Collier's Corner
Conference Boss
By Sean Collier
The tricky thing about the slow-boiling NCAA conference realignment brouhaha is this: someone is gonna get screwed. And I'm not worried about the conferences themselves –there is never any cause to have sympathy for a governing body. No, somewhere in this mess, a school's fortunes are going to be reversed. A program on the rise is going to find its conference in shambles, and recruitment will plummet. A school formerly surrounded by powerhouses is going to find itself in a patched-together group of misfits. Things are not going to be rosy on every campus.
With that in mind, I think I have the only intelligent solution.
Blow up every current conference and replace them with completely random, arbitrary (and occasionally schadenfreuede-laden) new alignments.
Allow me to offer a few of my ideas.
The Big 10, no longer content to simply be a collection of sprawling Midwestern campuses, clearly wants to devour all the biggest universities in the country – they've already reached south to take Nebraska, and were thinking of Texas. So, they want big? Let's give 'em big. My new conference, renamed the Big Big, will only be open to schools with an 85,000-seat stadium. No hapless Northwesterns and usually-underperforming Minnesotas for Penn State and Ohio State to beat up on in this conference. The Big Big would consist of Penn State, Michigan, Ohio State, Alabama, Texas, Tennessee, USC, Georgia, UCLA, LSU, Florida and Auburn. Absolutely no one is going undefeated. I imagine that Notre Dame would quickly relocate to Kokata, India's 120,000-seat Salt Lake Stadium to keep up, but now I'm just speculating.
Do not think, however, that all of my plans involve punishing our nation's largest universities for their damnable hubris. No, I'm here to help the NCAA. And that's why I'm thinking celebrity endorsements. Let's throw some money at Bruce Springsteen and try to put together Bruce's Blue Collar Conference (the Boss-C for short.) You're only allowed in if you have a working-class nickname. Purdue Boilermakers? Obviously. West Virginia Mountaineers? Oh yeah. UTEP Miners? Damn straight. Western Kentucky Hilltoppers? I don't know if that's a job, but it sure as hell sounds manly. Oh, and as the only school with an FBS team in New Jersey, Rutgers gets in as a matter of principle. But they damn well better rename themselves to something difficult and sweaty. The Rutgers Fightin' Asphalt Spreaders, maybe.
Now, I know what you're thinking – with all this upheaval, where are the rivalries going to come from? Trust me. Way ahead of you. My Conference of Pure Hatred (the CPH-10) will only consist of teams whose mascots would, in the wild, rip each others' throats out. We'll start with two sets of Bulldogs (let's say Louisiana Tech and Mississippi State) going against a duo of Wildcats (Kansas State and Arizona.) I'm assuming that Falcons and Gophers would not get along, so Bowling Green State and Minnesota are in.
With all of these fine powerhouse conferences around, though, someone has to be the little also-ran of the new order. And this fate will fall to the octet of squads in my new Woefully Unimagintive 8 (WU-8, pronounced "Whooo-ayt.") If your name bears no mark of originality, you're stuck in the WU-8. Utah Utes, Illinois Illini, Troy Trojans? Obviously. Syracuse Orange? You're an adjective. Until you find a noun, you're in. Also, I'm throwing in everyone named the Aggies for good measure. No just naming your team after what your school is good at – if we all did that, Penn State would be the Nittany Drunkards. (I'm an alumni, I'm allowed to make that joke.)
I'm submitting this modest proposal, the brainchild of several minutes of work and research, to the NCAA. Free of charge. Is it perfect? No, certainly not. Is it better than the current system? That's a silly question. Literally anything is better than the current system. Especially if you can work Springsteen into it.
