Say a prayer for what's happened to college football thanks to realignment

The longest seven-plus months of the year are over. College football is back, serving up its usual dishes of color, pageantry, partisanship, thrills, and, the Chef’s Special for this season, poignancy. The sport as we have known it is taking a defeat lap, running a going-out-of-fun sale, staging a season-long funeral procession for the Pac-12 Conference, which continues to be designated as one of the – hold your laughter, please – Power Five.

College football has survived a lot of trials over 154 years, and it probably will survive this one.

I hesitated to even bring up this topic for fear of sounding like a hey-kid-get-off-my-gridiron guy. I don’t feel cranky. I’m a little sad and a lot in disbelief that college football has performed this DIY lobotomy.

The sport that counts tradition as one of its grandest attributes just lopped off more than a century of it. The sport that counts regionalism as one of its greatest strengths just dissolved football on the West Coast like Mentos in a Diet Coke.

The worst thing, and that’s saying something given what has happened to the Pac-12-10-9-7-4 since June 2022, is that the league died an unnecessary death. Is anyone outside of the athletic offices of USC and UCLA happier with the outcome than with what they had? Is anyone happy with the state of college football, period? Anyone out of the Big Ten or the Big 12 who thinks that the Great Realignment is good for the sport? Even the Big 12 commissioner, Brett Yormark, apologized to the Pac-12 for what his conference did.

Great Realignment, by the way, is church-lobby language for this abomination, this abdication of tradition, this monument to fear and selfishness and greed and looking out for No. 1. I can tell you who they’re not looking out for – the athletes in all those sports. Mick Cronin of UCLA is the latest coach to say as much.

Long list of villains transformed college football

Apportioning blame for this city dump of a result doesn’t make anyone feel much better. You can open the Field Guide to College Football Villains to just about any page and find someone worthy of your bile.

• The checkwriters at FOX and ESPN, emulating Roman emperors as they nod toward which Christians to save and which to send to the lions.
  
• The Pac-12 presidents who turned down a good TV contract last year because – I hope I can finish typing this without my eyes rolling out of their sockets – a business school professor suggested they could get a lot more.
  
• USC president Carol Folt, who pursued the Big Ten’s money and severed the Pac-12’s oxygen line in the chase.
  
• Texas chairman of the board of regents Kevin Eltife, who abandoned football mediocrity in the Big 12 for the SEC – and convinced Oklahoma to go with him.
  
• And everyone’s favorite punching doll, former Pac-12 commissioner Larry Scott. He exacerbated his bad bet on the Pac-12 Network by running the conference with an imperious hand.

That is but a partial list, which reveals the real problem here. Pull one thread from this patchwork quilt of avarice and pretty soon you find yourself reeling back in time.

Two decades ago, the ACC cannibalized the Big East, which had been made vulnerable without the presence of Penn State. Nearly two decades before that, the Nittany Lions balked at forming a football conference with their traditional eastern foes.

Then you’re back to 1984 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the NCAA must return ownership of television rights to individual schools.

No one is saying the Supremes made a bad decision. In the last four decades, college football has exploded in popularity. To name one achievement, the accompanying dollars funded the Title IX wave that made American women dominant in so many Olympic sports.

The accompanying dollars also created the arms race that bankrupted the industry, morally if not otherwise. What we are left with are the tatters of what maintained a hold on the American public: rivalries tossed aside, history and tradition ignored.

Can it be saved?

Not to mention that you can count the number of programs that benefitted competitively from conference hopping on one hand and still have enough fingers left to eat your halftime popcorn.

Nebraska left the Big 12 for the witness protection program known as the Big Ten. Texas A&M is 0-for-the-SEC. Boston College, Syracuse and Pitt have one ACC championship among them. There are two dominant teams in the Big Ten East and neither of them is Penn State.

The teams that have realigned successfully – Utah, TCU – took a step up to their new league and kept climbing. Maybe there’s a lesson in that. If there is, you can be sure the college football industry won’t learn it unless there’s money involved.

Can this sport be saved? From itself? Sure.

Everyone will shrug, shake their head with disappointment, and go on with the business of beating their archrival. Except in the Pac-12, where rivalries and all that go with them have entered hospice. When the league takes its last breath sometime next spring, the cause of death will be foul play. Week Zero is here. College football is here. When you lay out your tailgate spread, save a spot for the Kleenex.