The Great Unraveling

Conference realignment is happening and the fans are stuck with the bill, as usual

I don’t like when somebody makes his “thing” my problem.

You know, like when a coworker schedules an URGENT meeting just because he’s clearing his desk before his vacation, or when a parade forces you to drive six minutes out of your way for your hangover Egg McMuffin.

So I really don’t appreciate when a bunch of university presidents, chancellors and athletic directors (let’s call them the “Chasers”) stick me with a new college football conference structure all because they decided to chase bigger buckets of money.

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Beginning in 2024, the conference landscape will look a lot less familiar. I won’t list all the conference changes in this column because it’s long and boring and I want you to keep reading, but I’ll say that if you’ve had trouble tracking your team’s roster in this player portal era, just wait until you see the new conferences.

Realignment is going to affect almost every team right away¹. Every Power 5 Power 4 (more on that later) school will have its schedule impacted in 2024, and five of this week’s AP Top 10 — and nine of the Top 20 — will begin 2024 in a new conference.

Nebraska foreshadowed this mess in 2010 when it bailed from the Big 12 amid fears over the power and influence of the Longhorn Network, setting off a mini chain reaction of conference defections that are cute and charming in retrospect.

Over the past year things have gone completely off the rails. The latest realignment wave is a full scale overhaul, and there are three victims: Identity, Rivalry and History.

Identity.

Not that long ago, before this Great Unraveling, college football conferences had identities that were shaped over time by geography, resentments, rivalries and even the weather. The Big Ten was burly and snowy; the Southwest Conference was ornery and drinky; the Big 8 was topheavy and farmy; the Pac 10 was sunny and smiley.

Thanks to the Chasers, all of that is out the window.

Starting next year, Central Florida, Utah, Arizona and West Virginia will share a conference headquartered in Dallas, and USC and Washington will join Maryland and Rutgers in a conference based in Chicago. And those are just a few examples of the impending madness.

One reason the Rose Bowl became the Granddaddy of Them All, complete with a parade of disturbing floats, was that it was an annual prizefight pitting the best Big Ten team against the best Pac 10 team in a national referendum on Midwest vs. West Coast, on style vs. substance. That baby has also been thrown out with the Chasers’ bathwater.

Rivalry.

Sure, realignment will generate spicy new conference games in 2024, matchups like Oklahoma/Alabama, Ohio State/UCLA, Nebraska/USC and Texas/Georgia. They will be fun to watch and they will do big numbers².

But enduring rivalries are forged over time, not bought and scheduled.

Here’s an example. The Nebraska-Oklahoma rivalry was an early casualty of realignment, as their annual battle went on hiatus after the 2010 season when Nebraska left the Big 12 for the Big Ten. So when those teams got together for an encore in 2021, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of their “Game of the Century”, the final score didn’t matter (so don’t look it up).

What mattered was the week of nostalgia leading up to the game, of watching grainy highlight reels and reliving memories with old frenemies.

And then the week was over, and everybody returned to their regularly scheduled programming.

Reunions give you a chance to reconnect and reflect, but they also reinforce that the old days are gone forever. While you’re together, you’re happy to see each other, but soon your attentions return to the present. You can’t go Oklahom-again.

When Nebraska finally wins the Big Ten one day (stop laughing, it’s rude) it will be cause for celebration (seriously, stop), but it won’t be like winning the conference title in the Big 8 era. Back then, part of Nebraska’s joy in winning the conference was that Oklahoma lost. In modern times winning your conference is a proud but victimless accomplishment, like accepting a diploma.

I liked it better the old way.

History.

The third victim of realignment is the saddest one: the Pac 12 conference has been left for dead. It was the perfect crime, too: it was nobody’s fault because it was everybody’s fault.

The Pac 12 has been a fundamental part of the college sports landscape for over a century, earning more team sport national championship trophies than any other conference. In football it produced 12 Heisman winners and 22 national champions.

But after the conference’s former commissioner, Larry Scott, bungled the latest TV contract negotiation, the Pac 12’s Chasers cast their gazes toward the bigger pots of money to the east, and 10 of the 12 schools jumped ship. A century of history, poof.

When the music stopped, Washington State and Oregon State were left without chairs, forcing them to beg, borrow and sue in search of a place to land.

The worst part is that none of this makes any competitive sense. The Pac 12 has seven teams (including WSU and OSU) in this week’s AP Top 25, more than any other conference (the SEC and ACC have four each).

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All of this was probably inevitable. As we’ve discussed before, when it comes to the important decisions, nobody’s in charge of college football. Permanent changes to the conference landscape are made by the Chasers, acting individually and solely in the best interests of their schools. They have donors and bosses of their own to answer to and “acting in the best interests of college football as a whole” isn’t on their job descriptions.

The Chasers who fueled Nebraska’s departure from the Big 12 — Dan Beebe, DeLoss Dodds, Tom Osborne and the rest — are no longer even involved in sports, and the Longhorn Network has sputtered and stalled. But the decisions that they made in 2010 will impact generations of fans.

We’re about to experience that again on a much grander scale.

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Perhaps making it into the expanded playoff will be all the fans really care about going forward, and any individual game — even a “rivalry game” — will matter much less³. Losing two or even three games probably won’t disqualify your team from the postseason in the new system, so losing to a rival won’t have the same sting that it used to. Maybe we will begin to view college conferences like we do the NFL’s divisions, just a means to an end.

And that will all be fine, until the Chasers decide that even more drastic changes are necessary, because why settle for lots and lots of money when you could instead have lots and lots and lots of money?

The latest round of conference realignment makes no geographic sense and it makes no competitive sense. But it does make dollars and cents, and as usual the fans are left holding the empty bag.

1. Only Notre Dame, the nation’s most independent and Catholic football school, has held out and resisted the realignment promiscuity its peers have succumbed to.

2. The Chasers want you to focus on these games and not think about Rutgers’ softball team boarding a plane to play in Eugene, or Central Florida soccer players flying to a match in Provo.

3. As a Nebraska fan, I view the expanded playoff as a very good thing. I welcome college football’s Little Dance with open arms. The bigger, the better.