The Gargantuan Ten

 (Well, I’m back — and no groans from you popcorn throwers  in the last row. I had a great time, and more on that later.  I also missed a lot, not much of which was good. In that vein, here’s my Official Catching Up With Stuff That Happened A Long Time Ago post. Apologies if you’ve already heard enough about this …)

And so, to summarize: The Big Ten's footprint is now a clown shoe.

Heel on one coast; toe on the other. Bells and whistles everywhere. Painted a particularly garish shade of green because, well, cash is green.

And that of course is what this all about, adding USC and UCLA to the family. The "student-athletes" (cough, cough) are gonna love those coast-to-coast flights to New Jersey and Maryland, with a red-eye home. And vice-versa, of course.

Geezers like me will mourn what is lost, with intersectional rivalries now just another Big Ten Saturday or Big Monday. In football especially, one of the things that made the Rose Bowl so intriguing was the clash of styles between the combatants. You had General Patton and his tanks against Richtofen's Flying Circus, aka Woody "Three Things Can Happen When You Pass, And Two Of 'Em Are Bad" Hayes vs. John "We'll Take The Other One, Then" McKay. And now that's gone.

College football is a homogenous creature now, and there isn't a lick of difference between the way USC plays the game and the way Ohio State plays it (except that Ohio State plays it better). And even if it's impossible for the geezer crowd to get its head around USC and UCLA, those Left Coast degenerates, playing in the freaking BIG TEN ... well, it ain't 1970 anymore. It's 2022, and the landscape of college athletics has changed in ways both literal and conceptual.

Literally, of course, there are no geographic boundaries anymore. Conceptually, that's because geography means nothing when everything is driven by TV markets.

That's why the Big Ten eagerly poached USC and UCLA from the Pac-12, thereby shredding the illusion of their alleged "alliance." No honor among thieves, and all that.

 Especially when adding USC and UCLA opens L.A. to the Big Ten Network.

The BTN now has the New York, Chicago and L.A. TV markets in its pocket, something none of its competitors can say. And that's all that matters anymore. Don't let anyone try to tell you it isn't.

All the sis-boom-bah that once characterized college athletics went the way of raccoon coats and "Fight On, Dear Old Whatsamatta U." decades ago. It's a boardroom game now, and every chess piece everywhere is in play. Even the "student-athletes' (cough-cough) have gone commercial with the advent of NILs.

Turns out Alabama or Kansas didn't win the national title, capitalism did. You can hate it as much as you want, and ADs can ever more laughably insist they're not the NFL or NBA. But reality is reality -- and the new reality is Penn State Inc.'s "student-athletes" (cough, cough) leaving campus on a Wednesday to play USC Inc. and UCLA Inc., and not coming back until the wee hours of Sunday.

Travel costs won't be an issue, because the BTN will pay the tab from its overflowing coffers. The SEC, which has already torn out the heart of the Big 12 by poaching Texas and Oklahoma, will go after, I don't know, Washington or Oregon or Stanford to secure their own west coast TV markets, if the Big Ten doesn't poach them first. 

Eventually only the Big Ten and SEC will be left among the "major" conferences, and they'll own all the markets. 

(And, yes, Domers, that means even Notre Dame football will eventually have to pick a side. There won’t be enough parking spaces left for them otherwise, because the two conferences will be so big all the spots on the schedule will be filled with conference games. Or so it looks from here.)

And everyone else?

The PAC-12 or whatever numerical that applies may be doomed, also the Big-12 or the ACC, or they may become a diminished presence with their own designation. Say, Division I while the two mega-conferences become Super Division I, which will look a lot more like the NFL than college football the way the geezers misremember it — or that the folks involved will ever be willing to admit.

I mean, the Alabama, Ohio State, Clemson, Georgia Incs. et al are essentially already there, yet continue to peddle their worn fictions about “student-athletes” and academic integrity and what-not. Might as well go full legit pro so they can finally ditch a charade that surely must be getting wearisome.

Me?

I get enough of that on Sundays. I’ll watch the service academies and the Ivies instead, thanks. Geezer that I am.