College Football, What Are You Doing!?

Photo Credit: albedo20 via Flickr

In today's world of college football, everything is centered around three major topics - NIL, the transfer portal, and realignment. Let's focus on the topic at hand, realignment. In recent days, we have seen the Pac-12 virtually become extinct.

The once proud member of the Power Five contingent, the west coast-located group of schools is left with only four: Stanford, Cal, Washington State, and Oregon State. This is not only bad for college football as a whole but also for the fans that have followed this great game for decades.

The statement released by the Pac-12 conference sums up the biggest issue within this entire mess. Tradition, history, and rivalries are all gone in one fell swoop. For over 100 years, fans on the west coast enjoyed such rivalries as USC/UCLA, Oregon/Oregon State (Civil War), Washington/Washington State (Apple Cup), and Cal/Stanford.

Who can forget the mighty Trojans wandering into Reser Stadium in Corvallis, Oregon to face off with the Beavers in the fog back in 2004? One of the most epic games I recall from my childhood, was the Cal Bears clobbering the tuba player in the Stanford band to win in 1982. There are far too many games to list them all, and yet now with realignment, west coast fans are left wondering what is next.

With all of the conference switching, university presidents and athletic directors are now telling fans that it is money over tradition. If there is one thing that is ruining the amateurism of college athletics, it is the money pushing schools to switch allegiances for better media deals.

They are looking for their next big payday and pushing away fans in the process. Imagine, if you will, what Arizona Stadium is going to look like on a cool October night hosting UCF. You tell me, is that going to draw more fans than Arizona hosting former Pac-12 rival USC? If you answer yes, you are kidding yourself.

Photo Credit- Neon Tommy via Flickr

I personally blame all of this on two distinct entities. The first would be the University of Colorado. In 2010, the Buffs made a move that upset the college football landscape when they left the only home they had ever known in the Big 12 and joined the Pac-12. From the beginning, this move never made sense, and it set off a chain reaction that has led us to where we are today.

In response to this move, the SEC then added Texas A&M and Missouri, giving the SEC a total of 14 teams. Bigger is better, right? Since that time, realignment has never stopped. And now it has cost us the granddaddy of them all, the Rose Bowl. We will never again get to see the best of the Big Ten square off against the best of the Pac-12 on New Year's Day. As a fan that grew up in the Midwest, this SUCKS.

Personally, I grew up loving the Nebraska/Oklahoma rivalry. Some of the hardest-hitting football I have ever seen. Those days are over. Whoever thought there was a need to fix something that was not broken should be held accountable. For fans, we had a great thing going with 12-team conferences that produced division champions facing off in conference championships. Those games were financial boons for all conferences.

Surely, they did not need to be "fixed" by creating super conferences. We have seen those before and they never worked. In a short history lesson, the SEC was not always the SEC as we know it today. Most members were once part of a super conference, known as the Southern Conference, with 23 of the finest football-playing schools in the southeast, back in 1928.

And it fell apart, with 10 of those schools leaving to form what is now the SEC. I suspect that in the very near future, the financial feasibility of doing this all over again, history will repeat itself. And I hope it does. Fans need to stand up strong and tell these money-hungry buffoons that enough is enough and tell these conference commissioners that there will be no more realignment. It is destroying every tradition ever created in the sport we all so dearly love.