Chip Kelly has come a long way in life: In five years, he’s advanced from obscurity in New Hampshire to architect of one of the most prolific offenses in college football to head coach of an emerging national power. Much too far, in other words, to let a bunch of spoiled, mugging kids ruin his shot after Oregon‘s 41-27 win over Arizona State:

Ever the professional, ESPN’s Erin Andrews handled the moment with the usual combination of spontaneous bemusement and poise. Behind her, the howler monkeys scattered immediately. I don’t think she’s going to be showing up at the kegger, guys.

Anyway, in case you were laughing too hard during that part, Duck fans, it sounds like quarterback Darron Thomas is going to be fine after leaving with an apparent knee injury in the third quarter. Still, with All-American tailback LaMichael James still on ice, it’s not a bad time to be preparing for Colorado and Washington State.

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Matt Hinton is on Facebook and Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.

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Chip Kelly has come a long way in life: In five years, he’s advanced from obscurity in New Hampshire to architect of one of the most prolific offenses in college football to head coach of an emerging national power. Much too far, in other words, to let a bunch of spoiled, mugging kids ruin his shot after Oregon‘s 41-27 win over Arizona State:

Ever the professional, ESPN’s Erin Andrews handled the moment with the usual combination of spontaneous bemusement and poise. Behind her, the howler monkeys scattered immediately. I don’t think she’s going to be showing up at the kegger, guys.

Anyway, in case you were laughing too hard during that part, Duck fans, it sounds like quarterback Darron Thomas is going to be fine after leaving with an apparent knee injury in the third quarter. Still, with All-American tailback LaMichael James still on ice, it’s not a bad time to be preparing for Colorado and Washington State.

- – -
Matt Hinton is on Facebook and Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.

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Poor Ron Morris. You spend years at the same newspaper, showing up at press conferences, collecting quotes, writing stories on a daily basis, building a byline. And then one day, as you’re going about your business as usual, the central figure on your beat abruptly halts the proceedings to call you out in front of all of your colleagues for something you allegedly wrote months ago:

Yes, that was South Carolina‘s Head Ball Coach himself, Steve Spurrier, literally walking out of his regularly scheduled Tuesday press conference Tuesday morning over a story Morris allegedly wrote in the spring about Spurrier recruiting then-Gamecock point guard Bruce Ellington — now a Gamecock wide receiver – from the basketball team. I can’t find that story (Update: Alert reader Craig has passed along a link), but it’s clearly been gnawing at the HBC for all these months:

“I’m not gonna talk when [Morris] is in here. That’s my right as a head coach. I don’t have to talk to him, and I don’t have to talk to him when he’s in here. So what we’re gonna do, all you TV guys, I’m gonna do a personal interview with you in this other room. And the writers that are still left in here, I’ll come back here and talk with you right after that.

“OK? Everybody for that? What room we got? Media room? OK! Bring your cameras down there and let’s do some one-on-one.”

Ouch. You got told, Ron Morris, for some reason or other. Spurrier will be over here with the professionals while you think about that.

Oh, and while they’re doing that, and the video of Spurrier’s speech is making the rounds on YouTube, the university’s media relations department will be typing up a press release that says the former starting quarterback has been officially booted from the team:

COLUMBIA, S.C. (October 11, 2011) — University of South Carolina senior quarterback Stephen Garcia has been dismissed from the football team, it was announced today.

“Being a student-athlete at the University of South Carolina is a privilege, not a right,” said Athletics Director Eric Hyman, “and we remind all of our student-athletes that there are consequences for their actions. For Stephen to return to and remain with the football squad this fall, we agreed on several established guidelines. Unfortunately, he has not been able to abide by those guidelines and has therefore forfeited his position on the roster. We wish him the best of luck as he moves forward in life.”

“We are all saddened that this has occurred,” said head coach Steve Spurrier. “We all feel like we’ve given Stephen numerous opportunities to be a student-athlete here at South Carolina. Obviously, he has chosen not to follow the guidelines of his reinstatement contract. We wish him the best.”

Funny how Spurrier’s attention-grabbing, headline-generating, favor-currying speech, delivered months after the column that prompted it, happened to come on the very same day as the biggest, most negative headline concerning his team all season, isn’t it? What are the odds?

[Get the latest college football scores with the free Yahoo! Sportacular app iPhone and Android]

Sarcasm aside, Spurrier’s shrewd little stunt never really had a chance of obscuring the final, disappointing chapter of college football’s resident Bro Montana. Garcia was a repeat offender, enduring five separate suspensions — all alcohol-related — between his enrollment in January 2008 and his unceremonious exit Tuesday morning, but as inevitable as the ending seems now, it’s worth recalling that Garcia had seemed to turn not one corner in his college career, but two.

The first came after his third suspension in March 2008, when he lost the “Wild Thing” locks, remained in good standing and entrenched himself as the full-time starter in a rising program that hit a new high last fall with its first SEC East championship. He looked like a success story, a kid who learned his lesson, matured and slowly grew into a leadership role on a team harboring all-time-high hopes this fall with virtually all of the stars of the 2010 squad coming back.

