...and college football as we know it.

With today's announcement that the Big Ten is reengaging in talks with Oregon, Wasington, Stanford and Cal, we could be on the precipice of a monumental shift in the college football landscape. The term Power Five has never felt more meaningless, as the Biggest Two, the SEC and the Big Ten, are veering towards a quasi-NFL farm system even closer than ever before.

The Big 12 is doing all it can to survive, seemingly just adding as many schools as possible and the ACC signed a long term deal with ESPN too early, causing schools like Florida State and Clemson to rethink their process. Florida State held a board meeting today and there were statements from some members saying if not demanding "we should be out of the ACC by 2025." For those not aware, the ACC members signed a deal keeping them locked in with ESPN until 2036 with enormous buyouts.

There's plenty of blame to go around:

-The bidding war between TV Networks (Disney/ESPN/ABC, CBS, FOX, NBC) for the rights to the Big Ten and SEC which seemingly started this whole thing.

-The SEC convincing Oklahoma and Texas to leave the Big 12 after said deals were in place, essentially doubling their money.

-The Big Ten convincing USC and UCLA after their deals were done that the PAC-12 was a sinking ship and who cares if your volleyball team has to travel 3,000 miles to Piscataway, NJ? The Big Ten has also said "they don't want to be the ones to kill the PAC-12" without even realizing they're the ones who loaded the bullet into the chamber in the first place.

-The Big 12 playing catch up, nabbing the 3 best Group of Five programs they could find plus BYU and Colorado, and securing their TV rights before the PAC 12 knew what was happening. Arizona, Arizona State and Utah? You're on deck.

-Larry Scott and George Kliavkoff for the laundry list of mistakes they've made as PAC 12 commissioners dating back to the first round of realignment.

The PAC 12 Network distribution rights and somehow not ever improving it.

The PAC 12 home offices being placed in the most expensive real estate area of the country at the height of a real estate and tech boom in the area.

The pending lawsuits with Comcast.

Not being more aggressive in realignment, turning up their nose at lower tier programs like SDSU, Fresno and Boise because they "didn't fit the academic profile."

(Psssst watch Stanford/Cal go Independent or drop football altogether and become West Coast Ivy-like schools if the Big Ten doesn't offer them a spot. They quite literally have nowhere else to go.)

The presidents, boards and ADs of the schools share some of this blame also for letting it continue until it was too late.

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I don't really have a point to all this, just that it's sad. I've only lived on the West Coast for 18 months, but have always been a fan of West Coast football. The schools will still be here, but the regionality of college football is what makes this sport great. Non-conference matchups are fun to see where your team stacks up. But who in all honesty wants to see UCLA play at Purdue and Illinois in back-to-back weeks? Why should I give a crap about Washington hosting Maryland then traveling to the Big House to face Michigan?

I was at Oregon State's game last year where they hosted USC. Reser Stadium was undergoing a renovation project and half the stadium was empty, but you wouldn't be able to tell with how electric the atmosphere was. They did the same thing against Oregon when they scored 21 unanswered to come back and beat their rival. That could all go away here in a matter of days. One of the Bermuda Triangles of college football in Pullman, WA will lose a lot of relevance if the Wazzu Cougars are relegated to the Mountain West - the potential landing spot for both OSU and WSU. We've seen rivalries disappear and come back due to realignment, but there's something different about them not being in your conference.

One of the best things about college football was the...somewhat innocence of it? Hardly innocent by any means when you think about the scandals that have rocked the sport. You took it seriously, but not as seriously as the NFL because it's just a bunch of young kids playing their hearts out with their hair on fire. TV money has essentially ruined all of that. I really hope Big Ten fans enjoy a 9-10:00pm EST kickoff if your school is playing at Stanford or Berkeley or LA. Enjoy those back-to-back road games in Seattle and Eugene. You're gonna have to make sacrifices eventually.

To be clear, I'm all for athletes getting paid. They absolutely deserve a portion of this ever-growing pot. Especially when you look at the size of coaching contracts going up and up. But what we're seeing now is essentially a minor league NFL. Maybe it's always been that way and I've been too naïve to even care. But I digress.

And on top of all this I'm a fan of a school in the MAC - an also-ran conference with a lowly TV budget. Maybe this is what pushes this conference and others like it down a peg meaning we get a shot at our own national championship - which I wouldn't hate - or maybe we'll just maintain status quo until the sun burns us all. Either way, it just feels really hard to care about much anymore.

I'll watch the games, because the games are fun as hell. I'll still wake up at 9am Pacific Time and watch football all day long until the last whistle blows in Hawaii. But man...

...THIS SUCKS.

Apologies for the rant.

You have put into words exactly my frustration with the way the future of college football is leaning towards.

What makes this transition particularly hard for me is just how suddenly NIL completely changed the feel of college sports. I completely agree, student athletes rightfully deserve a slice of the pie that they have been baking and serving up for the past 30-40 years, but it feels how the spirit of college sports suddenly evaporated over the past 4 years. The NCAA basically betted that they could perpetually keep the status quo of moderately enforced "amateurism" and made no plans for athletes to be paid. So when they were forced to do so, the system put in place has become the wild west where the top programs can essentially pay for the best student athletes while leaving the smaller programs completely in the dust.

