There is no other timeline for the future: There will be two superconferences.
Every school is thinking about this, because they have to. Washington also called around and was told the Big Ten isn’t adding anyone right now. Nike founder Phil Knight, according to CBS’s Dennis Dodd, has started cold-calling, trying to get Oregon into the mix. They also realized that it is time to start worrying if you are not currently in or in line to join one of the two main conferences, both of which are about to triple-at least-every other conference’s revenue. (The SEC poached Texas and Oklahoma last summer, and the two are scheduled to depart the Big 12 in 2025.) The move had two major aftershocks: The first is that everyone realized, if they hadn’t already, that geography will mean absolutely nothing in the conferences of the future-a five-hour flight between schools is no longer a barrier to entry. Two weeks ago, USC and UCLA announced they will leave the Pac-12 for the Big Ten in 2024, accelerating a decade-long trend of top teams consolidating into the Big Ten or SEC.
But even by these standards, this is a new era. It is a system designed for anxiety about the future and your team’s status in it. College sports always seem to be at a crossroads, always on the verge of a paradigm-shifting blowup, be it realignment, a court case, NIL panic, or the transfer portal. This probably feels like background noise for people who do not religiously follow the sport. USC and UCLA Don’t Make Sense in the Big Ten.
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No one is in charge of college football (well, maybe the TV networks), and no one is guiding the sport toward anything meaningful beyond grabbing more land in bigger TV markets. Thamel wrote that in 2011, during the first wave of the realignment boom, and it is more true now than it was then. No one is building consensus and channeling all of the ratings, financial success and popularity toward an outcome that is positive for everyone in the sport.” No one is guiding the sport toward long-term prosperity and short-term sensibility. No one is looking out for the greater good of the game. For all the billions of dollars, millions of fans and boundless passion that surround college football, that has always been its glaring and bizarre flaw. And it’s happening with unbelievable speed, supersonic speed that I could not have predicted.” The second is from writer Pete Thamel: “No one is in charge. The first is from Paul Finebaum, who said on a WJOX radio show in April that college football “is going to come apart, the NCAA is on its last breath, and I think college football as we know it is on its last breath. There are two quotes you can use as guideposts to college football’s great unraveling. But the sport is, as of this month, lunging dangerously close to becoming something it is not-and that’s where the trouble starts. You cannot kill college football: I know, because the people who run it have tried their best.
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And if, somehow, it was dying, Tennessee and Alabama fans would still meet in a grass parking lot every October to figure out how to play something. It is not dying-any suggestion that it is should not be taken seriously. But right now, the sentiment best relates to college football, a sport that remains one of the best things in the world despite 100 years of bureaucrats and administrators trying to make it worse. This is not unique to one sport-it could be about any (baseball, golf, soccer) that’s facing upheaval in a world of changing television habits, technology, and media economics.
The best thing you can hope for when you are the captive audience of a sport is that the people making decisions like the sport, too that they understand why people watch it in the first place. It is not hard, given the theme and title of the book, to guess what happened next. “Those who had the most power had the least passion,” Halberstam wrote of the realization.
They were not enthusiasts of anything except making bigger cars with bigger accessories and bigger profit margins. When he returned and gleefully shared the information, though, he quickly realized that the people running these companies did not love cars. There, he found “a car enthusiast’s dream”: fun, brilliant, well-designed vehicles that he figured would excite car lovers back in Detroit. In The Reckoning, David Halberstam’s 1986 epic about how Japan disrupted the American car industry, there’s a scene in which a young General Motors executive is tasked with traveling abroad to study new European cars.