Perhaps conference realignment’s greatest alleged benefit is ‘solving’ a problem that college football could’ve easily addressed without threatening to sell its soul instead.
(This is the second of a three-part series covering the wreckage from the latest round of realignment. You may read the first here.)
I’ve made it pretty well known where I stand on the complete and utter upheaval that the latest round of conference realignment will cause within and beyond the sport of college football.
But just because I may be less than enthusiastic about — or in this instance, absolutely detest — a change in life it doesn’t mean said change is unequivocally negative, nor that at some point in the future I won’t come around to appreciate it myself.
I vividly remember the mass hysteria that ensued within my family and the local community at large when the first roundabout was constructed at a four-way intersection less than two miles from the house I grew up in. What was with this ‘European’ approach to roadway operations? This ‘deathtrap’ would surely result not only in countless accidents, but an interminable sense of dread for travelers such as myself upon each and every visit.
Turns out, I would ultimately come to admire and appreciate the clever, indisputably more efficient nature of the ‘foreign’ traffic solution. Nowadays I find myself regularly asking why this country has failed to adopt these ingenious structures on a far greater scale.
(Explainers like this one offer great insight into some of the reasons why the U.S. has as of yet failed to go all-in on this modern traffic safety strategy.)
It’s just too bad that conference realignment is no roundabout.
The latter has been misunderstood and far too quickly cast aside in spite of its overwhelmingly positive benefits.
The former is but a steaming hunk of a turd wrapped in dollar bills as a lazy attempt to camouflage its true nature.
Of this I am all but certain.
As long as we’re here though, I figured we could humor the pro-realignment crowd — tiny though it appears to be — first by examining one of its most common refrains as to the ‘benefit’ of cramming a bunch of disparate toys (schools) into the same bloated conference sandboxes.
So, what is that refrain?
Conference realignment = more exotic/premier matchups = a net-gain for college football fans
Texas and Oklahoma playing a full SEC schedule? Woohoo!
USC frequently taking on Ohio State and Michigan? Heck yeah!
Or my personal favorite, “What a cool deal it will be for (insert Big Ten school and its fans) to travel to Los Angeles — or Seattle or Eugene — during a Midwestern fall?”
Each of these sentiments plays on the idea that fans yearn for more appealing games to both attend in person and/or watch on television. That appeal can come in the form of a prestigious opponent, a new or ‘exotic’ location or simply an uncommon, if lesser heralded matchup that merely spices things up for the fanbases involved.
In fact, I myself am quite partial to several of said notions — and others like them.
Hell, for my entire life enraptured by this sport I’ve not only heard fans of programs all around the country banter about other schools whom they’d love to see play against their own, but I’ve been doing the same damn thing.
Do you know what I haven’t heard though? Those same fans yearning for both sides of the ‘dream’ matchups in question to also share a conference affiliation.
Oregon fans have not been clamoring for showdowns with a Michigan or an Ohio State that would simultaneously threaten to upend the Big Ten standings.
No, they’d just enjoy playing unfamiliar high-caliber foes like those two programs on a somewhat regular basis — something they’ve actually done in recent memory via a home-and-home series with the Wolverines in the mid-aughts and attempted with the Buckeyes just a few years ago only for COVID to spoil what was supposed to be Oregon’s half of the deal in Eugene in 2020.
And in the spirit of exposing their fans to atypical opponents and/or locales beyond its traditional Pac-whatever footprint, the Ducks have done so about as well as any program I can think of in recent memory.
Over the last 20 years (including the aforementioned Michigan/Ohio State tilts) Oregon has played 20 games against then non-conference, fellow ‘Power Five’ opponents.
That group includes home-and-home series against Michigan, Oklahoma, Purdue, Tennessee, Virginia, Michigan State, and Nebraska, lone visits (to) Mississippi State and (from) Indiana, plus a trio of neutral site affairs versus LSU, Auburn and Georgia respectively.
In addition to it all the Ducks also went toe to toe (home and away) with Boise State amidst its heyday and faced other highly reputable ‘Group of Five’ programs like Fresno State and Utah — long before the latter would eventually join Oregon in the Pac-12 — on multiple occasions.
Oh, and they’ll be traveling to Lubbock, Texas in about a month to take on Texas Tech.
