Forty names, games, teams and minutiae making news in college football (rib necklaces, the new must-have fashion accessory in the sport, sold separately in South Bend):
First Quarter
Last Waltz
Everything changes come 2024, but that’s no reason to wish away 2023. Settle in for our last chance to see a lot of things before they go away—some of them forever. Check out the Dash’s Last Waltz dance card:
The Pac-12 (1). The Conference of Champions isn’t officially dead yet, but it has absolutely been snuffed out as a power league and a base for West Coast schools. Four schools are fleeing to the Big Ten: USC, UCLA, Oregon and Washington. Four are bolting for the Big 12: Colorado, Arizona, Arizona State and Utah. Two more, Stanford and California, are persistently trying to work their way into the Atlantic Coast Conference (that quest could reach a resolution, one way or the other, this week).
That potentially leaves Oregon State and Washington State as the last two members of a league that was born in 1915. The Beavers were a charter member, and the Cougars joined two years later. Whatever their fate will be, it’s sure to be sad.
Kirby Lee/USA TODAY Sports
Mourn-o-meter: On a scale of 1 to 10, this is an 11. It took incredibly bad leadership, both from the conference office and campus administrators, but they actually pulled it off: They destroyed a long-standing Power 5 conference. Shamelessly grabbing for cash, making a mockery of academic emphasis, subjecting athletes to ridiculous travel demands and insulting fans is inexcusable. But the cowards in charge did it anyway.
The four-team College Football Playoff (2). The four-teamer served a valuable purpose in the history of the sport, simply by being better than what came before it. The BCS and the poll systems produced 145 years of nonsense in trying to crown a national champion, and the last nine years have certainly been an upgrade from that.
But it remains mind-boggling that the heads of a ten-conference consortium approved a playoff that excludes a majority of them from participation every year. Even if you reduce the true clout to five leagues, they still approved a format that keeps at least one of them out. Think the Pac-12 wishes this had been eight or 12 or 16 from the get-go? The leaders were so afraid of a playoff that they voted to create the smallest one possible, until the 12-team version was passed and will be implemented next season.
Mourn-o-meter: This registers as a 1, because what’s to come will be so much better. More inclusion, more teams in the championship hunt later into the season, playoff games on campus—it’s going to be great.
Divisional champions in both the Big Ten and the SEC (3). Both leagues are scrapping their divisional alignments in an effort to put their two best teams in the league championship game and increase chances for multiple playoff bids. Of course, this could be subject to further review. Maybe the Big Ten reconsiders now that it has swollen to 18 members. Maybe both eventually get to 20 schools, which would be wild in a non-divisional format. Maybe schools come to realize that tabular standings are going to look really bad for whoever is last in a league with 16 to 20 teams in it.
Mourn-o-meter: 4. Imbalanced divisions often produced championship-game mismatches that nobody will miss. But think about what it meant for some of the underdog schools and their fans to win something: pour one out for Missouri, SEC East Division champion in 2013 and ’14; for South Carolina, East champ in ’10; for Mississippi State, which won the West back in 1998; for Purdue in the Big Ten West last year and Northwestern in 2018 and ’20. Those schools might never wrap their hands around conference hardware again in the championship format to come.
Marc Lebryk/USA TODAY Sports
Bedlam (4). The Nov. 4 game in Stillwater, Okla., between Oklahoma and Oklahoma State will be the 118th and perhaps final meeting between the Sooners and Cowboys. It’s definitely the last one scheduled, and it will take some diplomacy for the two to schedule a non-conference meeting in the future after Oklahoma heads to the SEC. Cowboys coach Mike Gundy has taken every opportunity to blame the Sooners for killing the rivalry, and he’s correct. They’re the ones who chose to leave the Big 12, ending 99 years of shared conference affiliation between the two schools.
Mourn-o-meter: 8. Make no mistake, this has not been a competitive football rivalry: Oklahoma leads the series 91-19-7. Oklahoma State has never even won three in a row (though it won consecutive one-point thrillers in 1965 and ’66, escaping thanks to a late missed OU field goal in the first game and a late missed OU two-point conversion in the second). But the fans do care deeply about the series, and in many other sports the Sooners and Cowboys are more evenly matched.
