It’s all the fault of Texas, really. Once the Big 12 insisted on treating them as the most special boys with the biggest share of money and their own cable TV network, everyone else began looking for a way out. For Texas A&M and Missouri, it was the SEC. For Nebraska, it was the Big 10. And for Colorado, it was the PAC-12, where they finished above .500 in football twice before choosing last week to flee back to a Big 12 that had the dual advantages of no more Texas and a TV deal in hand to the tune of $31 million a year.
Because Texas decamped for the SEC. Which then gave the B1G room to do a deal with U$C and UCLA to keep up with the 16-team standard, and made the Big 12 more attractive to Colorado – and now the Big 12 is at 13 and eyeing Utah and both Arizonas to reach that new magic number of 16. And all of sudden, the PAC-12 is the PAC-9 and the wolves are at the door, and the commissioner doesn’t have a better TV offer than a streaming deal with Apple.
The problem now is that the ESPN-Fox duopoly already has everybody. They are already paying for all the football, and there’s not something out there that will compel them to offer more money (witness the foolishness of Florida State, trying to get the ACC to give them a Texas free-roll when their media rights are tied up through 2036 and all the places they’d go are already ESPN leagues – why would ESPN pay out an extra $40 million a year for the same thing they already have?) – right now, the peril is that the PAC-9 has no TV deal and no obvious dance partner, and a lot of schools that are leveraged to the hilt.
I’m obviously most concerned for Cal, whose best days in football are a decade behind them and who can’t seem to crack the 8-win plateau after wasting years in the cul-de-sac of a Sonny Dykes Air Raid pastiche. How Golden Bears fans don’t climb Sather Tower with a high-powered rifle I’ll never know – first the burden of $300 million to stay on campus in their own stadium, then two years’ delays by filthy hippies, then economic collapse, then footballing futility and a decade of not getting over on Furd, then the pandemic and its aftershocks, and now, to add insult to injury, the warrior poets of the B1G extend the life raft to the SoCal schools and then Oregon and Washington.
But it’s not just the sturdy golden bear in a pinch here. Stanfurd’s longtime sugar daddy is deceased, and the Arillaga money every year may or may not be replaced by a young donor base more consumed with crypto and NFTs and AI startups than the fate of the Axe. And spare a thought for Oregon State and Washington State, which basically everyone has consigned not to the Big 12, but to the WAC or Mountain West alongside the Boise States and Colorado States of the world. And now if you go through and do the math, we are getting perilously close to the 64 teams-and-pull-the-ladder-up for the Super League – or worse yet, a weird mutant relegation system with the SEC and B1G as the Super League and the ACC and Big 12 one step below as a sort of second division, then everyone else scrambling, and promotion and relegation determined every five years by what kind of TV deal you can do.
Spencer Hall famously made it clear in “God’s Away On Business”: there is no one in charge in college football and there likely never will be. That’s why we have the professionalization of NIL and wide-open transfer without any sort of salary cap, salary floor, cost controls or (most important) player unionization, just free market narcocapitalism. Vanderbilt played for decades as the one stripper actually putting herself through college, only to find out that suddenly the club is twice as big and there’s a price list on the wall and they’re bringing in donkeys and if you don’t like it, the Sun Belt is over there. Geography is meaningless in a league where UCLA will play Maryland. Tradition is meaningless in a league that somehow combines Boston College, Pitt, Miami and Louisville. A third of the “original” Big 12, including the one no one wanted to be around, has been inexplicably grafted onto the SEC, because somehow Texas and Oklahoma are valuable brands to draw eyeballs and not because they are materially better at football than programs like TCU or (spit) Stanford that have turned out superior results in the same interval.
And now, because of a decade of chasing some kind of golden goose of casual fan eyeballs, the wheels are coming off. Now your options as a college football program are basically 1) be Alabama, 2) be willing to pay the money and make the compromises to pursue Alabama, even at the expense of other sports or the mission of your institution, or 3) go play intramurals. And if you are not a member of a conference that is shelling out $60 million a year in TV revenue, 2) may not be open to you no matter what you’re willing to do. Nothing that happened before has any value any longer. And that is toxic, because the value of what happened before is what separates college football from the XFL. It’s the tradition, it’s the rivalries, it’s the family connections, it’s Eli Gold on the radio or Keith Jackson on the game of the week, it’s names that don’t mean anything to anyone else but can take you back decades, and the play flashes before your eyes at the mention of “Van Tiffin” or “Thomas Rayam” or “George Teague” or “Patton Robinette”.
College football was the original and greatest form of the sport because of all the things you couldn’t put a price on. It will die, and die badly, and die ugly, because someone tried to put a price on them anyway.