Submitted by BB
Let’s jump forward in time a bit, shall we?
I can tell what you are thinking. What is BB ranting about now?
Cue theme song to Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back and journey with me into the future world of college football. The landscape, according to outspoken Athletic Directors, journalists and bloggers, will look vastly different. This is the result of our overwhelming, unending dependence on the almighty dollar. The big boys still won’t share the wealth, which makes one wonder if we ever learn our lessons. What if we’re doomed to repeat the same mistakes over and over again?
We’ll be asked to ignore the lack of tenured professors in state universities while we applaud the prowess and character of ten million dollar a year head football coaches. Football, by this time, will far outweigh the importance of Bachelor and Masters’ Degrees. One “student” out of every 10,000 will go on to make a profitable living in the NFL…and they’re the only ones that will matter.
Reasonable odds, don’t you think, for the future of our youth?
We’ll witness the advent of the Super Conferences, which will relegate conferences now known as non-BCS, or non-AQ to the level of third world countries.
The most likely change proposed is the eventual addition of Utah and Colorado to the Pac 10, according to a Salt Lake City columnist. Who doesn’t like this idea? Brigham Young University and the Mountain West Conference. The far reaching consequences of losing Utah and possibly TCU in a reactive move would potentially kill the Mountain West’s addition as one of the mighty BCS conferences.
Solution? Mountain West presidents and Athletic Directors should quickly invite Boise State into their fold, thus assuring them the coveted BCS AQ classification and pre-empting any moves made by bigger conferences . BYU, Utah, TCU and Boise State would be a formidable football conference, as well as regionally relevant.
More awe-inspiring, confusing conjectures follow.
Texas and Texas A&M will become members of the Pac 10. Wow. As one member of my family said, Texas is denying this possibility, which means it’s probably true. Oklahoma might like this move, although removing two Texas teams from the Big 12 means they’ll need to replace them with two new ones. If memory serves correctly, TCU does fairly well against the Sooners, and Houston is a potential threat looming on the horizon.
The Big East and the Mountain West will combine to create one large conference with branches in the east and west. This move would assure that the beleaguered Big East does not lose its AQ standing, while the inclusion of the Mountain West into a preexisting BCS conference means that we don’t need to create a new one. This will also help eliminate the threat of two non-AQ team’s inclusion in the big money of the BCS bowls.
Missouri or Rutgers will join the Big Ten, finally making them the Big 12? Yes, I know that ten plus one equals eleven. Penn State has just been hanging out for years, understanding that not only is eleven an odd number; it’s also a lonely one.
A new conference name will obviously be called for. Perhaps the Slow Pokes, the Twelve Packs, or the Irrelevants? Hey, this isn’t my line; those words came from the mouth of a Big 10 president, who said that the conference needed a twelfth member so that they could have a conference championship game. They are tired of being irrelevant for three weeks leading up to the Bowl season.
Surely they’re jesting. They honestly want to have a true conference champion and forego the three-way tie breaker we all watch, but don’t understand? In truth, the only conferences that deliver true champions are the ones without championship games. Teams in these leagues have to play everyone in their conferences—true head-to-head matchups with the victor still standing at the end of the season.
But the money generated from an extra game televised by a major network is too enticing to ignore. Who cares if we’ve already seen the match-up earlier in the season, and that neither team played every team in their conference?
Perhaps the most ambitious suggestion I heard was the idea of combining conferences to create super conferences. This plan is not fully formulated yet, though, as I suspect they most likely mean to combine the existing BCS conferences with the top two or three teams from all of the non-BCS conferences. Then they’ll split them all up regionally, do the hokey pokey and shake them all about.
This will lead to a wealth of haves and have nots in college football’s future. Sounds like they want to create elitist leagues divided into four regional super-powered conferences, each having their own television network and elaborate administration. I thought the University of Texas already had this, as well as the largest Trinitron screen in the college game—and they want to share?
I can already hear ESPN’s war cry as other networks gain exclusive new contracts in upcoming years. This possibility can’t be good for them.
All of this is, naturally, because of money. And it brings to mind the debate that all college football fans will likely have to face. How big do we want—or need—the game to be? Big enough to eclipse secondary education? Yes, football revenues help a lot of programs at universities, but the salaries that coaching staffs receive have grown much faster than the revenues taken in.
This means that the conferences are looking for new ways to create revenue to support not only the football programs and athletic departments, but the university staff and its educational system. This means more advertising, increased hype, heavier recruiting and bigger stadiums. Sports—especially football—will play a larger role on campuses than ever before.
So what came first: education or football? It’s definitely food for thought. For now, I’d rather pretend to be an ostrich and bury my head in the sand—because I don’t have the answers. Neither do the college presidents or the NCAA. If their solutions are not fair to all involved, we’ll have congress’ intervention to look forward to as well.
Is college football experiencing the pinnacle of its success? Has it reached its height? Has it become the most popular sport in the US, second only to the NFL, just to decline as a result of greed, a false sense of entitlement, and the public’s ennui—and the disillusionment that follows?
I hope not, because I love college football. The Boise State Broncos, as many of you know, are my team. I have a solution for them if the earth does change its directional rotation and the four super conferences come to be. They can become an independent and play Notre Dame and the armed forces teams every single year while picking up games from each super conference. The revenue from those games should keep them in good stead, and the elephant in the room—the oft-maligned weakness of the WAC—will finally be put to rest.
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Comment from Paul Moore
Time March 3, 2010 at 11:10 pm
Susanville should be very very proud of this group!!! 26 years of not making it to the title game is a LONG time! Hope we can have a large crowd supporting us at Chico St on sat. By the way a win on sat will mean a home state play-off game on tuesday night!