I don't know... I guess I was expecting the eventual transition to super conferences was going to be a long and slow decline, versus a seemingly pretty sudden rug pull for big money.

I'm curious to see what the deals are going to look like in 10-15 years if and when cable money completely runs dry and all that's left are streaming services, or whatever the future holds.

There are conferences that would pee on themselves to get Cal & Stanford.

They won't be independents.

In an era where the climate of our planet has become a factor in many business decisions, I'm not sure how the Big 10 can justify travel between teams on the West Coast and teams in the Midwest. Flying between Columbus and Los Angeles emits a large amount of CO2.

I guess the P5 is a lot like Hollywood actors who fly everywhere on private jets and then complain about the environment to anyone who will listen. Clearly, being a fan of the MAC with our humble, eco-conscious travel schedule is the best path forward for the good of the planet. Big Ten fans are immoral.

There in lies your problem. Other conferences would love to have them, but culturally and academically, Stanford doesn't want to join any other conference that isn't a fit. They've said so publicly. The other day on KJR here in Seattle, John Canzano explained that privately in PAC 12 circles, Phil Knight was pissed off at Stanford for not wanting to expand the PAC 12 because of their academic stance.

Cal and Stanford are two very different schools from the rest of the country. Cal is broke, so they might do their own thing if the check amount is right. But Stanford wins national championships in just about everything other than football and they're ok with that.

Hindsight is 20/20, but from what I heard the PAC-12 had a similar tiered payout structure with the PAC-12 network, where the conference gets a bigger payout the more cable subscribers they had... unfortunately they could never rollout the PAC-12 network to enough homes and their payout was less than compared to B1G, SEC, Big 12, ect. I'm sure the last thing they wanted to do was enter in ANOTHER contract with a tiered payout to a distant 5th or 6th place streaming platform.

I think in the next round of contracts talks in 10-15 years we'll finally see the jump to mostly streaming services. It seems like Apple+ is jockeying for more live sport content with their deal with Major League Soccer and their initial talks of buying out ESPN from Disney.

The irony in all of this: if you've ever actually seen the PAC 12 Network, it's actually really well produced and televised. It's a shame it's gonna die and hardly anyone saw it.

Baseball's a weird case, because basically any team north of the Mason Dixon line ends up traveling a ton and spending a big chunk of the early part of the season somewhere in the south. I suspect they have pretty big travel budgets as a result.

Last year, for instance, Purdue played Holy Cross in Texas, NJIT and Akron in North Carolina. Big 10 baseball's probably excited to have some warm weather teams who can host conference series before April without risk of snow.

That's a good point about baseball out-of-conference and early season in-conference warm-weather scheduling. But, maybe there would be these kind of opportunities in other non-revenue sports?

I'm wondering what happens to academic powerhouse Vandy. They certainly would fit in with Wake and Duke in the state to their east. Yet, the BIG 10 has wanted them forever, to put in a division opposite academic power Northwestern for balance and to get a foothold in the Nashville area sports-crazy media market.

And the Big 10 network can match the SEC network dollar for dollar.

And Washington is saying it will cost 10million extra for transportation. Ouch. Apparently the Big Ten is only talking about paying Washington and Oregon a partial share of 30-35 million to join.

It feels like if you get much bigger that you would have to push the NCAA to change rules and allow you to play a semifinal for your championship. Or you could reserve the final week of the regular season and play the equivalent finisher in another of 4 divisions where the 1 vs. 1 acts as a semi-final.

If the B10 went to 20 and created 4 5 team pods with 5 western teams in 1 pod then you could play your 4 main geographical rivals every year, save travel, 9 total conference games with no crossover play in football where you rotate which pods make up the divisions every year so you still play everyone on a regular basis, and 20 conference games in basketball where you play everyone once and your rival twice. Its unwieldy but you could make it function. If you get bigger than 20 how do you function without doing something very, very different from what we currently think of as a conference.

Those two schools rode on their high horses for long enough. Combined with President Crow at Arizona State, those three high horses shot the league to pieces. I blame Crow the most, but the ivory towers and arrogance is what sunk this league. And to be candid, the fact that Cal gets $10 mil a year from UCLA due to its own incompetence is pathetic. Cal deserves every ounce of pain with this realignment. Earthquake insurance ain't covering this screwup.

I feel bad for Stanford to an extent, but wouldn't be shocked to see them actually consider their options (and I mean all of them). Whether Ivy League is on the table or not, their only hope to their high horses is literally praying Notre Dame's TV deal sucks. Because unfortunately, they're tied to the hip with Cal. Which, if they want to go down with that ship, I say it's noble but completely stupid.

And as to Arizona State, mark my words, they are going to try to screw up Arizona's chance in the Big 12. The regents in Arizona are already holding a gun to their head that if they leave without ASU, they gotta make them whole. Completely wrong, but nonetheless, they're going to do it. Which again, I point back to Crow as to why Arizona State is a sleeping giant being medically induced into a coma until he leaves.