College football lends itself to the existential. No sport is more given to having its fans, coaches, administrators, and media commentators warn that this next thing will be the domino that somehow topples the whole sport. The list of things that were poised to kill college football and didn’t is long and exhausting, but the sport has made it for 153 years and may well have another 153 in it. The emotional draw of this sport done right is too strong a stimulant for the whole thing to ever go belly-up. Incompetent or arrogant people in suits won’t make your tailgate group stop getting together on Saturday mornings or take the trumpets away from the marching band.
But these are treacherous times. It’s been clear for a few years that the traditional order of the sport is collapsing. Some of that is good: Players can make money now, though the administrative scheme their schools have set up at the NCAA still complicates the process and limits their earning power. Most of the time now, players can transfer schools freely without having to sit out a year. And the players are still great, but not so flawless that the game looks sterilized.
Some of what’s changed, however, is extremely shitty: A mix of demographic pressure and outrageous mismanagement will soon kill the Pac-12, a conference with a more than century-long history as the flagship of Western college sports. And some of the change is … complicated: The looming expansion of the College Football Playoff from four teams to 12 will have the paradoxical effect of making regular-season games matter both more and less, until the field one day expands again as executives try to capture more TV (or more accurately, by that point, streaming) revenue.
So, while the sport has been winding down its old ways for some time now, 2023 really is the moment it will cross a Rubicon. This year is the end of a breed of college football that had stood an extensive test of time until now.
Cherish it, and above all else, root for the Oregon State Beavers and the Washington State Cougars. (I will explain.)
Conference realignment isn’t new, and neither is TV money’s central role in determining the competitive shape of college athletics. Realignment has existed as long as conferences have existed (so, for more than 100 years), and it has responded to the desires of media executives since the Supreme Court gave conferences the right to make their own deals in the mid-1980s. But what comes after this year will be by far the most geographically nonsensical, logistically ass-paining set of moves that realignment has ever wrought. And it may be the shift that costs the sport the most as a national concern that gives people localized reasons to care about it, no matter where they live.
When Missouri and Texas A&M left the Big 12 for the Southeastern Conference in 2012, it was one kind of tragedy: Mizzou split off from blood rival Kansas, A&M from blood rival Texas. But at least these states are contiguous to other states where the SEC operates, and at least the Big 12 kept humming. Then Maryland and Rutgers left the ACC and Big East for the Big Ten in 2014. That was the first time that regionality so clearly lost out to cable fees in the construction of conferences; the big Midwestern league now had an Amtrak division. But those schools aren’t that far from Penn State, or even from Ohio State, or even from Michigan. They are certainly not as far-flung as Los Angeles, where USC and UCLA are, or as the Pacific Northwest, where Washington and Oregon are. Those schools will all share the Big Ten come 2024.
USC and UCLA’s exit, announced in the summer of 2022, set off a chain of events that murdered the Pac-12 this summer. It took much more than that, though: Two successive Pac-12 commissioners and the presidents who empowered them needed to biff it spectacularly in the course of consecutive media-rights negotiations. The Big Ten, one of the two richest leagues (along with the SEC), needed to want more, more, and more money that its schools could put toward coaching salaries but not, ideally, toward players. The Big 12, smarting from the SEC’s poaching of Oklahoma and Texas (announced in summer 2021, effective after this year), needed to have no qualms about going from the hunter to the hunted. And so this summer, Colorado left the Pac-12 to go back to its old Big 12 home; Oregon and Washington took the Big Ten’s big bag; and Utah, Arizona State, and Arizona fled to safety in the Big 12.
The Pac-12, by this point the Pac-4, died when those teams left. A desperate Stanford and Cal might yet find a home in the ACC—the Atlantic Coast Conference—where they could be used in a Ponzi-esque scheme to divert the media value they generate to unhappy ACC schools like Florida State and Clemson. If the Bay Area schools do it, their travel will be as much of a nightmare as it will be for athletes in the new Big Ten, who will take taxing cross-country trips to play opponents with whom their teams share no history. (Football teams only travel a few times a year and do so on chartered flights. The same is not true of most college athletes.)
Again, though: A major conference dying is not new. Things have been moving in that inconvenient and vapid but lucrative direction for a long time. The tragedy of the Pac-12 is that its death means the death of the main conference that defines college sports in an entire, enormous region of the country. Even the brutal death of the Big East, a beloved basketball league, didn’t snuff out a sense of regionalism in East Coast sports. The Pac-12’s demise will certainly do that to its region, as there will be no value or even recognition in being the best team in the West.
The Pac-12 will also leave at least two orphans: Washington State and Oregon State, two of the quirkiest and often most fun programs in major football. Wazzu has one of the most raucous home atmospheres in the country, in a town you otherwise wouldn’t know exists: Pullman. A nationwide collection of its fans wave a Cougar flag behind the set of College GameDay every week, and have for 20 years. Oregon State is often bad but always punchy, and has been a thorn in the side of the Pac-12’s elites, on and off, for 100 years. The current realignment wave tells schools like Wazzu and OSU that they don’t matter, because their richness in fun doesn’t translate to richness in casual TV audiences. They’ll probably go off to play with teams in the Mountain West Conference, whether that’s under the shredded flag of the Pac-12 or just by joining the Mountain West. Whether the left-behind schools keep playing Washington and Oregon, and for how long, is unknowable despite those schools’ stated hopes.
The Pac-12’s execution will come right as the sport opens up its playoff system, tripling its size. The 12-team playoff is mostly, I think, an improvement on the present situation. After the playoff came into existence as a four-teamer in 2014, media coverage and a great deal of fan and booster engagement came to focus exclusively on making the tournament. That hasn’t been healthy; it used to be possible for more than a tiny number of teams to end the season feeling fulfilled. But the playoff toothpaste isn’t going back in the tube, and expanding to 12 teams will give more teams a theoretical shot at the top for a longer chunk of the season. When a team loses two games in September, the people invested in that team’s success will be less likely to write off the year before October.
Something is lost there, too, though. A charming but imperfect feature of college football has been that one upset can destroy a season. Auburn’s 2013 Kick Six to beat Alabama, in the final year before the playoff, would’ve packed a different punch if everyone in the stadium knew that the Tide could still win a title. That’s far from rendering regular-season games irrelevant. Ohio State lost to Michigan last year, and Buckeye fans did not seem to feel that much better about it just because they still had (and ultimately got) a chance to play in the playoff. As margins for error grow, some games will matter more. And some will matter less.
If realignment and playoff expansion are the bad and the complicated to come, then player payment rules might be the good. The NCAA, acting on behalf of the schools, is fighting doggedly to get congressional intervention that would keep players from being recognized as employees. But the NCAA’s success is not close to guaranteed, even its advocates admit, and various legal and regulatory bodies could soon rule that at least some players are employees. The athletes have more work to do, and even if they one day gain employee rights and form unions, those unions could get rolled because of how hard it will be to organize a sprawling new industry. But the trajectory is obvious. Players will get more money. Schools will get to keep less. That’s a great thing, and very few people are still of the belief that they will enjoy college games less because the labor has made some money.
The good and the bad in college football’s present moment are working together. The constant churn of TV money and its obvious power in college sports has made it much harder for the suits to keep up an amateurism charade. The corporatization of the sport has wrought bad forms of realignment, but it also shows up regularly in legal filings and legislative presentations that challenge the status quo of players having their economic rights trampled. A hopeful thing has stemmed from a rotten thing, and part of loving college football in 2023—and especially beyond—will be reconciling that bad traditions are dying at the same time that good ones do.
