An alien landscape

But this story isn't about what you think it may be.

Two of the classic* members of the Mid-American Conference (including the winner, my alma mater) battled for the league title. That may be a rarity in college football going forward.

Being from Ohio, to me there were two sports worth following as a kid. One was baseball, but I write a whole Substack about that so I won’t go into that here. The other was football, and there was a neat division about things: Friday nights were for high school, Saturday afternoon for college, and Sunday afternoon for the pros. (Back in the day, Monday night was appointment football for fans, too, thanks to the talents of Frank Gifford, “Dandy” Don Meredith, and Howard Cosell.)

And it was nicely and rigidly divided and predictable as well: my high school was in the (now-former) Northern Border League with eight other schools I could rattle off from memory. (Most of them followed to the Northwest Ohio Athletic League where my school currently resides.) As for the pros, I could always count on Detroit being on Channel 11 and Cleveland being on Channel 13, usually at the same time on Sunday so I would have to flip back and forth to avoid the commercials.

As for college football, we had the Big 10 and its little brother, the Mid-American Conference, or MAC. Toledo was ground zero for the Michigan-Ohio State rivalry - back in the day they were the Big Two among the Little Eight of the rest of the Big 10 (Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan State, Minnesota, Northwestern, Purdue, and Wisconsin), but it also had its share of representation in the MAC as Toledo-Bowling Green was one of its big rivalries along with Miami vs. Ohio University and Western Michigan-Central Michigan. (The others were Ball State, Kent State, Eastern Michigan, and - sometimes - Northern Illinois.) And you couldn’t sleep on the MAC, either: Toledo put together a three-season win streak of 35 games from 1969-71 and Miami had a AP Top 10 team in 1974, with a run of three straight postseason top 15 teams from 1973-75. (In two of those seasons the Redskins knocked off an SEC team in the Tangerine Bowl, and in the third they took out an independent future SEC school in that game, winning three straight when the MAC champ had an automatic bid.)

So as a kid I saw just about as many MAC games as Big Ten games, since ABC’s college football package used to regularly feature MAC games on a regional basis. And, of course, I went to a MAC school down in Oxford, Ohio - the title winners above who play in the Cure Bowl this afternoon.

But back then diehard college football fans could easily rattle off the competitors in each of the major conferences such as the PAC-8, Big 8, Southwest Conference, SEC, and ACC as well as the Big 10. There were also a number of independents from all over the country who got notice. It was predictable, and you had great annual non-conference rivalries as well.

But along came big money and that fucked it all up.

I think the first inkling of what was to come was the Big Ten adding Penn State in 1990. Not only did it change the conference to an eleven-team league (even though they opted not to change the name to the Big Eleven) but it also picked off one of the major independents in the Northeast. Eventually they added Nebraska (formerly of the Big 8, that became the Big 12 later on when the Southwest Conference dissolved), then poached Maryland from the ACC and Rutgers from the Big East to further establish an East Coast presence. In 2024 the Big 10 will add four more schools (Oregon, UCLA, USC, and Washington) scavenged from the ruins of what became the PAC-12, meaning Maryland at Washington will become just another conference game instead of an every once-in-a-blue-moon intersectional treat.

Out of the initial conferences I alluded to, then, we now have the PAC-2 (Oregon State and Washington State were the ugly stepsisters no one else wanted), Big 12 (which expands to 16 teams for 2024 by snatching four other erstwhile members of the former PAC-12), the 16-team SEC, the 17-team ACC (gaining two of the former PAC-12 combatants to become a coast-to-coast league as well), and, for 2024, the 18-team Big 10 that picks up four former PAC-12 schools of its own. The Southwest Conference is long gone, its members scattered to the wind - three to the SEC, four to the Big 12, and one apiece to the ACC and American Athletic Conference (AAC.)

At this time, there are 133 schools which play in the Football Bowl Subdivision, or FBS. In just the four megaconferences described above, there will be 67 teams, and by and large they, along with independent Notre Dame, are considered on a higher plane than the other 65 who mainly toil away in the MAC, Sun Belt, WAC, Mountain West, and AAC.

Given a $917 million pool to work with, if you look at who the top-paid NIL (name, image, likeness) players are, they’ve become millionaires without hardly cracking a book, and oftentimes hit the transfer portal once the season’s over looking for a better deal. And since the major conferences are awash in TV money moreso than the MACs of the world, they’re naturally going to begin taking more and more of the best players into the transfer portal. It was such a big deal to Miami, who wants to repeat as MAC champions, that they went to social media to celebrate the players who are staying, including their award-winning kicker.

At some point this madness has to stop. There is a saturation point for college football we will eventually reach, and the idea of playing a late-season MAC game in November on a weeknight will eventually go by the wayside. Is it really good for the schools to present themselves at a mostly-empty stadium to watch, say, 2-8 Akron go up against 4-6 Eastern Michigan when it’s a chilly night at “The Factory” (called such because of its gray turf field)? I get that ESPN needs content but they way people are cutting the cable there may not be an ESPN in ten years.

It’s getting to the point that the Power Four conferences may just decide to monopolize the money and cut the others out. Instead of Akron-EMU on a weeknight you may get a non-prime Big 12 matchup like Kansas State-Houston or a lesser light Big 10 game, perhaps that long-awaited Rutgers-UCLA tilt. The other conferences may as well go to FCS, where they have real playoffs and probably spend a heckuva lot less on athletics. Remember, football is the revenue sport so those of you on the volleyball team better hope the money is there to fly across the country for your conference tilt.

College football has become the sport of the casual fan. How many people who yell “Roll Tide” or “Geaux Tigers,” or have the bumpersticker “Directions to Columbus: South Until You Smell It, East Until You Step In It” have ever been to those respective campuses? Obviously I have a rooting interest in my alma mater, but aside from the dislike of a school whose fans Misplace the letter M for a week in November, I just don’t get into it that much anymore.

What made a great sport special has yielded to the almighty dollar, and we’re all the poorer for it.

*I originally wrote “charter” because I thought they were but Miami joined a couple years in, back in 1948. Toledo is a charter member.

Until next time, remember you can Buy Me a Coffee since I have a page there.