Some thoughts about realignment

Conference Realignment??? You’re gonna feel a little pressure.

Every time I hear another discussion on college football conference “realignment,” it makes me think of going to the chiropractor — and how appropriate!

Chiropractic is defined as a health care discipline that focuses on the relationship between musculoskeletal structure (primarily the spine) and body function (as coordinated by the nervous system.

Nervous? You bet. Nationwide the talk of realignment has Athletic Directors and Conference Commissioners sleeping lightly and waiting for the next big text message to buzz in on their predawn bedside table.

College Football fans, you better be nervous, too. For years, the NCAA stated that college football needed to be distinctively different from the professional game. Rules were different, goal posts were wider (believe me, I know) and the focus was on competition and the overall health of the game. The NFL was left to worry about television contracts, media markets, expansion and how much to pay the players. Now, those conversations have oozed into the college game on a daily basis.

Sure, lay the blame for starting this latest wildfire at the feet of ESPN (gas can) and University of Texas (match), but there are plenty of other players to include on the list of suspects. And don’t forget to blame two inventions of post-World War II America, the jet engine and television — without them we wouldn’t have this situation.

My point is that maybe everyone should back off and think about what has built college football to this point:

• Regional conferences that make game access for fans easy.
• Road trips that all fans can make.
• Rivalries that hook fans as toddlers and carry through a lifetime. (See Texas-OU and Texas-Texas A&M, both on the chopping block.)
• Scheduling that keeps ‘em coming back for more.

See where I’m going? Some things just should not be abandoned.

Several years ago, NASCAR decided it was going to get too big for its britches and bolt out to larger markets, abandoning its historic regional roots and killing off races in Nashville and North Wilkesboro Speedway and Rockingham for Las Vegas, California, etc. and it’s not working out the way they thought it would. Oh, by the way, NASCAR has announced that it’s going back to Rockingham next year after a 7-year hiatus. Making the move of out Rockingham wasn’t a good idea after all. Is there a marketing lesson here?

For Texas A&M, the marketing research may lie as closely as the University of Arkansas. The Hogs bolted for the SEC in 1990 and took one leg off the SWC chair that eventually crashed under the weight of Big Bertha. Arkansas fans will tell you that it hasn’t worked out the way they thought it would. The SEC is a meat grinder, and TCU has been ranked in the Top 10 more than Arkansas has. not to mention that when Arkansas went east to the SEC, it abandoned its recruiting base in north central Texas because it ceased playing games in Texas and game exposure to recruits diminished. (That’s why Jerry Jones — a Hog alum — booked the Hogs into Cowboys Stadium to play every year.) Again, TAMC (for you older readers) might want to review this case study.

Finally, whatever configuration is decided on at the end of this domino game, the serious talk of 16-team conferences makes me scratch my head. TCU lived in the 16-member WAC from 1996-2001 and the travel, scheduling and operation of the conference were unwieldy. In a five-year period there were actually conference opponents that TCU never played home-and-home in football. In basketball, teams played everyone in their 8-team division and then cross over to the other division to play 4 teams in one of the “crossover quadrants” which alternated year-to-year. Confused? Twelve-team conferences are the way to go.

This situation brings to mind a passage from The Life of Reason (1905-1906) by George Santayana:

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Perhaps the best answers for the future of college football are wedged in its past.