The second apparent corner came on the heels of his fourth and fifth suspensions in the spring, after which he managed to keep his nose clean through the summer and returned to re-seize the starting job from sophomore Connor Shaw one quarter into the season-opening win over East Carolina. Before his demotion in favor of Shaw last week, Garcia was the most experienced starting quarterback in the SEC, with more than twice as many starts under his belt (34) as any other passer in the league. Before Shaw’s big day against Kentucky over the weekend, the smart money was still on Garcia returning from the bench to add to the total.

As of Tuesday morning, we don’t know the nature of the straw — or possibly the anvil — that broke the camel’s back. (Initial reports suggest a failed alcohol test, one of the conditions of his latest reinstatement.) But it is interesting to consider that it may have been Garcia’s declining play — before his demotion, he’d completed fewer than half his passes and served up more interceptions (nine) than any quarterback in the country — that influenced whatever it is that finally did him in, rather than vice versa. With his job suddenly out of his hands, maybe he lost whatever sense of purpose was holding him back. Or maybe he’s just an unrepentant  hellraiser for all seasons, I don’t know. Maybe it’s a little bit of both.

Now: Is Spurrier going to send a “Sorry, still friends?” note to Ron Morris? Or is he going to stand by his grudge?

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Video of courtesy of partners at WLTX.
Matt Hinton is on Facebook and Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.

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At some point in the midst of Ole Miss‘ ongoing, eight-game SEC losing streak, a handful of UM fans decided what’s really holding the Rebels back isn’t geography, resources or a 48-year-drought since their last conference title. It’s not even head coach Houston Nutt, not really. It’s the guy who hired him: Athletic director Pete Boone, who also hired Nutt’s oft-mocked predecessor, Ed Orgeron, after presiding over the firing of Ole Miss’ most successful coach in decades, David Cutcliffe. A group calling itself Forward Rebels! has taken out full-page ads in local newspapers after each of the Rebels’ last two losses declaring “The Ole Miss Administration is the problem,” a sentiment that spread to the home crowd Saturday during an ugly, 27-13 loss to Georgia.

But according to a letter e-mailed across campus this morning by chancellor Dan Jones, the campaign has gone a lot further — and gotten a lot nastier — than a few slogans:

Dear Ole Miss Family,

The Ole Miss Creed begins: “The University of Mississippi is a community of learning dedicated to nurturing excellence in intellectual inquiry and personal character in an open and diverse environment. As a voluntary member of this community, I believe in respect for the dignity of each person; I believe in fairness and civility.”

These words say a lot about who we are as a university family. … These words represent important Ole Miss values. Robust debates and disagreements always have taken place at institutions such as Ole Miss. The current controversy in athletics has gone beyond that.

Many are aware of anonymous, malicious and public attacks on athletics director Pete Boone. The Ole Miss family may not be aware, however, that as a part of this orchestrated campaign, I have received threats, promising that if I do not remove Pete Boone, “It is going to get real ugly,” and threatening to expand the attacks to other athletics employees.

Whatever else you have to say about Houston Nutt, you have to give him this: His presence in any football-obsessed state always makes for great press.

Jones’ reaction to the “threats”: He’s not going to give the thugs the satisfaction. “I will not react,” he wrote. “I cannot and will not engage in any sort of review in response to a public campaign” against Boone or Nutt, at the risk (or so Jones says) of threatening the university’s accreditation on top of (or so Jones says) his personal sense of professionalism. Have you no decency, sirs?

The chancellor’s stand for civility is an admirable, and one that frankly seems a lot easier to make in September than it will in a month or two at the current rate. As it stands, even rebounding Saturday at Fresno State is looking like a long shot (the Bulldogs are 3½-point favorites); after that, it’s a bye week ahead of consecutive dates with Alabama, Arkansas and Auburn, all likely losses. If bowl eligibility is already off the table by the time Ole Miss goes to Kentucky on Nov. 5, anonymous lurkers who apparently still read print newspapers aren’t going to be the only ones leaning on Jones to make a change. When the guys with bank accounts start picking up the phone, their “campaign” tends to move to the top of the agenda.

- – -
Matt Hinton is on Facebook and Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.

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Hey, North Carolina fans! Remember those 16 wins your team earned during back-to-back 8-5 seasons in 2008 and 2009, including victories over Miami, Notre Dame and Virginia Tech? You are hereby instructed to forget them: Today, the university officially vacated all 16 wins in its formal response to the epic list of allegations handed down by the NCAA in June. You can read the entire 111-page response here.

To refresh your memory, officially, the Tar Heels are accused of:

a) Playing seven players in 2009 who allegedly accepted more than $27,000 in improper benefits from three professional agents, five former UNC players, a jeweler, “various financial advisers” and a guy named Willie (last name unknown);
b) Employing an assistant coach who allegedly partnered with an agent to steer NFL-worthy players to the agency;
c) Employing an academic tutor who allegedly conducted research and wrote portions of papers and works-cited pages for players in 2008 and 2009;
d) Employing an academic tutor who allegedly provided well over $3,000 in improper benefits via free tutoring, airfare and cash to pay off parking fines; and
e) Obstructing the NCAA’s investigation, thanks to an unnamed player (almost certainly former defensive lineman Marvin Austin) who allegedly “provid[ed] false and misleading information” about who paid for airfare and lodging on multiple trips he took in 2009 and 2010.

