Oregon, Washington to Big Ten: Another Dollar Sign of the Times

Shame, Shame. Get used to it. They're not your college sports any more. They belong to B1G & SEC money-worshippers.

 Who’s celebrating the announcement that Oregon and Washington will inflate the already bloated Big Ten to 18 teams!—including UCLA and USC?

Maybe some bean-counters who have turned college sports into their own little money-grubbing, power-grabbing fiefdom. They’ve paved an athletic paradise and put up an ATM.

This is no cause for joy in actual Big Ten country, where people want to compete against teams they’ve been competing against for decades.

Now we’re going to have Oregon-Rutgers masquerading as a Big Ten game. And meanwhile, what about all of those marvelous games in the Michigan-Ohio State-Penn State-Michigan State sector? Or the Wisconsin-Iowa-Minnesota troika?

Gone with the money-sucking wind. . . 

Nor is this a cause for celebration on the West Coast, where people are experiencing the gut-wrenching end of the road for what had been a marvelous part of college athletics—the Pac-12, also known as the Conference of Champions.

I'll also just throw this out there: What if they're wrong? What if these two mega-conferences don't generate mega-TV-revenue because people don't want to watch watered-down made-for-TV rivalries? What if the joke's on the 18-school Big Ten and the 16-school SEC?

Pause for dark laughter.

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For years, I have thought the college football world would boil down to four super-conferences. But I thought the Pac-12 would be a survivor. The Big 12 seemed more likely to be the casualty. Or maybe an unwieldy ACC.

That said, this could have been done in a much more orderly fashion.

If the Big Ten wanted to conquer the television-revenue world with the Pac-12, why not keep two leagues and merely partner in a combined multi-channel network? Keep your Big Ten and Pac-12 leagues and channels, and bargain with CBS, ESPN, FOX and the streaming crazies for top dollar.

Keep your rivalries and your sanity and your self-respect.

But no. Now we have an 18-team Big Ten that will make Big Ten and Pac-12 followers long for the old days.

There is plenty of blood on the SEC’s hands, too. The addition of Texas and Oklahoma was as deplorable as the Big Ten’s West Coast invasion. And it basically forced the Big Ten’s hand.

If you want a deep-dive into history, I always thought Penn State belonged as an anchor in a Big East with Pitt, Syracuse, Boston College and other geographically correct rivals, That misstep was a product of shortsighted Big East leaders who thought they were just a basketball league. That enabled the Big Ten to change the rules of the game, a game that continued with Nebraska, Maryland and Rutgers,

Along the way, the SEC further eroded the sanity and sanctity of college athletics by acquiring Missouri and Texas A&M.

And now we have this. . . A world where the gap between the Haves in the Big Ten and SEC and the Have-Nots, especially institutions like Washington State and Oregon State, Cal and Stanford—and we’ll see about Kansas and Oklahoma State in the ever-changing Big 12—is an uncertain tale of betrayal.

Oh, and by the way, how long before schools that don’t bring enough to the television-numbers table are gerrymandered out of the Big Ten and SEC? Vanderbilt, Northwestern, and maybe the Mississippi and Indiana schools, ought to watch their backs.

That said, this whole business will shake out eventually. It will be a different world, but college sports fans either will adapt or turn away.

Honestly, it is the nature of professional sports. For the longest time, Brooklyn baseball fans felt betrayed by the Dodgers when they made money grab to Los Angeles—which was, by the way, an excellent business decision.

Same deal with the Braves’ long ago abandonment from Milwaukee. I only mention this because I know geezers who still yearn for the Milwaukee Braves.

And frankly, there are times when I think wistfully about the NHL’s Original Six of my childhood. A six-team league where you could know everything and everybody, where the traditions were wonderful and the rivalries were fierce? Sign me up.

And so, in a way, it’s understandable that college sports is following the same path, although with far more clumsy bloodletting and overt money worshipping.

In professional sports, it was sad, but understandable.

The problem with the Big Ten and SEC betrayals is, we didn’t know how far college sports would go to chase dollars.

We know now.