College football is a regional sport. Or at least, it was.
For over a century, the sport was defined by regional rivalries and athletic conferences whose composition seemed almost set in stone. It was defined by tradition as fans geared up annually for games that were so significant that they had their own names. Kansas didn’t just play Missouri; they held a Border War. Oregon’s rivalry against Oregon State was so intense that it was Civil War. And the matchup between Oklahoma and Oklahoma State was just Bedlam. Soon, none of these rivalries, all of which date back a century, will exist.
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The realignment of college sports around a handful of megaconferences, consumed by a need to maximize television payouts to air college football games, is not new. It’s a process that has been going on for decades but has accelerated in recent weeks with the near-total disintegration of the Pac-12, the conference traditionally based on the West Coast of the United States. It seems possible that the Atlantic Coast Conference, the conference traditionally based along the Atlantic Coast (although it now includes schools as far afield as Louisville and Notre Dame), could follow in its wake. The most likely scenario is that college football may soon become a homogenized national sport.
Now, there is nothing inherently wrong with homogenized national sports. The NFL has become a vital part of American culture, and its teams often become avatars for a set of values rather than a geographic area. There are countless Cowboys fans who have never been to Dallas and countless Packers fans who have never been to Green Bay (let alone the Raiders fans who have never been to Las Vegas or Oakland or Los Angeles).
But that is not what college football was meant to be. It is, or at least it was once, built around regional rivalries and local bragging rights. Passions were fueled by the fact that archrivals were clustered in such close geographical proximity to each other. College football rivalries divided workplaces and families and provided an almost sociological insight into states and regions. The class divide between Mississippi and Mississippi State runs deep in the Magnolia State, and the Holy War between Brigham Young and the University of Utah literally reflects the religious tensions in the Beehive State. A big loss was something to be brooded over for a year, a big win provided a year of gloating. While those two particular rivalries will continue under the current alignment, there is no guarantee they will continue into the future.
This is not unusual in sports or even life. After all, one of the most fundamental aspects of modern life is the general homogenization of everything. Increasingly, there are only a few big brands and only a few options. Regional chains get bought out by national conglomerates, and the cultural quirks that defined every locale in America get slowly eroded away by this consolidation. In all 50 states, people shop at Walmart, eat at McDonald’s, drink coffee at Starbucks, and search for information on Google. Sports has not been immune to this trend. In recent years, European soccer has transformed from a series of nationally based leagues to one flooded with oligarch money and focused on a handful of teams that dominate the sport not just in their own countries but across the continent. Teams like Bayern Munich in Germany and Paris Saint-Germain in France easily win domestic competitions every year. Instead, the real goal is the rich television rights fueled treasure of the Champions League. The strategy is not to beat traditional rivals but to best other far-flung superteams to cash out and use the proceeds to buy even more elite players.
There are both gains and losses from this. After all, prices tend to be cheaper at a Walmart than at a Main Street shop, just as the quality of football in a game between Texas and Alabama is likely much higher than that in a game between Texas and Baylor. But there are other more intangible things that are lost.
It’s not likely college football will go fully big box megastore, not yet. It is still nominally an amateur pursuit organized around nonprofit universities that insist they exist to provide educational opportunities. But the rise of the megaconference hints at a world in which this will inevitably become the case.
Instead of Oregon State, Oregon will soon be in the same conference as Maryland, and instead of Oklahoma State, Oklahoma will soon be grouped together with Florida. These are not exactly natural rivalries, and they represent an array of other obstacles more logistical than just the spirit of competition and regional spirit. After all, while football teams fly private, their fans will now have to deal with cross-country flights and multiple layovers to see their favorite teams. (Let alone the obstacles faced by college athletes in other “nonrevenue” sports. In order to maximize money from television deals, water polo players and gymnasts will now have to figure out how to study for a test or write a paper while traveling commercial from Norman, Oklahoma, to Gainesville, Florida.)
But the product being sold is not about what it means for the fans going to the games or even the die-hards watching at home. Instead, it’s a television program for casual fans, ones who are less caught up in the history and tradition and simply more likely to flip the channel when there are two big names playing. It is homogenized content for an increasingly homogenized country. And as for the things being lost? They are harder to quantify for the same reason they were worth valuing.
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Ben Jacobs is a political reporter in Washington, D.C.