For all of that, Carolina was forced to suspend 14 players for at least one game last season, seven of whom — including Austin and two other players who were subsequently drafted in the first two rounds of April’s NFL Draft — never played a down. It also wasted no time distancing itself from John Blake, the rogue assistant coach who was briefly vanquished to the innermost circle of NCAA infamy before a new one had to be created to accommodate Ponzi-scheming Miami booster Nevin Shapiro. Then, just for that extra clean feeling, it canned head coach Butch Davis just before the start of preseason practices in July — a full year after the allegations first surfaced, and more than a month after the formal charges came down with Davis’ name conspicuously absent from the report.

Now, in addition to the vacated wins, North Carolina is continuing to plead for mercy from the NCAA by “voluntarily” imposing scholarship reductions (three less per year for the next three years), two years’ probation and a $50,000 fine.

It is not, however, instituting the harshest penalty on the board, a bowl ban, which will conceivably be on the table when UNC goes to Indianapolis on Oct. 28 for its all-important hearing in front of the NCAA Committee on Infractions. A final verdict will come down a few weeks after that, and if the Tar Heels are lucky, the committee will decide its seen enough blood spilled in atonement.

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Matt Hinton is on Facebook and Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.

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As you’re probably aware, the SEC wants to expand — its commissioner is beginning to sound very, very certain about it — and when it does, certainly you have been made aware by now that Things Will Never Be the Same. Once the dominoes begin to fall, no one can be certain where or when they’re going to stop, or who they’re going to flatten in the process.

If you’ve followed the sport for the last two decades, you’re also aware that things have never been “the same” in college football for very long, turmoil and change being two of the hallmarks of an unstructured, unwieldy, Darwinian ecosystem completely lacking the central brain and top-down logic that’s defined every other sport in America, save maybe professional wrestling. Schools and conferences have always been in it for themselves — the NCAA, too — and the next phase of that evolution will be every bit as pitiless on those that are slow or ill-equipped to adapt as all of the previous phases. The fact is, the dominoes have never stopped.

Within that dynamic, there is one constant, central narrative in the business of college football over the last half-century: The ongoing stratification of the “Haves” and “Have-Nots,” and the ever-increasing stakes of falling into the former category. The specifics of the relationship between the profitable, behemoth programs and the aspiring middle class have changed to a degree; there’s far more money to be had today than in the past, and more competition for it. Scholarship restrictions and increased exposure for smaller schools via mid-week games on ESPN and a sudden glut of bowl games have helped distribute talent more evenly. The “Have-Not” schools have more access to a fraction of the loot thanks to BCS payouts and “guarantee” games that keep the lights on for another year in exchange for (usually) a sound beating in front of a packed house at Juggernaut U. But the big trend — the steady consolidation of money and power among fewer programs — is only just reaching another critical juncture in a long, 40-year arc that’s made the notion of the all-encompassing superconference almost inevitable.

That’s not a nod at fate or conspiracy. (As a rule, people are not competent to organize and execute master plans over many decades). Consider, though, that every major structural upheaval in college football over the last three generations has served to further separate the elite from the chaff — or, to put it bluntly, to bring the archaic structure more in line with the longstanding competitive and economic realities.

In 1973, the NCAA drew a sharp (though easily crossed) line between the really serious football schools and those still just playing to play when it separated its new “Division I” classification into I-A and I-AA. In 1984, universities beat the NCAA in the Supreme Court for the right to negotiate their own broadcast rights, overthrowing decades of restrictive “Game of the Week” deals controlled by the NCAA, which distributed revenues to big and small schools alike. Within 10 years, every major Eastern independent except Notre Dame — Miami, Florida State, Penn State, Pittsburgh, Syracuse, West Virginia — had leapt at the chance to get in on one of the major conferences’ television deals (or, in the case of the Big East, to form a new one of their own), and the SEC had hit upon the golden idea of splitting into two divisions and staging a championship game between the winners. To get to the requisite 12 teams, it added independent South Carolina and poached Southwest Conference heavyweight Arkansas, confining the SWC to the state of Texas and hastening the implosion that would send its remaining “Have” members (Texas, Texas A&M, Texas Tech and, for political reasons, Baylor) to the new, SEC-modeled Big 12, while leaving its Have-Nots (TCU, Houston, Rice and SMU) scrambling for cover.

The Big East only narrowly avoided the same fate barely a decade into its football existence, when the ACC nabbed its two most prominent programs, Miami and Virginia Tech, along with Boston College in 2003. By then, the nascent postseason cartel that had begun with the Bowl Alliance in 1992 had morphed into the Bowl Coalition and finally the full-fledged Bowl Championship Series when the Big Ten, Pac-10 and Rose Bowl swallowed their traditionalist pride and signed on in 1998, formally dividing Division I-A into the “Big Six” leagues with automatic bids to the prestige games — along with the full-fledged payouts that came with them — and everyone else.

In all of those cases, the number of teams that can claim to play in the top tier of college football — structurally and competitively, at least, if not always in terms of money, attendance or exposure — has gotten a little smaller. Fewer programs have been able to claim a formal affiliation (Division I-A, “Big Six”) that clearly separates them from the Have-Nots, with the attendant economic and recruiting advantages. By getting bigger, the Big Ten, Pac-12 and now the SEC threaten to make that number even smaller.

