Expansion brings out college's ugly face for all to see again
Comrade Dodd has been covering the college expansion story with the kind of fevered fascination one normally associates with the stupidly clichéd Internet nerd in the folks' basement, and blah blah blah.
Or, for those of you with a few more miles on the tread, people who played Risk a lot.
And Comrade Dodd is right to do so, because as shameless land grabs go, this is right up there with the Europeans carving up the African land mass for colonies in the 18th century.
|
|
| Notre Dame remains the wild card and the expansion prize. (US Presswire) |
Indeed, the only folks who come out looking even remotely decent about this are the kids who run the Sun Belt, because nobody is clamoring for the ACC to swallow Troy, and nobody who covers the Sun Belt has reported that the conference is casting a covetous eye toward Delaware.
Call it the high moral ground that comes from nobody else giving a damn.
But here's the kicker, the one thing that we haven't had yet -- Notre Dame, BYU and Texas, the biggest prizes on the cash continuum, just tarting themselves up, rouge, fishnets, stilettos, the whole nine yards, and going from conference to conference saying, "We know what we all are here, so just make us an offer."
And we're all expecting that to happen any time soon, no matter how stridently the schools try to look dignified about this. This is high-powered whoring, combined with higher-powered brigandry, and nobody seems even the slightest bit ashamed. They're all "growing the brand," which is fancy talking for "Stealing from others so we can buy up."
It also is the roundabout way of destroying the bowl system as we know it, because the big conferences don't care what the postseason looks like as long as their clients get it all. Once the pie gets cut down to five big slabs, a playoff will magically appear
So the Big 10 becomes the Big 16 (and shut up, Jim Delany, you know where this is heading as well as the rest of us), and the SEC goes from Southeastern to SuperSized (and Mike Slive will nod in benign approval), and the Pac-10 goes to the Everything West Of The River (and Larry Scott got hired specifically to do this one thing), and the Big 12 eats the Mountain West and the ACC eats the Big East's leftovers, and then you've got five conference with 80 teams, and everyone else can go play with the Big Sky and the Patriot League until they all run out of money.
It's how the Congo became Belgian, and how Algeria became French, and South Africa became English, and Ethiopia became Italian.
And eventually the SEC will decide that Vanderbilt is too snooty for the rest of the membership and trade it in for Louisville, and the Pac-10 will decide that Oregon State and Washington State are insufficiently urban and run at San Diego State and UNLV (after having already grabbed BYU, Colorado and Utah), and then they'll start to consume each other, hopefully right after the government finally realizes that college sports is the NFL only without the dignity and starts redefining their tax status upward.
I mean, if you're going to eat everything in front of you anyway, your grocery bill should rise commensurately, and the conferences are acting as a cartel in a way that would make Roger Goodell whistle with admiration. Only this is even more brazen, shameless and remorseless than that.
In fact, the next thing you're going to find out is that the five big conferences will remove the remaining pretense and just have a televised draft of universities, complete with trades ("We'll take Texas A&M and give you Baylor plus two law schools to be named later"), and Dodd wearing a puffed up wig, aviator glasses and beadier eyes to make him look a little more like, well, you know.
I mean, we've already established that this is college athletics at its most revolting (except for the way it still uses its athletes as key ring fobs to protect the coaches it hires), so it might as well run the table and turn itself into a full service buffet and brothel.
After all, if you're going to make a fetish of taking things that don't belong to you, you may as well get down and dirty about it. Well, downer and dirtier about it, anyway.
Ray Ratto is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle.
