COMMENTARY : College Football Has Cash on Its Mind in Conference Shuffle

College sports have been thrown to the wolves in the suits. The coaches and players can take the next few years off. They’re strictly small print. No one in the know cares about touchdowns, turnovers or three-point shots. Realignment is the game right now. The big-money game.

The lawyers and accountants and demographics whizzes have moved in. They’re the ones in charge. No questions asked. It’s a negotiating free-for-all. Anyone can talk to anyone else. All rules are off. All traditions are old news, not worth a nickel. We’re talking about a revolution.

Who is No. 1? The team with the best defense? Nope. The conference that cuts the best deal. The conference that gets the largest share of the television market. That’s what college sports are all about now--television shares.

The games may look the same, but they will never be the same. Decades-old conference ties are being snipped, new ones sewed. Some conferences may die, others merge. There will be a championship football playoff one of these years--that looks certain now, at least from this seat. Bowls won’t be the end-all anymore. As always, some little people probably will pay.

Is it a shame? Sure it is. Change isn’t necessarily bad, and there’s nothing wrong with trying to make money, but these people are tromping all over the history and many of the traditions of their sports. You say nothing is like it used to be? Well, college sports--particularly football--may soon be Exhibit A.

It all started after last season, when Penn State jumped to the Big Ten and Notre Dame signed its own football TV contract. It was clear, despite the conference’s altruistic posturing, that the Big Ten was trying to make itself more attractive to the networks. It was also suddenly clear that networks were only going to be signing football deals with individual conferences and schools. It’s called a free market.

Suddenly, conferences are considering annexing schools that would make them more attractive to the networks, and schools are mulling the positives and negatives of jumping to different conferences.

What should we make of it? The smart money says that four or five football super-conferences are going to emerge from this mishmash in the coming years, that they will annex enough big names to push many of the other conferences out of business. The top candidates are the Big Ten, Pac-10, SEC and ACC, all of which appear to be gaining weight instead of--like the Southwest--losing it.

If you’re going to try to follow it all, don’t think logically. Regionalism, long the backbone of college sports, doesn’t matter much anymore. The Big Ten proved that by taking Penn State, which is about 1,000 miles from some of its new “brothers.” And Texas going to the Pac-10? Last time I checked, Texas was a long, long way from the Pacific Ocean.

But, see, annexing Texas makes sense for the Pac-10 in this new order, because it would boost the conference’s share of the national television market from 14% to more than 20%. The conference would be in a better position to negotiate a football deal with one of the networks.

Of course, all this probably will mean the end of some smaller sports, which will be even less cost-efficient in conferences covering so much territory. Let’s talk about that dual track meet between Penn State and Minnesota. How long do you think the schools would be willing to take a loss on that?

Not all the changes will be bad. The emergence of super-conferences will mean more quality games during the football regular season. As things stand now, everyone except Notre Dame tries to schedule as many sure wins as possible. It’s largely a bore.

But the devaluation of the football bowls will be sad. The question of who is No. 1 sustains furious debate and a healthy dose of anarchy; it is one of the last gray areas left in sports, and replacing it with a sterile, made-for-television tournament will contribute to deadening the game, not enlivening it.