The Big East, having narrowly avoided the guillotine earlier this decade, could clearly read the writing on the wall for its existence as a major football conference last year, when the Big Ten appeared to be on the verge of gutting its neighbor in the name of increased exposure for its new, in-house television network. As it turns out, the sword was pointed instead at the Big 12, which lays prostrate from the major players in all directions: The Big Ten poached Nebraska with virtually no resistance, and could have easily had Missouri if it wanted, robbing the Big 12 of two of its most important markets in Kansas City and St. Louis; Colorado eagerly defected to the Pac-10, with the that Texas, Oklahoma and the rest of the Big 12′s South Division would be right behind it. Instead, rejecting the uneasy compromise that briefly staved off collapse in 2010, Texas A&M is about to follow Arkansas in the opposite direction, setting the stage for a replay of the drawing-and-quartering of the old SWC. Only this time, it will Baylor, Iowa State, Kansas and Kansas State left for the vultures, just like their discarded predecessors in the Lone Star State.

True, the remnants of the Big 12 may yet find shelter in the Big East, whose sense of self-preservation has already sent it reaching across the Mississippi for TCU. But eventually, its days as a major football conference are numbered, too, both by its lackluster performance on the field and the growing pressure on the Big Ten and ACC to keep up with the Joneses. If its a 14 or 16-team “super conference” they want, it’s from the Big East — Pittsburgh, Rutgers, South Florida, Syracuse, West Virginia — that it will come.

That sort of end-game, whether played out relatively quickly or over decades, is precisely the landscape Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick imagined last year when describing the catastrophic scenario that might force the Irish to bite the bullet and join the imperialist race (emphasis added):

“The only things that could make it happen are the sorts of radical change in the industry that would cause upheaval and impact a lot more (schools) than Notre Dame,” he says. “You wind up with only three conferences. You wind up with two tiers of conferences. Now, all of a sudden, it’s not three divisions in college; it’s four. It’s the big change.”

The big change: A future of three or four swollen conferences — the Big Ten, SEC, Pac-10 and possibly the ACC, likely under different names — controlling all of the strongest, richest programs in the country (alongside a few vestigial tails from the Dark Ages, when schools like Northwestern, Stanford and Vanderbilt could compete without compromising academics), standing astride a land littered with castoffs that have coalesced into respectable but decidedly second-rate leagues that no longer have their place alongside the behemoths at the adults’ table.

Of course, a swollen conference of 14 to 16 teams — by all accounts, an increasing likelihood for the SEC and Pac-12, and probably the Big Ten and ACC behind them — isn’t really a conference at all, in the traditional sense. It’s a conference in the sense that the NFC or AFC is a conference, a collaboration under a large umbrella with scheduling and revenue-sharing agreements among teams that may only play one another once or twice a decade. That’s the really dystopian apocalypse at the end of the track: A pro-style “league” among the top three or four dozen programs in three or four power conferences, eventually shorn even of their academic vestigial tails, with a few power brokers at the top pulling the strings exclusively in the interest of TV contracts, merchandising deals and maximizing revenue. (And yes, with a playoff, albeit one that’s likely even more hostile from Have-Not interlopers than the BCS is now.)

Note that Swarbrick also says, “I don’t see that happening,” and as a short-term vision over the next 10 years or so, there’s no way to present a radically reconfigured future without seeming a little heavy-handed and slightly unhinged. In many ways, though, that scenario — 30-40 of the strongest, richest programs standing astride the rest of the country, concerned mainly with TV contracts, merchandising deals and maximizing revenue — already exists in practice, and has for a long time. When it comes down to it, the obsession with the emergence of the “super conference” is a desire for a governing structure that reflects the reality of the sport, in which 30-40 of the strongest, richest programs actually are standing astride the rest of the country, concerned mainly with TV contracts, merchandising deals and maximizing revenue. Except that, for now, they remain bound to a chaotic remnant of an era whose most sacrosanct assumption about the game as an amateur pastime restrained by an academic, university-oriented structure faded into oblivion decades ago. The ongoing upheaval of the last two years is only another step toward a prevailing order that openly acknowledges that reality.

As the stakes increase and the economic bar continues to rise, the sport has been moving slowly, often painfully in that direction for decades. Eventually, it will get there in some fashion or another, and it probably won’t be pretty, in the same way that Pop Warner and Fielding Yost would probably contract diphtheria on first sight of the game in the 21st Century. But that’s the thing with radically reconfigured futures: They always seem like the apocalypse until they finally arrive, and by then you usually don’t even notice them.

- – -
This post is updated from a previous post originally published in April 2010.
Matt Hinton is on Facebook and Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.

Read the Article »

As you’re probably aware, the SEC wants to expand — its commissioner is beginning to sound very, very certain about it — and when it does, certainly you have been made aware by now that Things Will Never Be the Same. Once the dominoes begin to fall, no one can be certain where or when they’re going to stop, or who they’re going to flatten in the process.

If you’ve followed the sport for the last two decades, you’re also aware that things have never been “the same” in college football for very long, turmoil and change being two of the hallmarks of an unstructured, unwieldy, Darwinian ecosystem completely lacking the central brain and top-down logic that’s defined every other sport in America, save maybe professional wrestling. Schools and conferences have always been in it for themselves — the NCAA, too — and the next phase of that evolution will be every bit as pitiless on those that are slow or ill-equipped to adapt as all of the previous phases. The fact is, the dominoes have never stopped.

