Alex Rychwalski | Money trumps tradition, and it's nothing new

Jul. 14—There's a certain magic to college football that isn't present in the professional ranks.

History, tradition and bad blood are the driving forces behind collegiate athletics, and they're also what makes them so profitable. It's these very profits, however, that has done a number on the product.

Conference realignment has ended rivalry after rivalry for the sake of making a buck, and that's a shame.

Hopping leagues is nothing new. The Big 12, which fell victim this year to losing its premier members Oklahoma and Texas to the Southeastern Conference beginning in 2024, is a conference born from realignment.

This story begins in 1984 when the Supreme Court ruled in NCAA v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma that the NCAA could not punish schools for selling media content. This allowed schools and conferences to negotiate their own contracts.

The Big Ten and Pac-10 sold their rights to CBS and ABC, and the rest of Division 1-A collectively sold their rights through an organization called the College Football Association. The CFA's function was to negotiate television deals for its members.

Notre Dame left the CFA in 1990 to sell their home games to NBC. The SEC, meanwhile, extended memberships to Arkansas and South Carolina to position itself to leave the CFA in 1995 and sign a massive deal with CBS.

The Big East followed suit and the CFA ceased to exist, thus triggering the first major conference realignment in 1996.

Southwest Conference members Texas, Texas A&M, Baylor and Texas Tech joined with Big Eight members Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Kansas, Kansas State, Nebraska, Missouri, Iowa State and Colorado to form the Big 12 and secure a deal of their own.

Are you a fan of Washington State and Oregon State and sad your school might get left behind in the latest batch of realignment? Houston, Rice, Southern Methodist and Texas Christian got kicked to the curb, relegated to weaker conferences with worse T.V. deals and less revenue decades ago.

Eighty-two years of SWC history down the toilet, though, its final years were riddled with sanctions and scandal.

That was the beginning of the end for the rose-colored mystique of college football. Now, you can turn on the Big Ten Network on a Saturday and see Nebraska face Rutgers in a noon kickoff nobody but a fan of those two schools cares one bit about.

It's why Justin Tucker's last-second field goal to lift Texas over Texas A&M in 2011 ended a 118-year rivalry dating back to 1894.

And why the Kansas and Missouri game, a series beginning in 1891 that was dubbed the Border War because the two states waged bloody battles during the Civil War, has been dormant since 2011.

Both Texas A&M and Missouri joined the SEC in 2011, leaving history behind for the dollar. Ironically, in Texas' pursuit of more revenue, its joining the SEC will resume the rivalry with A&M in 2025.

It's an indisputable fact that Maryland's move to the Big Ten was the correct one, a position furthered by the conference's additions of UCLA and USC beginning in 2024 and the apparent danger the ACC is now in.

It salvaged the dire financial state the athletic department was once in, and there's also a pleasure in seeing the Tobacco Road conference scramble with Clemson and Florida State seemingly destined for the SEC.

None of that makes the product as enjoyable as the ACC once was. I want Maryland to win across the board, but there's little emotion, and there's no hatred. I miss that.

On a national scale, the idea of two 16-plus-team super conferences in the Big Ten and SEC shatters everything that was once special about college football.

Regional conferences provided spirited discussion in communities and in the workplace among alums. The results of games extended beyond a television screen or social media.

It's a travesty that the Backyard Brawl was abandoned with West Virginia now in the Big 12 and Pittsburgh in the ACC. Thankfully, the series is slated to resume this year.

Bowl season is already a shell of what it once was due to the College Football Playoff, but it will only get worse.

In the BCS era, it was a travesty that undefeated teams were denied an opportunity to compete for a national championship, particularly the non-Power 5 teams like Boise State, TCU and Utah that looked the part.

But an unfortunate side effect of a playoff is that historic, legendary bowls are a consolation prize. The Rose Bowl is now a battle between whichever fringe Top 25 Pac-12 team finishes first, and whoever finishes second in the Big Ten (the first-place team is a lock for the playoff).

With USC and UCLA exiting the Pac-12 and the Big 12 rumored to be looking to add any number of Pac-12 refugees Arizona, Arizona State, Utah and Washington, the Rose Bowl might as well cease to exist.

I'm not one of those people that whine about there being too many bowl games. Those clowns clearly don't actually enjoy the sport. Who would complain about more football?

I'm also not one of those people that believes the College Football Playoff renders the regular-season meaningless. Again, I don't think they actually watch the games.

Change isn't always a bad thing, and reticence to change is often short sighted. Yet, something just doesn't feel right about what's happening in this bout of realignment.

The people calling the shots don't seem to understand, or care, why many college football fans prefer the sport to the NFL.

They only see the bottom line, and it's at the expense of the very thing that makes college football special. What's tradition for a few extra bucks? Capitalism at its finest.

Alex Rychwalski is a sports reporter at the Cumberland Times-News. Follow him on Twitter @arychwal.