Big 12’s “win” amid conference realignment chaos still feels like a crushing loss

A few years ago former TCU, South Carolina and Texas A&M athletic director Eric Hyman flatly said of the future of college athletics, “Nothing is gonna’ stop college football.”

Around that same time my now 90-year-old father said, “Son, it’s all going to become horse racing.”

They are both right.

Our thirst for football, and the game’s built-in excuse to drink and eat to excess, coupled with the expansion of gambling in America, has moved college football to places we could not have predicted 40 years ago at the strength of a tsunami.

(What can stop a tsunami?)

Other than the number of legs, there is little difference between watching, and betting on, the college football game at Roos Field in Cheney, Wash. and watching, and betting on, the horse race at Eagle Farm, in Brisbane, Australia.

The biggest winner of the 2023 offseason remains the Big 12 Conference, and yet the league’s win feels like a loss for a sport that so many of us can’t help but love.

On Friday, not long after the University of Oregon and University of Washington announced its intentions to jump from the S.S. Pac-12 to the Big 10, the Big 12 secured its immediate future when Arizona, Arizona State and Utah accepted an invite to join.

The madness of the geography with these re-shaped leagues underscores that both professional, and top college, sports do not care at all about the ticket-buying fan. It’s entirely about the TV viewer.

If you are TCU, Oklahoma State, Kansas and the rest, celebrate this announcement hard; Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark did his job well by buying his once-dead league a few years’ worth of stability.

Think five years.

Forget the laughable myth of the purity of the Division I student athlete, and there is just something about all of this that feels dirty, disgusting and just so wrong.

Also, nothing is going to stop college football. Not concussions. Not the transfer portal. Not TV. Not NIL. Not the NCAA. Nothing.

“The old question, ‘How long would it take TV money to destroy college football?’ Maybe we’re here. Maybe we’re here,” Washington State coach Jake Dickert told the local media after a practice this week in Pullman, Wash. “It is unthinkable to think that we are here today.”

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Destroy?

No. Nothing is going to stop college football.

Change?

Yes.

There are many culprits in the alterations to a sport that America fell in love with before the NFL, the NBA, NHL, MLS and everything but Major League Baseball.

What expanded the sport to living rooms, and parking lots, all over the country is the same toy that “destroyed it.”

Go back to the 1980s, when this slow process started.

Point fingers at Notre Dame. At NBC. At the U.S. Supreme Court for its 1984 ruling in favor of Georgia and Oklahoma and giving the power of negotiating TV contracts to schools rather than the NCAA.

That’s when the real money started to rain, which also coincided with the rise of cable TV, and specifically ESPN.

Point figures at Penn State. Point all 10 fingers and 10 toes at former SEC commissioner Roy Kramer (RIP, Roy).

There are so many others guilty of “doing their job,” which is to act in the best interest of themselves, and whom they represent; to ruthlessly pursue more money to cover the obscene costs associated with the failed successful model that is college sports.

You will notice that the same coaches and administrators complaining about these changes spurred by TV aren’t saying much about the money necessary to cover their six and seven-figure salaries. Probably a coincidence.

College football has always been, and will always be, a top-heavy pyramid run by the select few. Conference realignment doesn’t change that.

The stripping of the Pac-12 Conference is simply a horrible look. College football is better with a Pac-12 that matters.

Friday’s announcement is as the direct result of horrendous leadership on the part of the Pac-12, as well as its core-member schools. Of a league that collectively refused to “read the room.”

Friday’s announcement is a continuation of a trend that began when South Carolina and Arkansas joined the SEC, in 1992. It was the same time Penn State joined the Big 10.

Conference-jumping isn’t new, and what happened Friday is nothing but a win for the Big 12 Conference.

Just don’t delude yourself about what also happened Friday. This is not the end of anything.

This trend is not going to stop.

And “nothing is gonna’ stop college football.”