I didn’t know. I’m not sure many others knew, either.
When was our college football life so bad? When did it suddenly need major surgery? When did fiscal responsibility become irrelevant? When did tradition prove worth throwing into a landfill?
When did college football fans in Los Angeles start to covet Denver? Is the possible end, in some form or fashion, of Texas-Texas A&M or Oklahoma-Nebraska actually being Texas-Texas A&M and Oklahoma-Nebraska a good thing? Do we yearn for Texas-Washington State and Colorado-Arizona?
Has the economy turned around and nobody told anybody, so drives for conference schools — and, uh, those people called “fans who pay money out of the wazoo” — become flights for every blessed game?
Are the few lucid people involved really happy pretty much telling every coach and player not on a football team to go take a flying leap? Do we expect cable companies not to jack up rates for conference networks as all this insanity prevails?
Was there a rally in Seattle that fans wanted to watch Texas A&M play Texas? Did networks suddenly find piles of cash when they were looking to renegotiate contracts they overpaid for?
Did Rick Neuheisel look at a map when he said that Colorado is a good geographic fit for the Pac-10?
Do folks think that just because the Pac-TBA has divisions that it won’t be costly to travel? Is Oklahoma State’s tennis team ready for the ride to Seattle?
Is bigger automatically better? Are people having that much trouble seeing their team on TV?
All of this expansion is extraordinarily disheartening on so many fronts, led by the fact it’s fixing what isn’t really broken.
The populace’s hypocrisy remains comical.
On one hand, people criticize college football for allegedly ignoring the money of a playoff for the BCS. On the other hand, people grumble two sentences later about greed and doing it just for money.
When filmmakers start thinking about “Wall Street III”, they’d better figure out who is going to play commissioners and athletics directors, because those people are making Gordon Gekko, that original movie’s sleazy protagonist, physically excited that everybody’s coming over to his side.
“Greed is good.”
Do athletics departments need more money to blow? Ahh, it’s OK for state institutions to misspend on toys and absurd overstaffing, but the government writes a legitimate check for something — and the banks cashes those checks no matter the party writing them, and both parties have written some wacky checks — and it’s un-American and worth shooting people over.
Wow.
When Barry Switzer is a voice of reason with his observation that Nebraska in the Big Ten doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, it’s time to pay a little attention.
“I hate to think we (Oklahoma) would lose what we have and what we built for so long,” he told The Associated Press. “Finances are a factor, and sometimes you have to give up tradition for finances.”
Well, yeah, if you mismanage finances, you must forego common sense to make up for incompetence.
In the name of sanity, hope that the Big 12 stays alive, maybe by swiping — yes, I hate to — Tulsa or UTEP.
And hope that everybody pounds Notre Dame football like a piñata.
We’re losing much of what makes college sports — regardless of the field of competition — so great. There’s too much talk of money, which thus makes it all smell too professional.
A wrecking ball wasn’t needed to improve college sports, and rarely does greed not kill or maim what is good.
Contact Michael A. Lough at 744-4626 or mlough@macon.com.
