A Big(ger) MAC

 I know I am old now, because there is so much I can't get my head around. And, no, I'm not talking about America's losing fight with its own sanity, which these days moves me more to hysterical laughter than existential angst.

If you don't laugh you'll cry, in other words. Or take a long walk off a short pier.

Anyway, that's not what I can't get my 70-year-old head around this morning. It's a news item I saw on the Great and Terrible Intertoobz that made me yelp "What th-?", followed by a lot of standard old-man grumbling.

The Mid-American Conference is going bi-coastal, you see. I kid you not.

Comes now the news that it's adding Sacramento State out in California as a football-only member, and as a proud Ball State grad who remembers when a road trip meant Kalamazoo or Toledo, the ground just shifted beneath my feet. Again.

Bad enough that the Big Ten is now USC at Rutgers and Maryland at Oregon; now my alma mater's far humbler conference is warping the accepted verities. The dainty footprint that once stretched only from DeKalb, Ill., to Athens, Ohio, suddenly is bigger than Bob Lanier's legendary hooves. Now,  at least in football, it will cover all of flyover America and then some, from Amherst, Mass., to central California.

Sac State (can we call it Sac State?) has been bucking for entry to big-boy football for some time, though God knows why. It's going to cost it $23 million to do it, for one thing. For this it will get skyrocketing travel costs, presumably, and the right to be a farm team for the Alabamas and Ohio States and, yes, Indianas of the football world.

This is more and more what Group of Five conferences like the MAC are fast becoming in the age of NIL and unrestricted transfers, with the consequence that hardly anyone's playing for the glory of dear old Directional Hyphen State. Like beer, no one's buying Stud Hoss anymore; they're just renting him. And no one's renting the way the Group of Five circuits are.

A close-to-home example: A few years back Ball State lured a running back named Carson Steele to Muncie, where for two years he tore up the MAC. Then, like a hot baseball prospect going from, say, Fort Wayne to San Diego, he jumped to UCLA. 

From there it was on to the NFL, where he played a couple seasons in Kansas City and last month signed a deal with the Philadelphia Eagles.

Mind you, I don't begrudge Steele any of this. He didn't invent the current system, after all; he just did what it allowed him to do. It's where we are now: The MACs of the world as the minor leagues, hemorrhaging money the way minor leagues often do.

Which is why it made sense for the MAC to bring Sacramento State aboard, because Northern Illinois jumped to the Mountain West and the conference was short a dues-paying football member. That $18 million of Sac State's $23 mill bill goes to the MAC as the conference's entry fee likely didn't cause anyone to shed a tear, either.

In other words, we know what the MAC gets out of its Bigger MAC. But what does its new member get out of it?

A lot more dealings with Expedia and Travelocity, one imagines.

And the chance to groom more Carson Steeles for the real big boys, of course.