Within that dynamic, there is one constant, central narrative in the business of college football over the last half-century: The ongoing stratification of the “Haves” and “Have-Nots,” and the ever-increasing stakes of falling into the former category. The specifics of the relationship between the profitable, behemoth programs and the aspiring middle class have changed to a degree; there’s far more money to be had today than in the past, and more competition for it. Scholarship restrictions and increased exposure for smaller schools via mid-week games on ESPN and a sudden glut of bowl games have helped distribute talent more evenly. The “Have-Not” schools have more access to a fraction of the loot thanks to BCS payouts and “guarantee” games that keep the lights on for another year in exchange for (usually) a sound beating in front of a packed house at Juggernaut U. But the big trend — the steady consolidation of money and power among fewer programs — is only just reaching another critical juncture in a long, 40-year arc that’s made the notion of the all-encompassing superconference almost inevitable.

That’s not a nod at fate or conspiracy. (As a rule, people are not competent to organize and execute master plans over many decades). Consider, though, that every major structural upheaval in college football over the last three generations has served to further separate the elite from the chaff — or, to put it bluntly, to bring the archaic structure more in line with the longstanding competitive and economic realities.

In 1978, the NCAA drew a sharp (though easily crossed) line between the really serious football schools and those just playing to play when it separated its new “Division I” classification into I-A and I-AA. In 1984, universities beat the NCAA in the Supreme Court for the right to negotiate their own broadcast rights, overthrowing decades of restrictive “Game of the Week” deals controlled by the NCAA, which distributed revenues to big and small schools alike. Within 10 years, every major Eastern independent except Notre Dame — Miami, Florida State, Penn State, Pittsburgh, Syracuse, West Virginia — had leapt at the chance to get in on one of the major conferences’ television deals (or, in the case of the Big East, to form a new one of their own), and the SEC had hit upon the golden idea of splitting into two divisions and staging a championship game between the winners. To get to the requisite 12 teams, it added independent South Carolina and poached Southwest Conference heavyweight Arkansas, confining the SWC to the state of Texas and hastening the implosion that would send its remaining “Have” members (Texas, Texas A&M, Texas Tech and, for political reasons, Baylor) to the new, SEC-modeled Big 12, while leaving its Have-Nots (TCU, Houston, Rice and SMU) scrambling for cover.

The Big East only narrowly avoided the same fate barely a decade into its football existence, when the ACC nabbed its two most prominent programs, Miami and Virginia Tech, along with Boston College in 2003. By then, the nascent postseason cartel that had begun with the Bowl Alliance in 1992 had morphed into the Bowl Coalition and finally the full-fledged Bowl Championship Series when the Big Ten, Pac-10 and Rose Bowl swallowed their traditionalist pride and signed on in 1998, formally dividing Division I-A into the “Big Six” leagues with automatic bids to the prestige games — along with the full-fledged payouts that came with them — and everyone else.

In all of those cases, the number of teams that can claim to play in the top tier of college football — structurally and competitively, at least, if not always in terms of money, attendance or exposure — has gotten a little smaller. Fewer programs have been able to claim a formal affiliation (Division I-A, “Big Six”) that clearly separates them from the Have-Nots, with the attendant economic and recruiting advantages. By getting bigger, the Big Ten, Pac-12 and now the SEC threaten to make that number even smaller.

The Big East, having narrowly avoided the guillotine earlier this decade, could clearly read the writing on the wall for its existence as a major football conference last year, when the Big Ten appeared to be on the verge of gutting its neighbor in the name of increased exposure for its new, in-house television network. As it turns out, the sword was pointed instead at the Big 12, which lays prostrate from the major players in all directions: The Big Ten poached Nebraska with virtually no resistance, and could have easily had Missouri if it wanted, robbing the Big 12 of two of its most important markets in Kansas City and St. Louis; Colorado eagerly defected to the Pac-10, with the that Texas, Oklahoma and the rest of the Big 12′s South Division would be right behind it. Instead, rejecting the uneasy compromise that briefly staved off collapse in 2010, Texas A&M is about to follow Arkansas in the opposite direction, setting the stage for a replay of the drawing-and-quartering of the old SWC. Only this time, it will Baylor, Iowa State, Kansas and Kansas State left for the vultures, just like their discarded predecessors in the Lone Star State.

True, the remnants of the Big 12 may yet find shelter in the Big East, whose sense of self-preservation has already sent it reaching across the Mississippi for TCU. But eventually, its days as a major football conference are numbered, too, both by its lackluster performance on the field and the growing pressure on the Big Ten and ACC to keep up with the Joneses. If its a 14 or 16-team “super conference” they want, it’s from the Big East — Pittsburgh, Rutgers, South Florida, Syracuse, West Virginia — that it will come.

That sort of end-game, whether played out relatively quickly or over decades, is precisely the landscape Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick imagined last year when describing the catastrophic scenario that might force the Irish to bite the bullet and join the imperialist race (emphasis added):

“The only things that could make it happen are the sorts of radical change in the industry that would cause upheaval and impact a lot more (schools) than Notre Dame,” he says. “You wind up with only three conferences. You wind up with two tiers of conferences. Now, all of a sudden, it’s not three divisions in college; it’s four. It’s the big change.”

