RELEGATION COMES TO COLLEGE FOOTBALL?

I've long suggested that Big Time College Sports, meaning football and men's basketball, has become incompatible with its amateur athletics integument.

College Sports, Inc. are moving toward sixty-four teams in four power conferences, and another sixteen in the not-quite range.  All the same, if the resulting league structure had flexible conferences with relegation (although that could make a mess of all sorts of rivalry games) these Boneyard wins might serve for making Mid-American teams candidates for elevation, and the teams that think they are buying wins by scheduling Mid-American cupcakes move onto the relegation list with a loss.

The Great Power maneuverings have been going on for some time.

I'm using "great game" in the sense of proxy warfare as it used to be waged in Asia and Africa, rather than what goes on on the field.  When somebody says a Tripartite Pact among the Big Fourteen Ten, Atlantic Coast Conference, and Pacific Twelve is "not driven by revenue," follow the money.

Never, though, could I envision the conference that once owned the Rose Bowl as its New Year showcase getting left out.

The Southeastern Conference (SEC) has led the way in recent conference expansion. The SEC added the University of Missouri and Texas A&M to the fold in 2012, and Texas and Oklahoma are joining the conference next year. Not only does the upcoming addition of the latter two schools stretch the definition of “Southeastern,” but it also had schools scrambling to revamp schedules to accommodate a larger conference.

Things got even crazier on Friday with more conference realignment news. Two rival conferences have gutted the Pac-12, a conference named for its proximity to the Pacific Ocean and for the fact that it had 12 teams. Not anymore — the University of Washington and the University of Oregon are joining the Big Ten in 2024, while the Big 12 is poaching Arizona, Arizona State, and Utah from the Pac-12. The University of Colorado has already jumped ship to the Big 12 starting next year.

“The day began with hope and nine members for the Pac-12,” writes Ralph D. Russo at the Associated Press. “It ended with the Pac-12 — with roots that date back a century and more NCAA championships than any other — down to four schools and facing extinction because it was unable to land a media rights agreement to match its competitors.”

There's enough border redrawing to confuse a Talleyrand or Metternich.  Colorado and Missouri were old Big Eight, Texas was Southwestern, Arizona, Arizona State, and Utah were not Pacific.  I continue to hold out for four big conferences of sixteen teams, as the existing alignments put me in mind of the Holy Roman Empire, and not in a good way.

In addition to the Pac-12 dwindling to four members, the moves have helped solidify the “super-conferences.” In addition to the SEC’s growth to 16 teams in 2024, next year the Big Ten will have 18 teams, while the Big 12 will have 16 teams.

In many ways, conference realignment has made a mockery of the names of the conferences. The Southeastern Conference has some teams that are hard to classify as southeastern, while the Atlantic Coast Conference has some teams that aren’t even on a coast, much less the Atlantic. But all the conference craziness this week makes the names of the Big Ten, Big 12, and Pac-12 nothing more than a bunch of numbers and letters.

I lose track of how big the Atlantic Coast is, although that's more of a factor in basketball than in football.  At the moment, though, the four remaining members of the Pacific Twelve are in the position of the non-deciders in a hand at leaster.

“The Pac-12 is on life support, at best,” writes Jeremy Mauss at Mountain West Wire. “The teams that do not have a current home are Oregon State, Washington State, Stanford, and Cal [the University of California].”

That a smaller conference like the MWC may have to bail out the Pac-12 shows the sad state of a once legendary conference, but it could also be the lifeline that saves the Pac-12.

“The Mountain West has rarely, if ever, been in a position of strength regarding conference realignment,” Mauss points out. “That may change now as these last four schools from the Pac-12 need some help.”

The trouble is that the 12 schools in the MWC can’t simply jump ship to the Pac-12 because the buyout to exit the MWC is a whopping $34 million per school. A merger is a possibility, but that could take years of legal wrangling and discussions about branding and other administrative hurdles.

Regardless of how the Pac-12 has to scramble to maintain credibility (or even viability), it’s clear that the era of the “super-conferences” is here. Welcome to college football in the roaring 2020s, where obviously anything can happen.

If Miller and Coors can merge, or the old American Football League and George Halas's and Vince Lombardi's National Football League could merge, the legal wrangling or branding aren't insurmountable.

In football, Stanford, Washington State, Oregon State, or California field respectable enough teams frequently enough that relegation as a condition of merger won't come up.

It's still something that I suspect appeals to the poobahs of the Southeastern or the B1G or the old Southwestern, whatever they're trading as these days, as they'd just as soon be rid of those annoying mid-majors and their guarantee games.