Pangaea: a supercontinent believed to have once connected
nearly all of the earth’s landmasses together.
A concept we learned about in some history class in grade
school, pangaea occurred some 300 to 200 million years ago. That’s a long time ago. Yet, somehow one of sports’ biggest
entities, NCAA Division I athletics, is going backward, reverting to a Pangaea
of its own after years of separation.
The age of superconferences is rapidly coming full steam
ahead. The Pac-10 and Big 10 expansion was just the beginning, as most of us
knew. Syracuse and Pittsburgh are the latest jumpers, bringing a Northeastern
flair to Tobacco Road. But as evolution and natural phases of the earth broke
up a large mass, college football is bucking that process- and it sure as heck
doesn’t feel natural.
When that one large continent broke into a bunch of
different ones, they developed their own cultures, ways of life based on unique
factors like geography. College athletics’ unnaturally greedy presidents and
conference commissioners are doing just the opposite, bringing their
geographically misaligned, culturally different entities together.
Conferences are going from 10 to 12 to 14 and there’s no
reason to think they’ll stop there. Decision makers in college athletics now
act under the pretense that bigger means better and the grass is always greener
on the other side. But as we all know, those clichés are often quite false.
As we move closer to the age of the superconference dawning,
the traditions that those in power claim to so badly cling to are on the brink
of being all but erased. Syracuse is leaving the Big East. The Orange are Big East basketball, a founding member in 1979 and
the life-blood of the conference’s rivalries.
So much for those traditions. No more Georgetown vs.
Syracuse games that draw the Carrier Dome’s biggest crowds and most fervent
ire.
It’s cafeteria traditionalism in college athletics. We’re
told the antiquated BCS and bowl system must be preserved because they are so
deeply woven into the fabric of college football.
Please, let’s cut the B.S. Just be honest with fans and
observers. Your system is driven by one factor, the ever-powerful dollar sign.
Each and every year we hear nonsense about how the bowl system is so seeped in
tradition. Because when you think of years and years of college football
history the TicketCity or Beef ‘O’ Brady’s Bowl are the first images that come
to mind.
Even the games that actually do hold onto some of their
tradition are going to see it washed away. Nebraska vs. Oklahoma, a possible
superconference Rose Bowl, is a Big 12 Championship game, not the traditional
Big 10/Pac 10 matchup that purists want to preserve.
ACC Commissioner John Swafford said about the latest additions:
"We just felt that right now this was in
our best interest," Swofford said. "I don't think it's really a
reaction to that, although in a subtle way, when you look over the past year or
so and see the movement with the Pac-12 that could potentially have gone
further, the Big Ten expanded, the SEC expanding, that all comes into play --
not necessarily in a measurable kind of way, but our interest is always about
what's best for us."
To make that more concise for you: we’ll make more money.
All the verbose language spewed out at these expansion press conferences is a
façade for that one motivating factor. Lost in all that verbiage is that the
real loser in this process is college basketball.
The NCAA Tournament is about to lose some of its novelty
when an Elite 8 has six teams from the same conference, the cachet of
unfamiliar opponents evaporated. Big East basketball as we knew it is all but
dead. Four of the most exciting back-to-back days on the hardwood at the
Garden, which have produced some of the sport’s most memorable moments (see:
Syracuse/UConn 6OT), are about to become a shell of their former self.
More notably, though, is one of the major reasons Syracuse
and Pittsburgh left the Big East and UConn and Rutgers may be next.
It got too big.
"The Big East has too
many good teams, is too big and 18 [conference] games . . . is way too many
games to play. And when we add two more schools, that's going to be fun -- a
20-game schedule,” said UConn head coach John Calhoun in a post-game press conference this past season.
That’s right…too big. A conference is about to breakup, just as the
Pangaea did, because it was just too damn big. The backwards part of it all
is that the really big Big East didn’t work but everyone is following that
lead.
The college athletics
Pangaea is forming and nothing’s going to stop it. So get ready for some
eye-popping conference showdowns like Boise State vs. South Florida- in the Big East. Unusual
potential bedfellows in an unnatural evolution.
