College football is my favorite sport.
Some of my earliest memories involve sitting in front of the television in the early 1970s watching the Ohio State-Michigan game and the Buckeyes playing in the Rose Bowl on New Year’s Day. The eye-catching visuals of the Scarlet and Gray lining up against those dreaded maize-and-blue wing-tip helmets, and the magical way the Buckeyes’ own silver helmets gleamed in the Southern California sunshine, were powerful images that are indelibly etched in my mind.
From those earliest moments, I’ve been your garden-variety college football fanatic. Saturdays in the fall were then, and are now, holy days in the Hardesty family.
So it was, then, that after following college football, well, religiously for over a half-century, I liked to think I knew a fair amount about the sport.
Until my wife came home with the Lindy’s Sports annual College Football Preview magazine a few days ago. I was only a few pages into it when a few things became crystal clear:
Lindy’s, along with Athlon Sports’ preview magazine, are football bibles to college fans. My wife fully understands that buying one means watching her husband disappear down the rabbit hole of college football information, occasionally coming up for air long enough to eat and sleep before going back down again. I did it when I was 6, and I’m going strong at 56.
I have these preview magazines going back to the 1970s — not ones I bought at rummage sales, mind you, but ones that Mom and Dad bought for me at the grocery store all those decades ago. In fact, those old college football preview magazines with players like Archie Griffin and Art Schlichter on the cover are sitting in the same room where I’m writing this column right now — and yes, from time to time, I still glance through them. I’m nothing if not nostalgic.
But they bear no resemblance to the 2024 college football preview magazines I’m poring over now — because college football itself bears no resemblance to what it was in 2023, let alone 1973. And I’m not even talking about filthy rich Name Image Likeness deals, the utter chaos of the transfer portal or the expanded 12-team College Football Playoff field this season (more on that next week).
I’m talking about simple math where 2+2 now equals whatever you want it to, and geographic location is a matter of how you look at it. If that doesn’t make sense, just wait. Because nothing about college sports makes sense anymore.
For instance:
– The Big Ten hasn’t actually had 10 teams in it since 1992, the year before Penn State started playing in the conference as team No. 11. That went to 12 teams with Nebraska in 2011, to 14 with Rutgers and Maryland in 2014, and to 18 this season with the addition of Oregon, Washington, USC and UCLA — four Pacific-12 Conference heavyweights whose defections to the Big Ten triggered the collapse of the Pac-12 (more on that in a few). The conference maintains the name “Big Ten” because it’s more of a branding issue than a numbers issue at this point, and I understand that reasoning. The Big Ten is a brand. The problem is, it’s a Midwest brand. Adding East Coast schools Rutgers and Maryland 10 years ago was a reach, but the addition of the four West Coast schools this year — fueled exclusively by TV money — shatters the conference’s historically Midwest image. So the name should be rebranded. To what, I don’t know, but it’s no longer a Midwest conference, and calling an 18-team league the Big Ten is perfectly absurd. Then again, it’s one of the few things of traditional value that hasn’t been destroyed (yet) in this era of college football, so maybe it’s best to just leave the name alone.
– But the Big Ten isn’t alone in this silly numbers game. The Big 12 lost two blueblood programs in Texas and Oklahoma to the SEC this season — and actually got bigger. How? Because Arizona, Arizona State, Utah and Colorado fled the rubble of the Pac-12 for the relative safety of the Big 12 — which now has 16 teams. Not as bad as the Big Ten yet, but at the pace college football is at now, the Big 12 could roar right past that 16 number and on into the 20s. I wouldn’t bet against it.
– But if you think an 18-team Big Ten and 16-team Big 12 is ludicrous, wrap your mind around this: After the smoke cleared from the collapse of the Pac-12, every school in the conference found a new league to play in — except Washington State and Oregon State. So where did they end up? The Pac-2. That’s not a typo. The Pac-12 is now the Pac-2, and it consists of Washington State and Oregon State. A two-team league. And it should be a humdinger of a race this fall: Lindy’s picks Washington State to win the Pac-2, while Athlon picks Oregon State to win it (although Athlon is having trouble letting it go, still calling the conference the Pac-12 – a larger numbers discrepancy than even the Big Ten). So the Cougars and Beavers will have to prove it on the field. Once.
– Can’t take anymore? You’d better pace yourself, because the best (or worst) is yet to come. We’ll touch on the SEC for a moment, then move on to the grand finale. The SEC is now up to 16 teams with the addition of Oklahoma and Texas. At least numbers don’t matter in the name “Southeastern Conference,” but geography does. And a quick glance at a map of the United States shows that Texas and Oklahoma are not located in the southeastern part of the country. But I guess you can say they’re close enough: Texas borders SEC states, and so does Oklahoma. And for you history buffs out there, during the Civil War, Texas was part of the Confederacy — known today as SEC country — while Oklahoma, not yet a state at that time, was a Confederacy lean. So while it’s a geographical stretch, at least there is some historic commonality.
– Unlike Stanford and California, two more Pac-12 teams which escaped that conference’s dumpster fire. For the record, Stanford and Cal are located in the San Francisco Bay area: Stanford in Palo Alto, Cal across the bay in Berkeley. They are bitter rivals, and like most bitter rivals, they can’t live without each other. So the two California schools went to the same conference together: the Atlantic Coast Conference. That’s right, the conference that sits adjacent to the Atlantic Ocean. Stanford and Cal, meanwhile, sit adjacent to the Pacific Ocean. Apparently, that’s just a minor detail. It’s a great fit academically considering those two prestigious schools are joining a league that already has Duke in it, but two California schools playing in the Atlantic Coast Conference is Twilight Zone stuff. The move of Southern Methodist University — located in Dallas, Texas — to the ACC barely ripples the pond by comparison. And if you’re looking for historical common ground between Stanford, Cal and the ACC, you have two schools from what is probably the most progressive region in America playing in the Bible Belt. The Big Ten having 18 teams makes more sense.
– And then there’s the good old Mid-American Conference, which somehow still has the same 12 teams – for now. The University of Massachusetts will rejoin the MAC starting with the 2025-26 academic year. UMass played in the MAC from 2012-15 and has been an independent since then. Other MAC expansion options that have been bandied about include UConn (don’t worry, it wouldn’t include basketball), Western Kentucky, Middle Tennessee State, Dayton (no basketball in that potential move, either) and Youngstown State. Any of those would fit into the MAC geographically, just pushing the conference a tad to the south and a little to the east. And the numbers are irrelevant.
Expect it to happen sometime soon. Because as we’ve seen in the span of just one year, if your conference doesn’t expand, it might cease to exist. And before you know it, your school is playing in a conference on the other side of the continent, in no conference at all…
Or in The Twilight Zone.
Tom Hardesty is a Portager sports columnist. He was formerly assistant sports editor at the Record-Courier and author of the book Glimpses of Heaven.
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