to make way for those he wanted to bring in from elsewhere, only to have the head of the school say doing so was fine? That’s the NFL’s modus operandi. The only thing college football doesn’t do like the pros now is play most of its schedule on Sundays. And, of course, it doesn’t pay the field-level unrepresented laborers it dissimulates as student-athletes.
So what are we waiting for? While the Big Ten is expanding from coast to coast, and the Pac-10 or -12 or whatever it was in its last iteration is, just call whatever teams are left the National College Football League. Teams can be affiliated with schools but in the loosest sense. Divide the conferences by region as the NFL does. The rivalries many are teary-eyed to see disappear can be reestablished or maintained.
Under the new arrangements, the athletes — who are ostensibly at their universities to learn — will be traveling farther to play games, which means less time in class and more letters to professors excusing athletes under the pretense of performing a university function, all of which makes a mockery of the academy.
found athletes felt longer travel hurt their academic performance as well as their athletic performance.What do their employers — which is what athletic bosses are, given their control over athletes’ lives — care? Florida State is trying to pony up more than $100 million, not to build a new home for biomedical sciences but to buy itself out of the ACC to join the SEC or Big Ten and start traveling regularly for games three time zones away on the West Coast.