If giving people what they really want as college football fans was the actual objective as the sport continues to grow and evolve a school like Oregon is the perfect blueprint.
You don’t need to be in the same conference as another Power Five school in order to get them on your schedule and play the damn game. In the spirit of Oregon’s Nike-infused relationship — just do it.
A program like the Ducks is perfectly capable of annually giving its fans enticing non-conference matchups to watch/attend both on the road and at home while also maintaining (and thriving upon) the deep-rooted rivalries inherent to its history — whether they be motivated by an intraconference, geographic or some other uniquely confrontational relationship.
Another school set to abandon a conference and its collection of historically entrenched opponents come 2024 is Texas.
Funnily enough, at one point in time, well before both the adoption of the future 12-team playoff and Texas’ decision to join the SEC, it had agreed to play six different home-and-home series over a 13-year period with the following programs:
LSU (2019–20), Alabama (2022–23), Michigan (2024/2027), Ohio State (2025–26), Georgia (2028–29) and Florida (2030–31).
Oh, and for good measure the Longhorns would travel to Arkansas (2021) in its lone off year from those behemoth home-and-home showdowns.
This was actually a gutsy maneuver at the time given the limited scope of the then four-team playoff format but represented a growing movement for big-time programs like itself to begin increasingly scheduling marquee non-conference matchups — especially of the home-and-home variety.
Concerns over decreasing attendance had led many athletic directors to (shockingly) realize that fans desire fresh, fun non-conference matchups as opposed to paying premium season ticket prices just to be saddled with anywhere from 2–4 often indistinguishable FCS/directional opponents on a slate of home games.
Texas had no issue counteracting those concerns with its future scheduling despite the fact that at the time a monster non-conference matchup could easily be seen as an unnecessary risk to a Power Five program’s odds of playoff inclusion.
Meanwhile, another method for addressing the lack of interest in a spate of potentially ‘less compelling’ matchups has been the addition of a ninth conference game. In theory schools are then forced to sacrifice a non-conference cupcake and replace it with a more competitive/appealing intraconference foe.
But some leagues, like the Big Ten, have still been dissatisfied with those results — i.e. high profile schools being forced to play the likes of Maryland and Rutgers (two byproducts of its last go at realignment) every single season thanks to divisions.
So, guess what? Now every Power Five conference either has or is about to scrap the old division format altogether.
Hopefully in the SEC — which has yet to budge from an eight-game conference schedule — this means that Texas A&M will finally be able to persuade its parents at the league office to let Georgia come over to its house for a play date.
Not that the two are ‘best friends’ or anything.
After all, it’d be hard to form that sort of bond when you’ve only seen each other once (at Georgia in 2019) in the eleven years you’ve lived in the same neighborhood since the Aggie family moved in circa 2012.
- Texas A&M has played 89 total SEC games as a member of the league and not a single one of those has included a visit from the Bulldogs to College Station.
Oh yeah, and they aren’t on one another’s schedule this season either.
Seemingly in spite of itself, college football has actually made progress with some of the aforementioned changes — regardless of their oftentimes half-baked, untimely nature.
But the pro-realignment cabal would have you believe that shared mega-conference affiliations are the only way to consistently generate more of the appealing matchups that we’d all love to watch.
In reality fanbases could’ve been getting more of those all along (some even have!), and they certainly could have gotten them moving forward without actors within this sport greedily, and perhaps irrevocably cannibalizing certain elements that make it as great as it is.
So, whether it would be done via abolishing divisions, adding conference games or (gasps) schools themselves actually taking the initiative to schedule more novel/compelling non-conference foes on their own, the ‘solutions’ to the problem at hand were exceedingly achievable — and in a variety and/or combination of ways.
Instead, we’re left listening to a bunch of hoity toity commissioners and school officials extol the virtues of shared conference affiliations that none of the sport’s most truly important persons (players, coaches, fans) ever really asked for, much less needed.
And it’s that same lack of awareness/competence from the misguided bunch exerting its authority over college football that plays right into the third and final entry of this series of realignment-related content.
In that last feature I’ll be taking a deep dive into modern realignment’s documented impact on what could easily be considered the very lifeblood of the sport — rivalries — and the two-pronged fallout that has proven to come in the wake of these seismic changes.
(To read part three of the series, click here.)