Never enough

 Saw a story the other day in USA Today and something called Saturday Tradition that both amused and perplexed me. Although perplexed probably won in overtime.

It was a piece about how the SEC and Big Ten were thinking of launching an SEC-Big Ten football series, much like college buckets has the Big Ten-ACC Challenge/Showdown/Early Season Soiree and similar Challenges/Showdowns/Early Season Soirees. The driving force behind the idea is, of course, TV money, seeing how three early SEC-Big Ten matchups this season were ratings blockbusters.

According to USA Today/Saturday Tradition, that got the boardroom suits in both conferences thinking, gee, maybe we should expand this little dealio. After all, who wouldn't be intrigued by an Illinois-Missouri Border War? Or an IU-Kentucky Not-Basketball-But-We-Still-Don't-Like-Each-Other Bowl? Or an Egghead Bowl between Northwestern and Vanderbilt?

Why, you could schedule six or eight such matchups -- even as many as 12 to 16 -- and everyone would still have room for eight or nine conferences games and even the annual pencil-in W against Directional Hyphen Tech State.

The idea, if it could be worked out, is that it would "boost revenue capabilities" according to the Saturday Tradition headline.

This is where the Blob gets amused/perplexed.

"Boost revenue capabilities"?

Since when do the Big Ten and SEC need to do that?

They're both already doing the backstroke in wads of cash, thanks to the revenue generated by their Big Ten and SEC networks and their various other TV rights deals. Isn't boosting revenue why they collectively blew up the entire college football landscape? Didn't the Big Ten destroy its footprint because it wanted the lucrative East Coast and West Coast TV markets, which is why Rutgers and Maryland and UCLA, USC, Oregon and Washington are "Big Ten" schools now?

And you think the SEC murdered the old Big 12 (and before that, the old SWC) because it thought Texas burnt orange was a cool color? Hell, no. It gobbled up Texas because Texas is one of the most lucrative properties in college athletics. And it pirated Texas A&M, Oklahoma, Missouri and Arkansas because A) it could, and B) those schools all added more to the pile.

It was always about money, never anything else, and now the Big Ten and SEC have box seats atop an Everest of it. And somehow it's still not enough.

We used to call this what it is -- greed -- until it became politically incorrect in some circles to utter the word. Now we call it "boosting revenue capabilities" and "increasing market share."

It's still just greed, though. Pure, grasping, Montgomery-Burns-summoning-the-hounds greed.

Spin it any old way you like.