@MarkKnudson41
The new college football season is underway, and we already know who this season’s biggest losers are. We’re looking at you, Stanford and Cal.
Yes, both have already won football games, including the Golden Bears win over SEC foe Auburn. Good for them. Not that it will matter much in the end.
The two California schools, still located just minutes from the waters of the Pacific Ocean, are now members of the Atlantic Coast Conference. The absurdity is hard to measure.
It’s not a secret that geography steadily became irrelevant in the endless (mindless?) slew of conference realignment decisions over the past decade and a half. It was fine when Missouri joined the SEC and traded Kansas for Arkansas. When Nebraska moved to the Big Ten and started playing Iowa instead of Iowa State. Texas A&M is located closer to Baton Rouge, Louisiana than Boulder, Colorado.
Yet we knew geography was in peril when the Big East, still trying to stay viable in football, almost lured San Diego State into the same conference with UConn. Then West Virginia joined the Big 12.
It’s kept happening of course, and now it just gotten stupid, with USC and UCLA joining the Big Ten to be in the same conference as Maryland and Rutgers. Fun road trips those will be.
But the move by Cal and Stanford is on a different level of stupid.
For one, neither school is a football power, and won’t bring a thing to a conference that’s already on life support. The ACC will die as soon as Clemson and Florida State move (presumably to the Big 12, but never rule out more SEC expansion.) Miami will follow, along with rumored moves by Virginia Tech and others. The historic basketball conference will be shredded by the football money grab.
So with the ACC not long for this world, what happens to Cal and Stanford then? They’ll find out how much fun hitting free agency yet again can be for mediocre players.
Had the two west coast school simply stayed put, hung together with Washington State and Oregon State, they could have shared some of the phat revenue the now two-school conference will still be getting for the next two years from the College Football playoff and the NCAA basketball tournaments. More importantly, for the long term, they could have helped the two remaining “Pac 2” schools decide which other programs they wanted to invite in – presumably the best of the Mountain West conference – to reform the Pac 8/10/12 and perhaps remain a “Power” conference, at least for the time being.
In other words, they’ve moved once, and they’ll have to move again in another year or perhaps two. Careful where you put those ACC logos around the facilities. They’ll need to be covered up again, perhaps before the paint is dry.
There continues to be endless jockeying for position as college football moves steadily toward a two or three “super-conference” NFL-style model. Some projections have 48 teams, some have 64 and some as many as 84. No one knows how many will be invited to be part of the new super leagues, so everyone is trying to show their worthiness.
Cal and Stanford can’t do any of that by moving themselves to a conference on the other side of the country – where they’ll be an afterthought. This move isn’t helping their chances of ending up in a better position than they were in within the “Pac.”
These two historic athletic programs will travel…and wallow…for two worthless seasons, losing fans and having only one meaningful game – their long standing rivalry tilt at the end of the season – to draw eyeballs and attention to. Otherwise, they’ll be invisible.
That makes them 2025’s biggest losers already.