The big change: A future of three or four swollen conferences — the Big Ten, SEC, Pac-10 and possibly the ACC, likely under different names — controlling all of the strongest, richest programs in the country (alongside a few vestigial tails from the Dark Ages, when schools like Northwestern, Stanford and Vanderbilt could compete without compromising academics), standing astride a land littered with castoffs that have coalesced into respectable but decidedly second-rate leagues that no longer have their place alongside the behemoths at the adults’ table.

Of course, a swollen conference of 14 to 16 teams — by all accounts, an increasing likelihood for the SEC and Pac-12, and probably the Big Ten and ACC behind them — isn’t really a conference at all, in the traditional sense. It’s a conference in the sense that the NFC or AFC is a conference, a collaboration under a large umbrella with scheduling and revenue-sharing agreements among teams that may only play one another once or twice a decade. That’s the really dystopian apocalypse at the end of the track: A pro-style “league” among the top three or four dozen programs in three or four power conferences, eventually shorn even of their academic vestigial tails, with a few power brokers at the top pulling the strings exclusively in the interest of TV contracts, merchandising deals and maximizing revenue. (And yes, with a playoff, albeit one that’s likely even more hostile from Have-Not interlopers than the BCS is now.)

Note that Swarbrick also says, “I don’t see that happening,” and as a short-term vision over the next 10 years or so, there’s no way to present a radically reconfigured future without seeming a little heavy-handed and slightly unhinged. In many ways, though, that scenario — 30-40 of the strongest, richest programs standing astride the rest of the country, concerned mainly with TV contracts, merchandising deals and maximizing revenue — already exists in practice, and has for a long time. When it comes down to it, the obsession with the emergence of the “super conference” is a desire for a governing structure that reflects the reality of the sport, in which 30-40 of the strongest, richest programs actually are standing astride the rest of the country, concerned mainly with TV contracts, merchandising deals and maximizing revenue. Except that, for now, they remain bound to a chaotic remnant of an era whose most sacrosanct assumption about the game as an amateur pastime restrained by an academic, university-oriented structure faded into oblivion decades ago. The ongoing upheaval of the last two years is only another step toward a prevailing order that openly acknowledges that reality.

As the stakes increase and the economic bar continues to rise, the sport has been moving slowly, often painfully in that direction for decades. Eventually, it will get there in some fashion or another, and it probably won’t be pretty, in the same way that Pop Warner and Fielding Yost would probably contract diphtheria on first sight of the game in the 21st Century. But that’s the thing with radically reconfigured futures: They always seem like the apocalypse until they finally arrive, and by then you usually don’t even notice them.

- – -
This post is updated from a previous post originally published in April 2010.
Matt Hinton is on Facebook and Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.

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As you’re probably aware, the SEC wants to expand — its commissioner is beginning to sound very, very certain about it — and when it does, certainly you have been made aware by now that Things Will Never Be the Same. Once the dominoes begin to fall, no one can be certain where or when they’re going to stop, or who they’re going to flatten in the process.

If you’ve followed the sport for the last two decades, you’re also aware that things have never been “the same” in college football for very long, turmoil and change being two of the hallmarks of an unstructured, unwieldy, Darwinian ecosystem completely lacking the central brain and top-down logic that’s defined every other sport in America, save maybe professional wrestling. Schools and conferences have always been in it for themselves — the NCAA, too — and the next phase of that evolution will be every bit as pitiless on those that are slow or ill-equipped to adapt as all of the previous phases. The fact is, the dominoes have never stopped.

Within that dynamic, there is one constant, central narrative in the business of college football over the last half-century: The ongoing stratification of the “Haves” and “Have-Nots,” and the ever-increasing stakes of falling into the former category. The specifics of the relationship between the profitable, behemoth programs and the aspiring middle class have changed to a degree; there’s far more money to be had today than in the past, and more competition for it. Scholarship restrictions and increased exposure for smaller schools via mid-week games on ESPN and a sudden glut of bowl games have helped distribute talent more evenly. The “Have-Not” schools have more access to a fraction of the loot thanks to BCS payouts and “guarantee” games that keep the lights on for another year in exchange for (usually) a sound beating in front of a packed house at Juggernaut U. But the big trend — the steady consolidation of money and power among fewer programs — is only just reaching another critical juncture in a long, 40-year arc that’s made the notion of the all-encompassing superconference almost inevitable.

That’s not a nod at fate or conspiracy. (As a rule, people are not competent to organize and execute master plans over many decades). Consider, though, that every major structural upheaval in college football over the last three generations has served to further separate the elite from the chaff — or, to put it bluntly, to bring the archaic structure more in line with the longstanding competitive and economic realities.

In 1978, the NCAA drew a sharp (though easily crossed) line between the really serious football schools and those just playing to play when it separated its new “Division I” classification into I-A and I-AA. In 1984, universities beat the NCAA in the Supreme Court for the right to negotiate their own broadcast rights, overthrowing decades of restrictive “Game of the Week” deals controlled by the NCAA, which distributed revenues to big and small schools alike. Within 10 years, every major Eastern independent except Notre Dame — Miami, Florida State, Penn State, Pittsburgh, Syracuse, West Virginia — had leapt at the chance to get in on one of the major conferences’ television deals (or, in the case of the Big East, to form a new one of their own), and the SEC had hit upon the golden idea of splitting into two divisions and staging a championship game between the winners. To get to the requisite 12 teams, it added independent South Carolina and poached Southwest Conference heavyweight Arkansas, confining the SWC to the state of Texas and hastening the implosion that would send its remaining “Have” members (Texas, Texas A&M, Texas Tech and, for political reasons, Baylor) to the new, SEC-modeled Big 12, while leaving its Have-Nots (TCU, Houston, Rice and SMU) scrambling for cover.

