Conference chaos kills college sports
College sports as I knew them are dead, with decades of traditional rivalries having been sacrificed in pursuit of the almighty dollar. It explains why San Diego State soon might play a football game against Connecticut of the Big East Conference with a little asterisk alongside denoting conference game, though it is 2,983 miles between the two campuses. Same for Boise State. It is 2,594 miles as the potato rolls from Boise to Storrs, Conn.
San Diego State apparently will be joining the Big West in basketball and sports other than football. That’s a shame if you enjoyed watching Lon Kruger match wits with Steve Fisher in recent years. The UNLV-SDSU basketball rivalry might soon go the way of the two-hand chest pass, unless the Rebels and Aztecs are paired as eight and nine seeds in the East Regional, with the winner to play Kentucky.
On Wednesday, San Diego State and Boise State of the Mountain West and Houston, Southern Methodist and Central Florida of Conference USA officially accepted invitations to temporarily keep the Big East in business.
These are the institutions and individuals I hold responsible:
■ The Bowl Championship Series, because the BCS and its automatic-qualifier system are more evil than Lex Luthor and every Joker from “Batman” rolled into one. When BCS executive director Bill Hancock says every game in the current system counts — and Virginia Tech loses by four touchdowns to Clemson and still gets picked for the Sugar Bowl — it makes me want to cackle like Cesar Romero.
■ Mountain West commissioner Craig Thompson and his constituents, the MWC presidents, for creating their own TV network that provided neither the windfall nor the visibility to preclude Batman and Robin — Utah and Brigham Young — from leaving. Said Fisher of San Diego State moving to the Big West for hoops: “The one real big positive is that it would get us on the ESPN family of networks, and that will help our program and be a huge sell for us.”
■ Wayne Nunnely (19-25), Jim Strong (17-27), Jeff Horton (13-44), John Robinson (28-42), Mike Sanford (16-43) and Bobby Hauck (4-21) for being lousy football coaches, or at least for not being able to turn around a lousy football program, when Wyoming is 8-4.
Because it’s all about football. Isn’t that what they say about these conference cash grabs?
If, indeed, it’s all about football, perhaps UNLV will have no recourse but to join the League of Ordinary Gentlemen, or whatever they’re going to call the Mountain West’s proposed union with Conference USA. I don’t know how many college presidents it takes to change a light bulb, but apparently it takes 18 tackling dummies and Southern Miss to get a football game shown on ESPN.
How many recruiting trips can one make by dividing a check from the Argyle Sock Bowl 19 ways? Isn’t this why UNLV and the other Mountain West schools left the 16-team Western Athletic Conference to form a league of their own? Didn’t they learn that all those TV sets in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex don’t count if they’re tuned to the Texas-Oklahoma game?
Yes, it’s all about football, except at UNLV and Hickory High in Indiana, where it’s all about basketball. The Rebels’ basketball program made a $6 million profit last year. The Rebels’ football program only breaks even when Boise State’s kicker doesn’t miss short field goals with BCS berths on the line.
But yet, if you listen to the rhetoric, where UNLV winds up won’t be in the best interests of Dave Rice and Mike Moser, unless it’s also in the best interests of the women’s volleyball team. This is silly, but it’s something athletic directors say.
“Today’s conference realignment does not detour UNLV from its goal of being a premier athletics department in the West that’s respected nationally and is recognized as the leading school in our conference,” UNLV athletic director Jim Livengood said in a statement. “We are a proud member of the Mountain West and believe strongly in the future of those schools we are associated with now, and those schools we will possibly be associated with more in the future.
“We will continue to explore any and every option that may benefit this university and the well-being of our student-athletes …”
When an athletic director mentions student-athletes is where I usually tune him out, but Livengood went on to state “we do not believe in sacrificing the long-term health of UNLV athletics for short-term gain or radical change that solely benefits one program at the expense of our other programs.”
So much for keeping the basketball rivalry with San Diego State going. The Big West doesn’t play football. Neither does the West Coast Conference. Livengood talks about exploring options, but unless somebody has sincerely apologized to Western Athletic Conference commissioner Karl Benson for leaving him holding the bag many years ago, what options could UNLV have if it insists on keeping all of its teams together, other than the proposed MWC-Conference USA merger?
UNLV president Neal Smatresk, the chairman of the MWC’s board of directors, issued his own statement, saying that 20 Mule Team Borax, or whatever the proposed union would be called, still has merit, even with Wednesday’s massive defections. Thompson issued a statement that basically said he has been on the telephone.
I’m not sure what any of these statements mean. Considering the shifting landscape of college sports in pursuit of the almighty dollar, neither, probably, do the ones who are making them.
Las Vegas Review-Journal sports columnist Ron Kantowski can be reached at rkantowski@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0352. Follow him on Twitter: @ronkantowski.
