College Football's Spite Season

The big story in college football this offseason has been the rapid rearrangement of conferences.  It looks like a small child has shaken out a bin with action figures and all of a sudden there is an unexpected summit that appears to be happening between go-bots and a few ninja turtle villains.  Ask any random bystander what conference a middling and unexceptional Power Five program is in currently and they will not be able to tell you.  But that would be a fiendish trick! Because the funniest part of the realignment, one marked by rapacious raids by other conferences for plum programs, erstwhile conference-mates stabbing each other in back, hasty midnight meetings involving provosts, and apparently zero consideration whatsoever for non-football athletes who now will spend a large portion of their college experience in various regional airports is that none of that realignment has happened yet.  

 

The Big Ten and SEC carve up the college football landscape

For one glorious year, the programs that have just spent the past several months in a Hobbesian battle over television revenue are all stuck with the other programs they have fucked over, been fucked over by, or attempted to fuck over and failed in the same conferences they have been in more or less for one football season of grinning through gritted teeth and handing over championship trophies to teams that are already on their way out while boosters either jump up and down firing guns in celebration or jump and down firing guns in gutted agony.

College football anger is usually based on normal and understandable things such as the results of a game that was played 45 years before 99% of the undergraduates in either school were born or the way that people from a certain part of the state park like this while people from the other side of the state park like that.  But there is possibility for real animus at a conference game for the first time among high-level university and conference bureaucrats who will have to look each other in the eye after their colleagues had just secretly conspired to cost their athletic departments millions of dollars and even cost some of them their phony-baloney jobs.  Imagine George Kliavkoff, the (extremely) current president of the still for this year extant PAC 12 conference, having to hand over a trophy to USC or Washington or one of the other programs that will leave the conference a smoldering nub.  I am not saying it is likely, but there has to be a small possibility that Kliavkoff shakes Lincoln Riley's hand and then hits him with a folding chair while the president of Oregon State's music hits before she puts a UCLA dean through a table.

Conference realignment is not anything new in college football.  As long as the sport has existed, conferences and schools have contorted themselves into whatever configuration could make them an extra buck or two.  The only reason why this summer's feeding frenzy feels more grotesque and perverse than college football's business as usual is the matter of scale.  

Conference alignments at least before the 2010s seemed to at least attempt to gesture at regionalism, rivalry, and, at least in the case of the Big Ten, some sort of academic credential, which was important to the conference for reasons I have never been able to fathom.  But then the big money started rolling in from proprietary networks and the Big Ten and its constituent university presidents all immediately turned into the first half hour of Requiem for a Dream and before long they added Nebraska, invented something called "Legends and Leaders" and then the second half of Requiem for a Dream kicked in and Rutgers and Maryland were now in the conference.  These Big Ten moves caused the entire college football ecosystem to go insane.  Texas attempted to strongarm its own conference and then ended up creating its own college football cable network, a 24 hour network dedicated to one 12-13 football games and then 20 hours of Mack Brown's Slacks Wardrobe and Do You Remember Vince Young programming.   

 

Classic Longhorn Network programming. Unfortunately, the Longhorn Network is another casualty of realignment, and Texas fans will have to get their Bevo content on the internet.

The Great Realignment of 2023 is an extraordinary accomplishment in our Age of Disruption: it is a massive change that no one wants, done for reasons that no one cares about, and is being celebrated by bureaucrats who made it possible like they have split the atom for the first time by making it harder to know what channel a football game is on.  Fans do not care about whether a game is on the Fox or ESPN suite of networks and increasingly arcane streaming services-- they do care about playing the same teams they have been playing for more than a century.  The concept of "conference identity" is admittedly a very stupid and nebulous idea to attach to an arbitrary grouping of college football programs for purposes of revenue enhancement, but then again attaching empty signifiers to sports teams is pretty much the entire business model of big money college athletics.

I doubt enough many people will be so pissed off about conference realignment that they will stop watching the games.  In the end, the games are what people care about, and next year they will just start happening in odd and unexpected configurations.  By now, most people realize that "tradition" is something for the TV packages and the glossy mailers asking for donations, a phony marketing canard not unlike the infinite number of roadside hamburger stands offering "world famous chili" and not anything that anyone in charge considers real.  Most people consider the Michigan-Ohio State game the most glittering prize in the Big Ten, but quietly take aside one of the conference's head honchos in their meat restaurant-adjacent Rosemont citadel and watch what happens when you tell them you could kill it in the name of an annual Ohio State-Alabama game that only airs on phones with special exclusive Big Ten data plans and they will build a warehouse to house the very strongly-worded "you, sir" letters from Michigan alumni.

And yet in 2023 none of this has happened yet.  Everything is exactly where we left it last year as sour teams attempt to either play out the string in doomed conferences that they have themselves doomed or are on a team that's about to be shunted to some lesser run conference or left completely in limbo.  And I'm not sure how much the players on each team care about it or what effect it will have on the games, but I can't imagine the amount of money that realignment is costing certain programs will not result in something incredibly funny happening.