Uh, oh, here we go again. Another big turf war is heating up in college football.
The rich and powerful conferences are ransacking and pillaging other conferences in another land grab to become more rich and powerful, while everyone else scrambles to pick up the leftovers.
Been there, done that.
As if you needed further proof that college football is anarchy and run-amok greed. It's greed on steroids. It's the same greed that infects the entire sport, from the bowl system to the constant reshuffling of conferences.
It's nothing but old-world feudalism.
Just one question: Where is the NCAA during all of this?
Isn't it the NCAA's job to oversee the game? Isn't the NCAA supposed to do more than dream up rules about how many free dougnnuts a school can give a recruit? Isn't the NCAA supposed to oversee its own championship and not allow it to be taken over by a few greedy conferences that want a monopoly on the TV money? Isn't the NCAA supposed to oversee the orderly organization of its game and conferences?
If not, why not?
Why don't they oversee football the way they do all their other sports?
The inmates are running the asylum. The BCS. The BCS conferences and schools. The BCS presidents and athletic directors. The good ole boys still working it for the bowls. The TV and cable networks.
The tails are wagging the dogs.
The NCAA isn't watching out for everyone's interests. It isn't watching out for anyone's interests. The NCAA is a spectator. Imagine the Dallas Cowboys, Philadelphia Eagles and New York Giants forming their own alliance within the NFL. Picture the New York Yankees hogging all the money in Major League Baseball and not sharing it with the other kids (oh, wait, they already do that).
The NCAA — or some neutral overseer — needs to take control of the game, but there's no turning back now. They lost control, if they ever held it, long ago when they turned their championship over to newspaper polls and computer systems and bowl games and sponsors and finally TV. They lost even more control about 20 years ago with the creation of the Bowl Coalition and then the Bowl Alliance and finally the Bowl Championship Series.
The NCAA didn't create those entities; the blueblood conferences created them, whether the NCAA liked it or not. They hijacked the championship and the bowl system.
Now it's every school and every conference for itself. Take the latest expansion moves that are under way. The Pac-10 wants to become the Pac-16 by raiding the Big 12 to steal Texas, Texas A&M, Texas Tech, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State and either Colorado or Baylor.
After that, it's a game of dominoes. The Big Ten might nab Nebraska and Missouri, and it is also making a run to grab independent Notre Dame. Meanwhile, one of the have-not conferences, the Mountain West, is considering the annexation of Boise State, another have-not.
College football is all about TV sets and TV contracts and billion-dollar deals and the attempts to get more of them. TV contracts are awarded to conferences with the biggest names, so conferences are trying to add more big names to their ranks. Thus, college football's caste system is self-perpetuating.
There's no movement between the classes. Boise State and Utah have played with and beaten the bluebloods at their own games, but they still can't crack college football's Upper Class, and neither can anyone else.
If a school is located where there are few TV sets, that school's fate is sealed. Meanwhile, the have-nots are trying to keep pace with the haves at any cost. A recent study revealed that public schools in the Mountain West pay an average of $1,177 per student to subsidize their athletic programs; in the Western Athletic Conference, it's $718. It's a luxury most schools and students can't afford when teachers and programs are being cut and tuition is being raised continually.
It is also significantly more than the BCS conference schools pay, because they collect millions from TV contracts and don't have to gouge their students. The Big Ten distributed some $20 million to its 11 schools last year; the Southeastern Conference signed a new 15-year TV deal that is worth billions of dollars. There is no way for non-BCS schools to compete with that.
The rich get richer.
It should be the NCAA's job to establish equity that is so lacking on so many fronts. The game needs to be taken back by a neutral party whose interest is the health of all teams and all of college football, and not any particular fiefdom. As it is now, the NCAA can't even make a pretense of being in charge of football. In basketball, they crown an NCAA champion; in football, they crown a BCS champion.
When they name the national championship trophy after the organization that is owned and operated by six of football's 12 conferences, you should know something is unfair and broken in the game.
e-mail: drob@desnews.com