![]() The BCS television contract with ESPN is only a contract. Maybe none of this happens, but surely it will be considered if some new lineup of superconferences is created either right away or in the next few years. There's always going to be a Hawaii or a Cincinnati on the outside looking in under that system, but isn't that where lawyers come in? It's all part of the American way. Want to expand that to eight teams? Fine, take the conference championship games and call them national quarterfinals just to keep it simple. It's just not that far from there to a basic format of four major champions emerging to play each other in national semifinals and a championship game. That's the way we're headed, with the possibility of four 16-team superconferences snapping up all the programs that matter most in fairly short order. There even are scenarios that turn the ACC back into a basketball-only league, at least by reputation. If the Big 12 dissolves, for instance, what happens to the automatic BCS bowl bid that belonged to that vanishing breed? Same goes for the Big East, which already was the weakest member of the BCS brotherhood and now is in danger of imploding altogether with the greedy Big Ten coveting the best it has to offer. The whole thing may not have started with the BCS in mind, but it likely ends there. Even Boise State is on the move, swapping leagues from the WAC to the Mountain West for a higher profile at bowl time, and the Texas regents are scheduled to meet on Tuesday for a decision on which power league - the Pac-10, the Big Ten or even the SEC - will land the Longhorns. It's all up for grabs now, providing the momentum of hostile conference takeover continues down the most slippery slope of speculation. How do you make that point when all the power teams in Texas and Oklahoma are ready to take on the travel and time-consumption nightmares of membership in the Pacific 10? From College Station, Texas, to Pullman, Wash., just to dive into a pool or to run around a track, that's how far this leap is for non-revenue sports. ![]() So do all the old rationalizations by university presidents about not wanting to make student-athletes miss class or lose their balance during exams week for the sake of an extra football game or two. With the news that Nebraska is moving to the Big Ten and the expectation that Texas and other Big 12 runaways will also scatter to resurface in unfamiliar neighborhoods, the BCS teeters on the verge of irrelevance. The logjam of the Bowl Championship Series could actually be broken, blown apart by the most bizarre thing to happen to college football since artificial turf. ![]() ![]() After years of complicated formulas and pointless arguments exploring what it would take to bring a national championship playoff system to college football, the rising chaos of NCAA conference expansion may finally deliver the prize accident. ![]()
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