The Big East only narrowly avoided the same fate barely a decade into its football existence, when the ACC nabbed its two most prominent programs, Miami and Virginia Tech, along with Boston College in 2003. By then, the nascent postseason cartel that had begun with the Bowl Alliance in 1992 had morphed into the Bowl Coalition and finally the full-fledged Bowl Championship Series when the Big Ten, Pac-10 and Rose Bowl swallowed their traditionalist pride and signed on in 1998, formally dividing Division I-A into the “Big Six” leagues with automatic bids to the prestige games — along with the full-fledged payouts that came with them — and everyone else.

In all of those cases, the number of teams that can claim to play in the top tier of college football — structurally and competitively, at least, if not always in terms of money, attendance or exposure — has gotten a little smaller. Fewer programs have been able to claim a formal affiliation (Division I-A, “Big Six”) that clearly separates them from the Have-Nots, with the attendant economic and recruiting advantages. By getting bigger, the Big Ten, Pac-12 and now the SEC threaten to make that number even smaller.

The Big East, having narrowly avoided the guillotine earlier this decade, could clearly read the writing on the wall for its existence as a major football conference last year, when the Big Ten appeared to be on the verge of gutting its neighbor in the name of increased exposure for its new, in-house television network. As it turns out, the sword was pointed instead at the Big 12, which lays prostrate from the major players in all directions: The Big Ten poached Nebraska with virtually no resistance, and could have easily had Missouri if it wanted, robbing the Big 12 of two of its most important markets in Kansas City and St. Louis; Colorado eagerly defected to the Pac-10, with the that Texas, Oklahoma and the rest of the Big 12′s South Division would be right behind it. Instead, rejecting the uneasy compromise that briefly staved off collapse in 2010, Texas A&M is about to follow Arkansas in the opposite direction, setting the stage for a replay of the drawing-and-quartering of the old SWC. Only this time, it will Baylor, Iowa State, Kansas and Kansas State left for the vultures, just like their discarded predecessors in the Lone Star State.

True, the remnants of the Big 12 may yet find shelter in the Big East, whose sense of self-preservation has already sent it reaching across the Mississippi for TCU. But eventually, its days as a major football conference are numbered, too, both by its lackluster performance on the field and the growing pressure on the Big Ten and ACC to keep up with the Joneses. If its a 14 or 16-team “super conference” they want, it’s from the Big East — Pittsburgh, Rutgers, South Florida, Syracuse, West Virginia — that it will come.

That sort of end-game, whether played out relatively quickly or over decades, is precisely the landscape Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick imagined last year when describing the catastrophic scenario that might force the Irish to bite the bullet and join the imperialist race (emphasis added):

“The only things that could make it happen are the sorts of radical change in the industry that would cause upheaval and impact a lot more (schools) than Notre Dame,” he says. “You wind up with only three conferences. You wind up with two tiers of conferences. Now, all of a sudden, it’s not three divisions in college; it’s four. It’s the big change.”

The big change: A future of three or four swollen conferences — the Big Ten, SEC, Pac-10 and possibly the ACC, likely under different names — controlling all of the strongest, richest programs in the country (alongside a few vestigial tails from the Dark Ages, when schools like Northwestern, Stanford and Vanderbilt could compete without compromising academics), standing astride a land littered with castoffs that have coalesced into respectable but decidedly second-rate leagues that no longer have their place alongside the behemoths at the adults’ table.

Of course, a swollen conference of 14 to 16 teams — by all accounts, an increasing likelihood for the SEC and Pac-12, and probably the Big Ten and ACC behind them — isn’t really a conference at all, in the traditional sense. It’s a conference in the sense that the NFC or AFC is a conference, a collaboration under a large umbrella with scheduling and revenue-sharing agreements among teams that may only play one another once or twice a decade. That’s the really dystopian apocalypse at the end of the track: A pro-style “league” among the top three or four dozen programs in three or four power conferences, eventually shorn even of their academic vestigial tails, with a few power brokers at the top pulling the strings exclusively in the interest of TV contracts, merchandising deals and maximizing revenue. (And yes, with a playoff, albeit one that’s likely even more hostile from Have-Not interlopers than the BCS is now.)

Note that Swarbrick also says, “I don’t see that happening,” and as a short-term vision over the next 10 years or so, there’s no way to present a radically reconfigured future without seeming a little heavy-handed and slightly unhinged. In many ways, though, that scenario — 30-40 of the strongest, richest programs standing astride the rest of the country, concerned mainly with TV contracts, merchandising deals and maximizing revenue — already exists in practice, and has for a long time. When it comes down to it, the obsession with the emergence of the “super conference” is a desire for a governing structure that reflects the reality of the sport, in which 30-40 of the strongest, richest programs actually are standing astride the rest of the country, concerned mainly with TV contracts, merchandising deals and maximizing revenue. Except that, for now, they remain bound to a chaotic remnant of an era whose most sacrosanct assumption about the game as an amateur pastime restrained by an academic, university-oriented structure faded into oblivion decades ago. The ongoing upheaval of the last two years is only another step toward a prevailing order that openly acknowledges that reality.

