California leads the world in innovation, but we’re a backwater of college football | Opinion

College football conferences that originated in other regions of the country are busy cannibalizing the American Southwest for expansion. Four teams on the Pacific Coast will join a conference that currently stretches from Nebraska to New Jersey. Arizona’s two top universities are heading to a conference of teams from Oklahoma to West Virginia.

In Northern California, Stanford and UC Berkeley have been attempting to join a conference of teams mostly bordering the Atlantic Ocean. So far, they have received the cold shoulder of rejection.

There are a lot of California sports fans who are blaming this on the greed of the top football conferences and the incompetence of our own. But this has nothing to do with the Pac-12 Conference, which is on track to losing 10 of its institutions.

Opinion

This has everything to do with the Pacific Time Zone.

Here, a night-time college football game ends tomorrow where the crucial fan base is already asleep. For decades, this did not matter so long as teams stuck to playing peer institutions within their own regions. With tradition thrown to the wind in the chase for more television advertising dollars, teams in the Pacific and neighboring time zones are migrating to conferences headquartered in points east simply to survive.

It is a not-so-subtle reminder where power in this country truly resides.

There are few things as downright American as college football and its undying popularity. Few countries have anything akin to college athletic programs. None are glued to the televisions like the Americans who follow their teams.

California is the nation’s top destination for tourists as well as the country’s most populous state. These traits give us a false sense of self-importance. In college football, we are also-rans.

None of the nation’s 10 most popular teams are from California. Or anywhere in the Southwest. None are west of Indiana.

With popularity comes power.

And the conferences with the popular teams are seeking to become even more powerful.

Blame this, in part, on the United States Supreme Court. The country’s top governing body for sports in higher education, the National Collegiate Athletic Association, once was the primary divider of the economic spoils of televised college athletics. But in 1984 the high court ruled that the NCAA’s distribution method was illegal.

So grew the dominance of the regional athletic conferences, self-assembled and self-governing collectives of teams, and the irrelevance of the NCAA. The Midwest’s Big Ten athletic conference, for example, grew to 12 teams in 2011 and then to 14 in 2014. It became an economic juggernaut in recent years spanning media markets throughout the Midwest and Eastern seaboard.

All that remained unconquered were the comparatively less popular teams in the West. It was manifest destiny, pigskin style.

The Universities of Southern California, Oregon, Washington and Los Angeles will join the Big Ten next year. The Big Ten’s expansion brings the conference to 18 teams without a change in the conference’s numerical name, a nod to tradition while ignoring math.

USC and UCLA will soon have new conference rivals such as Rutgers University in New Jersey and Purdue University in Indiana. So much for always playing Cal.

Four other teams in the Pac-12 (Arizona, Arizona State, Colorado and Utah) have announced their move to the Big 12 Conference, which grows to 16 teams.

The Bay Area’s two orphans in all this consolidation, Stanford and the University of California, Berkeley, are seeking a safe harbor an ocean away with the Atlantic Coast Conference, home of universities such as Clemson and Florida State. The conference so far is snubbing the teams, reportedly for economic reasons.

America is a country where Las Vegas can have the finest hockey team and Los Angeles the most expensive palace for professional football. Sometimes, the local time zone does not matter. Sometimes, timing is everything.

The Pacific has always been far from the epicenter of the college gridiron. A lot of us for decades liked to pretend otherwise. We can no longer. Welcome to steerage. And get prepared to watch your favorite California team on Saturdays, sometimes, at breakfast.