Texas vs. Baylor, TCU and Texas Tech (5). The Longhorns have faced the Bears 112 times, third-most of any opponent in their history, trailing only Oklahoma and Texas A&M. Texas and the Horned Frogs met for the first time in 1897, and 93 times overall. The Horns first hooked up with Tech in 1928, and it was the Red Raiders who inflicted the last loss on Texas before its epic, 30-game winning streak from ’68–70.
Mourn-o-meter: 7. Given the state pride in being a self-contained football empire, there is no small amount of loss here. Playing Mississippi State, Vanderbilt and Kentucky isn’t going to stoke the water-cooler conversation in Texas. What will be gained by Texas and Texas A&M resuming hostilities is significant, but the rest of the Lone Star State’s ties to the flagship program will be severed. Those fan bases can (and certainly will) go on hating Texas forever, but it’s more tangible when they’re all playing each other on a regular basis.
USC vs. Stanford (6). The Trojans played the Cardinal for the first time in 1905, 24 years before they started playing crosstown rival UCLA. The series has been more competitive than you might think, especially recently—Stanford has won 10 of the last 17 meetings. This NoCal vs. SoCal series is certainly a more convenient matchup for fans than USC going to Rutgers or Stanford potentially going to Syracuse.
Gary A. Vasquez/USA TODAY Sports
Mourn-o-meter: 6. There was underrated enmity here for a couple of Richie Rich schools, much of it emanating from legendary Trojans coach John McKay. “I’d like to beat Stanford by 2,000 points,” he once said. Another McKay quote: “They have no class. They’re the worst winners we’ve ever come up against.”
UCLA vs. California (7). The two have faced off 93 times, playing annually since the rivalry’s inception in 1933, making it the second-longest never-interrupted series in the sport. The Bruins have never played anybody more than the Golden Bears, and of course they’re part of the same university system (which was something of a sticking point in UCLA’s desertion to the Big Ten). The reason Cal hasn’t been to the Rose Bowl since the ’58 season is because the Bruins derailed their bid in ’75 (and USC, another departing rival, did the same in 2006).
Mourn-o-meter: 5. This rates slightly behind USC-Stanford, because the Trojans and Cardinal have been better historically than the Bruins and Golden Bears, respectively. But it certainly matters to the two fan bases.
The SEC on CBS (8). The Saturday afternoon hours that football fans in the Southeast have spent dialed into their local CBS affiliates since the 1990s is innumerable. Verne Lundquist and Gary Danielson, then Brad Nessler and Danielson … they were the soundtrack to a ton of big SEC games. Verne called Johnny Manziel’s Heisman-winning performance against Alabama in 2012 and Auburn’s Kick Six against the Crimson Tide the following year, among many other classics.
Mourn-o-meter: 6. The games won’t go away, of course, they’ll simply relocate to an all-ESPN/ABC lineup. But SEC fans are a sentimental sort who will miss their love/hate relationship with Danielson in particular. Will he tone down the SEC superlatives starting this season, with CBS also calling Big Ten games?
Georgia-South Carolina (9). The Bulldogs and Gamecocks will still play each other in the future, just not every year. It’s not an A-List SEC rivalry, but the two have met 75 times, including annually since the Gamecocks entered the league in 1992. There have been some memorable clashes between them. Last team to beat the Bulldogs between the hedges? South Carolina, in 2019.
Dale Zanine/USA TODAY Sports
Mourn-o-meter: 5. With the SEC expanding to 16 schools but lamely refusing to move from eight to nine league games (yet), some long-standing matchups had to go, and this is one. The more important Georgia rivalries (Florida, Auburn, Tennessee) remain intact; South Carolina will still play traditional SEC East opponents like Kentucky, Missouri and Vanderbilt.
Mourn-o-meter: 8. Much like the Bedlam Series, these are the kind of matchups that make college football what it is: traveling trophies on the line, a year of back-and-forth jawing between fan bases, bragging rights at holiday gatherings. Losing games like these is a disgraceful side effect of realignment.
