With apologies to Bob Dylan, the times, they are a-changin’.
Especially in college football. And not for the better.
The seismic news last week was the announcement that Oklahoma and Texas plan to bolt the Big 12 to join the Southeastern Conference, a move that would create a 16-team super-conference.
The SEC already is the best and most powerful football conference in the country, having won 11 of the last 15 national championships, so the rich would get richer.
It also would likely mean the end of the Big 12, leaving its eight remaining members scrambling to find new homes.
USA Today predicted some of the winners and losers should it come to pass. Ironically, Texas made the losers list. The Longhorns have had more coaches (three) than playoff appearances (zero) since 2009 and have had trouble competing in the less-powerful Big 12, bruising the collective outsized ego of its wealthy donors.
While the thought of watching Texas get slapped around by Alabama, LSU, Georgia and Florida is appealing, the potential move is just another money grab that continues to reshape college athletics. Football is king and schools are chasing television checks, with other sports along for the ride.
Gone are the days when conferences were aligned geographically – teams in the Atlantic Coast Conference were actually along the Atlantic Ocean, the SEC was comprised of teams from the Southeast, the Southwest Conference had teams located in the Southwest and the Pac-8 Conference had schools in states along the Pacific Ocean. (That changed in 1976 when Arizona and Arizona State were added, creating the Pac-10, later to become the Pac-12.)
Back then you had the Big 10 (which now has 14 teams) primarily in the Rust Belt and Midwest, and the Big 8 (now the Big 12, which has only 10 teams for now) in the heartland from Missouri to Colorado and down to Oklahoma. Natural rivalries – Missouri versus Kansas, for instance – were developed over decades.
However, that all began to change in earnest in 2005 when three Big East Conference teams – Boston College, Miami and Virginia Tech – moved to the ACC.
(The Southwest Conference, which for most of its history was comprised of Arkansas and seven schools from Texas, began to decline in the 1980s, due primarily to NCAA recruiting violations by numerous schools, punctuated by SMU receiving the “death penalty” for the 1987 and 1988 seasons for its transgressions. The league broke up for good in 1996.)
But the realignment wave that impacted every Power 5 conference between 2010 and 2012 came when the Big Ten announced in 2009 that it would begin exploring expansion possibilities before ultimately adding Nebraska (from the Big 12) in 2011, and three years later, Maryland and Rutgers. (Penn State joined in 1990.)
Playoff expansion, NIL rights and immediate transfer eligibility already had shaken the college football world this year. Future realignment could be the biggest of all the changes.
Jesse Spector of Deadspin laments the ongoing game of conference musical chairs and offers this plan for four, 14-team leagues based on geography, with television money being distributed equally.
Of course, it makes too much sense to happen.