Raiding parties

 The Pac-10 is about to join the Southwest Conference on the ash heap of history, and there's the spoiled milk on your corn flakes this morning. They're breaking up the old gang because the rest of the gang got greedy and heartless, and that's a natural fact.

The SWC?

That died of starvation in the mid-90s, and some of us still miss it. Now it's just some dusty banners and faded video and the ghosts of Doak Walker and Sammy Baugh gamboling through the memory, and a whole pile of Chuck Dicuses and James Streets and Earl Campbells besides. But those who were there still remember the thunder of TCU-SMU in 1935, and of Texas-Arkansas in '69. And of too many Aggies-Longhorns to name.

Now Arkansas and Texas A&M are in the SEC, and Texas is about to join them, and it's a different and not especially better world. Time was, college football tried to hide the fact it was as corporate as IBM or Microsoft.   Now it doesn't bother to pretend it's about academia as much as TV deals and market shares and Mergers and Acquisitions.

Which bring us back to the Pac-12.

It's getting Mergered and Acquisitioned into extinction, in case you haven't been paying attention. The Big 12 and Big Ten have gone into full raiding party mode, and it's as ugly and rapacious as you’d expect.

Colorado, which jumped to the Pac-12 a few years back, is jumping back to the Big 12. USC and UCLA are jumping to the Big Ten and its mega-dollars next year. The Big 12 is vacuuming up Arizona, Arizona State and Utah, and the Big Ten just poached Oregon and Washington.

You want to know how shameless it's all become?

Florida State's president got up at a board meeting the other day and threatened to yank  the Seminoles out of the ACC if the conference didn't rework its revenue distribution in FSU's favor. In other words: Give us more money or we're out of here.

This from a school whose athletic department generated  north of $161 million last year, and which raked in $10.3 mill in profits -- the most profitable year FSU athletics has had in 18 years.

Yet now president Richard McCullough is complaining it's not enough?

And, sure, I get it, the concept of enough doesn't exist in a world of venture capitalists and hedge-fund pirates. And maybe there's a little old-man-shaking-his-fist-at-clouds in this  rant of mine as a result.

But once upon a long ago conferences didn't actively try to destroy other conferences the way it's happening now. There was greed, sure, that's always been part of the college athletics equation, but it wasn't the unrestrained lust for the next pile there is today.

Also, conferences and schools at least pretended to care about the "student" part of "student-athlete." Now the Big Ten is bringing schools into the fold from half a continent away, with the attendant ridiculous travel schedules. USC flying clear across the country to play Rutgers or Maryland or Penn State, and vice-versa? How's that gonna help their players academically?

It won't, of course. And it won't matter, because the "student-athletes" have become as mercenary as the schools for whom they labor. Kids come to college to learn, after all. And boy howdy have they. 

So you've got the mess that is the NIL, which college athletics brought on entirely itself. When grasping for that next dollar becomes your primary goal, it’s only natural that everyone will want his or her cut.

Which means everyone in this whole tawdry show needs to change their school motto.

I Got Mine sounds about right.