As college football continues to confront the chaos it deserves, some programs are finding things to be more chaotic than others.
Commanders coach Ron Rivera, who played college football at Cal, is concerned about the impact of the latest seismic conference shift on West Coast college football.
“I’m really disappointed,” Rivera said Saturday, via Ben Standig of TheAthletic.com. “My concern is West Coast football has lost its prominence and the primary West Coast teams that helped bring a lot of prominence have left a lot of people high and dry. Imagine the outrage if that happened to the SEC or ACC.”
Would there be “outrage” though? Most people don’t seem to care about the latest re-shuffling of the college football deck. The decisions were always driven by money, and the relatively new ability of college football players to make a little money of their own has caused the programs with the most money behind them to find a path toward each other.
It’s an ugly process from which a new age of college football will be birthed. If, in the end, the efforts spark a shift that has more than three or four teams run the show every year, it will be good for college football. There will be clear and obvious tiers — and the top tier will hopefully be bigger than Alabama, Georgia, Clemson, and Ohio State.
The reality is that plenty of schools, from Cal to West Virginia and many others in between, will officially be blocked from ever truly competing for a championship. But, frankly, the second- and third-tier schools are already shut out of the party.
The best outcome would be for college football to look like English professional soccer, with multiple levels from which, in theory, programs can rise or fall. The determining factor in promotion or relegation won’t be on-field success, however, but cold, hard cash.
Basically, college football has pivoted from socialism in certain conferences to capitalism across the board. It might not be pretty, but it’s inherently American.
