Conference realignment continues in college football, as the sport continues to process the chaos it has long deserved. Former USC coach Pete Carroll, whose Trojans teams ruled the Pac-12, was asked by reporters on Sunday to comment on the implosion of the conference, which lost five more teams on Friday.
“I don’t have enough information to comment clearly,” Carroll told reporters on Sunday. “But I’m really disappointed. I would think that there’s a lot of people, a lot of fans that are disappointed, too. I know that it’s a financial turn that they do and they’ve got to make their decisions and all, but there’s something about the tradition of it that gets lost and I don’t know where they recapture that, I don’t know how they recapture the traditions that have been there so long.
“It’s not just our conference out here, it’s around the country too. I really don’t understand. I’m pretty disappointed in college football right now. Just in general. Just disappointed it’s gone the way it’s gone. With all of the stuff that is happening, I hope they can get it right. And it comes out way better than maybe I can imagine it in my limited capacity here. I just kind of like the tradition of it, that I feel like we are missing. I don’t know how you recapture that.”
You can’t. The age of the superconference is here, with the Big 10 (now, 18) and the SEC vying for supremacy while the ACC and Big 12 jockey to command the second tier.
Money is at the root of all of it, as it always is. The fact that players can finally earn some has thrown the whole sport into a blender, with the end result being a geographic melange stretching from the Pacific Northwest to bucolic Piscataway, all in one mega-conference.
How much of it really matters? A handful of programs will run the sport, as they have for years now. And everyone will continue to feed at the billion-dollar trough except the players, who finally have gotten a chance to get a taste — and who now face having Congress restrict not coaching salaries or lavish facility expenditures but the ability to the players to get some of what they have been denied for decades, all in the cockeyed name of allowing the consumer to enjoy watching “amateur athletes” compete.
As I’ve written before, college football is experiencing the chaos it deserves. And it only has itself to blame for establishing and maintaining an inherently corrupt system that specifically denied the players any meaningful chance to legitimately make some money.
