Gallows humor might be the only reasonable response to the accelerating college conference mayhem. Given the disorienting realignments, The Athletic has suggested such potential “traditional rivalries” as the John Denver Classic (Colorado vs. West Virginia—“Rocky Mountain High” vs. “Take Me Home Country Roads”); the John Wooden Bowl (Purdue vs. UCLA); Phil Knight vs. the Scarlet Knights (Oregon-Rutgers).
Don’t even try to connect any of those matchups to leagues that for so long were organized by geographic and institutional ties—leagues that have become incapable of doing math or reading maps. The Big 10 is going to have 18 schools. At last count, the Big 12 has 14 and likely could go to 16. The Atlantic Coast Conference reportedly is considering Stanford and Cal (from the other coast) and SMU (from neither coast) for membership.
Also: Whither and wherefore Notre Dame, which forever banked on its independence but appears adrift in this reshaped financial model.
All the nutty new associations, with everyone seemingly running off to join a more lucrative circus, at least serve to finally acknowledge that college football—the sport responsible for this kaleidoscopic shuffling—has nothing to do with college. Fully professional (except that the players are not paid directly and have neither a union nor guarantees of health care), college football has further evolved into just another version of the NFL.
So why not accept reality and erect a firewall between football and academics, as proposed by Baruch College law professor Marc Edelman years ago? “Maybe,” he said in the wake of repercussions after Northwestern players attempted to form a union in 2014, “there should be a football program that wears blue and maize and plays out of Ann Arbor and is separate from the University of Michigan.” And a team dressed in burnt orange based in Austin, Tex., with no actual connection to that city’s institution of higher learning.
Why not follow the lead of Ithaca College sports media professor Ellen Staurowsky, co-author of the 1998 book “College Athletes for Hire: The Evolution and Legacy of the NCAA Amateur Myth,” who suggested splitting revenue-generating sports from the amateur, educations process? Football players still could go to classes if they chose to, Staurowsky said, but university athletic departments would lose the role of promoters and brokers of athletic talent and mass sports entertainment.
Or why not establish a National College Football League such as the one recently proposed by Welch Suggs, an associate director for the watchdog Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, a writer for The Chronicle of Higher Education and journalism professor at the University of Georgia?
In the Suggs model, there would be one major college football organization—same as the NFL—with manageable regional divisions structured something like of the old Southwest Conference (seven Texas schools plus neighboring Arkansas). The other sports—men’s and women’s basketball and especially the non-revenue sports of gymnastics, field hockey, track and so forth—would be grouped in their own separate conferences, immune from being big-footed by King Football’s insatiable pursuit of TV lucre.
With that, an Oregon volleyball team, not privy to chartered flights always available to the football gladiators, could avoid a cross-country round-trip journey to New Jersey to fulfill a commitment to play at Rutgers in the rejiggered Big 10.
Over and over, the NCAA has demonstrated it had neither the clout nor the will to stop all the gold-digging football gallivanting that is going on now. At a Knight Commission meeting 12 years ago, shortly after the Big 12 had begun to fall apart when Nebraska skedaddled to the Big 10, Missouri and Texas A&M to the SEC and Colorado to the PAC-12, then-NCAA president Mark Emmert declared that his organization “does not have a role in conference affiliations and should never be in the business of telling universities what affiliations they should have.”
So now, we have what New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait called the “logic of untrammeled capitalism” steadily picking up steam, with strategies “now driven entirely by the logic of television contracts” that yearn for expanded elite conferences. “The new mega-leagues,” Chait wrote, “will be too engorged to have real conference [football] champions: There will be too many teams in each league and too few games to fairly crown a winner.”
A decade ago, then-LSU chancellor Michael Martin predicted that “we could end up with two enormous conferences, one called ESPN and the other one called Fox.”
He sounds now like a regular Nostradamus. Or just a realist.
