sense again.
Ryan O’Leary is the sports editor for the Daily Journal. He can be reached at [email protected].
