Scooter Hobbs column: All big, one happy conference

Published 10:00 am Saturday, August 5, 2023

You don’t have to get off my lawn, but hear me out anyway.

Oh, and by the way, enjoy the upcoming college football season.

It will look a little different this year but this is the last time it will at least resemble the game you grew up and came to love and sometimes hate and mostly sweat bullets over.

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College football started spinning out of control when the universities all apparently shut down their geography departments.

So now — the latest — on a Friday that began encouragingly when it looked as if the Pac-12 might just crawl back onto life support, possibly even significance, the Oregon Nikes and Washington Huskies will join the Big Ten, which still includes Rutgers just for reference’s sake.

As I understand it, although there are still some pawns to be maneuvered, that pretty well signals taps for the Pac-12.

Good for the Big Ten, I guess.

That’s the game that’s being played these days. The B1G gets to take a bow. Well done, sir.

Some pretty good scraps are still left on the table and surely they’ll be distributed and find good homes. But Washington-Oregon, which seemed to have come out of nowhere, was the big one. It likely will eliminate one of the Power Five conferences.

It’s enough to make you dizzy.

But one last semi-recognizable season of college football can’t get here quickly enough.

All it is now is one big game of Risk, played not on a board game, but with equal parts survival and world domination in the back rooms of schools and conference offices.

Grab, grab, grab, at lightning speed, it seems. The more the merrier, bigger is better — more lucrative (on paper) anyway.

You don’t have to like it. You may have noticed that I don’t.

I don’t know what the Big Ten wants with Washington and Oregon, but surely it will think of something. It’s almost as if these mergers and acquisitions, like the old dot.com days, have become almost knee-jerk reactions.

Meanwhile, the Southeastern Conference, in a rare fit of stability, has been fairly quiet during the latest uproar.

Likely a smokescreen.

It probably can’t afford to remain that way, even though by most parameters it seems to the model of a power conference. Well, it can sit pat, but it probably won’t.

Does it have to save face? Or at least answer the B1G’s latest maneuver?

I guess Huskies and Ducks puts the Big Ten (ignore the number; 10 is no more relevant to it than “Southeast” is to Oklahoma) soon to be at 18 schools.

The SEC, as a conference, was already full to the brim after adding Texas A&M and Missouri. If that didn’t overload the system, you had to figure getting to 16 schools with Oklahoma and Texas would do the trick.

It doesn’t seem like any SEC we ever knew.

And we’ll probably never know it again.

But I’m done with precautionary tales.

I’ve thrown up my hands.

If this is what they want, if this is really what they think makes college football better, then by all means go for it.

Forget tradition, history, tailgating and marching bands.

Just go grab all the schools you can.

Sixteen isn’t enough, maybe not even 18.

Surely some ACC schools are ripe for the picking. Get a handful here, another there. Yo, Florida State, come on down. Miami, you too. Think outside the box. Go grab, grab the New Zealand All Blacks and some Ottawa Redblacks while you’re at it.

If you don’t the B1G will.

But does it really matter? Are these really conferences?

Not really. Just too many schools, many of which hardly know each other, stuffed in the same sack.

But once you crack 20-team conferences, at least you get back to divisions — four of them per conference.

Sounds a lot like the NFL, with lesser players and fewer of them.

Scooter Hobbs covers LSU athletics. Email him at scooter.hobbs@americanpress.com