As the stakes increase and the economic bar continues to rise, the sport has been moving slowly, often painfully in that direction for decades. Eventually, it will get there in some fashion or another, and it probably won’t be pretty, in the same way that Pop Warner and Fielding Yost would probably contract diphtheria on first sight of the game in the 21st Century. But that’s the thing with radically reconfigured futures: They always seem like the apocalypse until they finally arrive, and by then you usually don’t even notice them.

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This post is updated from a previous post originally published in April 2010.
Matt Hinton is on Facebook and Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.

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Making the morning rounds.

• It won’t be long now. The metaphorical clock ticking toward a decision on the fate of the Big 12 now appears to be attached to a time bomb, after multiple outlets reported over the weekend that Oklahoma is actively pursuing a defection to the Pac-12 — and multiple officials, given the opportunity, said nothing to disabuse them of the notion. With Texas A&M on the SEC’s doorstep, Oklahoma president David Boren conceded at a Friday press conference that the Sooners are effectively up for grabs and will make a decision on whether to stay or go by the end of the month; Oklahoma State issued a statement on Saturday suggesting it plans to stick with Oklahoma either way. Pac-12 commissioner Larry Scott, while insisting that his conference has not been “predatory,” acknowledged Saturday that “schools have reached out to us.”

The potential roadblock is Texas, the crown jewel of Scott’s initial expansion efforts in 2010 and the only school with the clout to conceivably keep Oklahoma in the fold if OU is determined to go. According to Orangebloods.com, Big 12 commissioner Dan Beebe convened an emergency meeting Friday with his university presidents — minus their counterparts from Oklahoma, Texas and Texas A&M — to urge them to “work on Texas,” betting that either a) Oklahoma won’t leave without the Longhorns, or b) The Pac-12 won’t take Oklahoma without the Longhorns. And the Longhorns have one very lucrative incentive to stay: The Longhorn Network, which reportedly ended their flirtation with the Pac-10 last year and would have to be reconciled with the family of networks the Pac-12 announced earlier this year.

In the meantime, if the Big 12 does start to crack up, the Big East is waiting for the refugees with open arms. [The Oklahoman, New York Times, Associated Press, The Business of College Sports, Orangebloods.com]

• RIP. Oklahoma great Lee Roy Selmon, a College and Pro Football Hall of Famer considered easily one of the greatest defensive tackles in modern history, died Sunday at the age of 56 as a result of a stroke. Selmon was a two-time All-American as the anchor of back-to-back national championship teams in 1974 and 1975, before going on to become the first ever pick of the expansion Tampa Bay Buccaneers in 1976. In his four years on campus, Oklahoma finished 43-2-1 with four consecutive Big 8 titles. [The Oklahoman]

• Back to the drawing board. Notre Dame coach Brian Kelly said he hasn’t settled on his starting quarterback for Saturday’s primetime trip to Michigan after yanking starter Dayne Crist for Tommy Rees after a three-hour raid delay in a 23-20 loss at the hands of South Florida. Crist moved the offense in the first half but killed a possible scoring drive with an ugly interception into the end zone and failed to produce any points; Crist responded with three touchdown drives after the break but also contributed to the five-turnover debacle with a pair of interceptions of his own. [Chicago Tribune]

• Tuel Time has been canceled. Washington State quarterback Jeff Tuel suffered a broken clavicle on the Cougars’ 64-21 rout over Idaho State, potentially sidelining him for up to two months. Backups Marshall Lobbestael and Connor Halliday filled in with 297 yards and three touchdown passes between them against the outmanned Bengals, but with Tuel likely out for at least the first half of Pac-12 play, Wazzu loses its best (and perhaps only) prayer of reaching a bowl game, and perhaps of saving coach Paul Wulff’s job. [Seattle Times]

• They’ve entered the Octagon of Orthopaedia. Ole Miss‘ backfield for Saturday’s date with Southern Illinois is a complete mystery after the top two running backs were injured and the top two quarterbacks played poorly in the Rebels’ opening-day loss against BYU. Starting tailback Brandon Bolden will have an MRI today on an injured ankle, which is suspected to be fractured; backup Enrique Davis suffered from a hyperextended knee. Coach Houston Nutt said Sunday he’ll “continue evaluating the position” at quarterback, where starter Barry Brunetti was pulled after an ineffective first half and backup Zack Stoudt failed to lead a scoring drive before handing the Cougars the winning touchdown on a late fumble. [Clarion-Ledger]

Quickly… Georgia linebacker Alec Ogletree is expected to miss up to six weeks with a broken foot. … The Longhorn Network will broadcast UT-San Antonio’s final five home games. … Michigan’s storm-shortened win over Western Michigan would have resumed if the game was still within the Broncos’ reach. … Georgia’s not changing anything in the backfield. … Cal Poly coaches complained that their headsets didn’t work in the second half of a loss at San Diego State. …

And Andy Staples commits a mortal sin.

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Matt Hinton is on Facebook and Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.

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