Rivalry weak

 God bless that Lane Kiffin. You might think the head football coach at Ole Miss is a trifle slow on the uptake, but some guys never even get to the uptake and by gumphrey you can't say that about ol' Lane.

The other day, see, the SEC rolled out its reworked future football schedule, and someone asked Lane about it at the weekly SEC teleconference. And what Lane said is it's good the new sked preserves the annual Egg Bowl rivalry game against  Mississippi State and other traditional rivalries like the LSU game, but some other conference matchups left much to be desired.

Like, for instance, Ole Miss vs. Oklahoma.

"Really disappointing," Kiffin characterized that. "We don't have anything in common with them or our fans, so that doesn't make any sense at all."

To which the Blob would say: Well, look who just showed up.

Of course Ole Miss-Oklahoma doesn't make any sense. It makes no more sense than Army vs. Alaska-Anchorage. But in case Kiffin is just now noticing (kudos on finally catching up to the uptake, Coach), college football stopped making sense awhile ago.

It stopped making sense when Nebraska joined the Big Ten and stopped playing Oklahoma every year, because Nebraska-Oklahoma actually has some history to it while Ole Miss-Oklahoma, as Kiffin pointed out, does not.

It stopped making sense when Texas-Alabama became a conference game, and Michigan-USC became a conference game, and Stanford-Florida State became a conference game.

It stopped making sense when the Big Ten and the SEC got their own TV networks and decided, hell, if we've got our own TV networks we must be a bigger deal than everyone else, and so we should BE bigger, numerically and in every other way. Rivalry games? Intriguing inter-conference matchups between established powers that almost never see one another except in bowl games? Geographic footprints?

Buncha sissy stuff. Who needs it?

Well ... I guess Lane Kiffin, for one. And me.

See, here's what college football loses when conferences become money-grubbing monsters like the Big Ten, SEC and (to a somewhat lesser exent) the ACC: Identity. And by that mean a unique identity. The Big Ten no longer has a Midwest identity that plays the game with a bullheaded Midwest ethos. The SEC no longer is southern football in its purest form.  The ACC, the Big 12 ... they all play the same game with the same motivation: To make a pile as high as an elephant's eye.

If Maryland and Rutgers and UCLA and USC are Big Ten schools, in other words, no one's a Big Ten school anymore in the traditional sense of the word. If Texas and Texas A&M and Oklahoma are SEC schools, no one's an SEC school. And if two west coast schools can become members of the Atlantic Coast Conference ...

Well. That's just more homogeneity, to the detriment of the college game. It means there's no longer anything distinctive and wonderful about Midwest football or West Coast football or Southern football or even Eastern football; it's all just football. And it makes the bowl games and intersectional clashes a hell of a lot less fun.

Oklahoma-Ole Miss?

Lane Kiffin is right. Won't be a lot of reminiscing going on in the Grove about that storied rivalry on game day in Oxford.

Hey, C.W., you 'member the time Archie dropped four sixes on those sorry-ass Sooners back in '69?  Had us a good ol' time THAT night, I tell you what. 'Course I ain't even gonna mention what happened a couple years later, when Jack Mildren 'n' Greg Pruitt 'n' them came to town and whipped our butts ...

Yeah. Ain't happenin'.

More's the pity.