Philip Larkin once wrote that all historians of jazz are either HG Wells or Edward Gibbon – ‘forward and higher, or decline and fall’. It is the relentless progress of Wells’ Outline of History or the inexorable fall of Gibbon’s Roman Empire.
The same is believed to be true of college football fans. There are millions who are no doubt thrilled with the recent news that the University of Southern California and the University of California, Los Angeles, will participate in the Big Ten Collegiate Athletics Conference in 2024, in defiance of more than a century of proud regional tradition and in spite of the logistical issues facing two West Coast teams entering a league geographically concentrated in the upper Midwest. (Among other adjustments, USC supporters will have to substitute Coors Light coffee if they want their team to lose to Wisconsin at 9:00 a.m. Pacific Time.)
For these fans, college football has been on an upward trajectory over the past two decades. Games are faster paced and higher scoring. Student athletes – free to take advantage of their names, images and likenesses and switch to other football programs without having to sit still for a year – are treated better.
The computer algorithm that determined the participants in the annual national championship game, the Bowl Championship Series, from 1998 to 2013, was, from this optimistic perspective, an improvement over the disorderly poll system of sports journalists who previously chose the best teams in the country. . Likewise, the College Football Playoff series, which started in 2014, seen through these rose-colored glasses, is better than the BCS, and it will be even better if there are eight or 10 or 16 teams instead of the current four, as it is virtually certainly will happen once ESPN’s contract to broadcast the games after the 2025 season expires.
So much for the Welles. The rest of us see a sport that is not only in decline but also becoming increasingly unrecognizable. The established identities of the Big Ten and other conferences—once organic groupings based on geography—disappear as regional accents, and well-intentioned but ultimately misguided rule changes make college football a de facto minor league for the National Football League, complete with free agency in NFL -style.
Like so many of history’s great tragedies—the Dissolution of the Monasteries under Henry VIII, the French Revolution, the end of ashtrays in automobiles—the decline of college football began with reasonable calls for reform. There was something really strange about the fact that Michigan and Nebraska, two undefeated soccer teams that had never played against each other, could both call themselves the 1997 national champions. It must be possible, fans thought, with a system that determines who the real champion is.
But it was precisely this insecurity that once gave college football some of its peculiar charm. To this day, at any dive bar in Michigan or Nebraska, you can meet fans who will lovingly provide detailed arguments as to why their team would have won 25 years ago if the two schools faced each other. (In 1998, a group of devoted Nebraska fans went so far as to write and record a script fake radio broadcast with the hypothetical matchup.)
These conversations were part of the sport’s appeal. They also belonged to a world where college football, in ways barely imaginable today, was a regional and somewhat parochial affair. Who cares if a bunch of newspapermen decided (as they did in 1985) that Oklahoma was No. 1 and that a Michigan team with an identical record and its own win in a big bowl game was No. 2? The main thing was winning rivalry matches and conference championships.
Rivalry often involved implicit class-based interests: urban versus rural, research versus land grant, upper-middle-class professionals and the extra-urban working-class versus middle-class suburbia. These games were played for old, often absurd trophies, such as the Old Brass Spittoon, which goes to the winner of the annual Indiana-Michigan State game.
Even as the conferences evolved slowly and occasionally welcomed additional members, they retained several personalities who seemed to have the power of European Union terroir-based food designations — the cornfed Big Ten, where all quarterbacks are named Brian; the aristocratic SEC; the rootin’ tootin’ Big 12; the Pac-12 and its Hollywood mystique. Post-season bowl games between top schools from rival conferences were not attempts to determine a consensus national champion, but a kind of loving cup into which all these different varieties could be poured.
Fans clamoring for reforms didn’t ask for a world where these game features would fade or disappear. But the two would go hand in hand, as the demand for a rationalized college football postseason coincided with the rise of cable television.
Cable TV wasn’t all bad. It meant that more games could be aired, including games that would never have reached the interested audience on broadcast television. Suddenly it was possible for a graduate of the University of Illinois living in Arizona to look at his alma mater.
But the not-so-small fortunes schools received from cable deals, especially those with specialty channels like the Big Ten Network, should have been the source of more ambivalence. Greater TV revenues meant more resources for recruiting, facilities and training. (The oldest members of the Big Ten conference received an average of $54 million each from the Big Ten network in 2020.) Schools that attended conferences that were less savvy in their dealings with broadcasters, such as the Big 12, were the only large conferences without a dedicated cable channel were clearly at a disadvantage.
Which brings us back to USC and UCLA’s decision to join the Big Ten, which followed a similar move by Oklahoma and Texas, which will leave the Big 12 and join the SEC by 2025. In any case, the motive is clear: adding schools with large fan bases in remote parts of the country means more television money† This is a well-known gambling game. The Big Ten welcomed Maryland and Rutgers as 13th and 14th members ten years ago in hopes of bringing their cable network to television packages in the metropolitan areas of Washington and New York.
There is no reason to believe that this downward trend can be prevented. It will probably end with the elimination of traditional bowl games and the creation of two regionally subdivided super conferences – not unlike the NFC and AFC in professional football – whose respective champions, after a two or three round playoff, will be included in the college equivalent of the Super Bowl.
Many fans, as I said, will welcome such a system. I’m not one of them. Indiana University, which the most lose in the history of college football, is as much a part of the history of the Big Ten as, say, the powerhouse Ohio State. A world where Indiana doesn’t lose to Ohio every year seems absurd and even somewhat illogical to me. Born through years of slow, organic development, these teams in their old configurations should be the subject of harmless stalwart devotion from fans, not subject to the relentless pseudo-efficient business logic of endless acquisition.
Matthew Walther (@matthewwalther) is the editor of The Lamp, a Catholic literary magazine, a media fellow at the Institute for Human Ecology at the Catholic University of America, and a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times.
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