A Geographer's Nightmare...

TCU announced earlier today they'll be leaving the Mountain West in a couple of years. This is just the latest in a season of college conference shakeups. Some of the moves make more sense than others, but for the shifts that don't make sense, I'm not sure who to blame: Texas or the SEC.

Once upon a time, most of the collegiate conference landscape made sense geographically (especially after academics and size where taken into account). The Big 10, the Pac 10, and the Big 8 dominated the Great Lakes, West Coast, and Great Plains regions respectively. One could have included the ACC and SEC until Georgia Tech and South Carolina flip-flopped conferences as well as the Big East until the early '90s.

But major changes came to the college landscape in the early 1990s with geography and academics, which had been the leading factors in conference alignments, being replaced by plane and simple greed. No longer do regional rivalries take center stage. Instead, it's about TV markets, more specifically, TV markets for college football.

It's with this shift that my nightmare begins.

I'm not sure if the SEC is behind this, but not being a fan of a college conference (for many reasons which I will not include here), I'm inclined to assess at least some of the blame to them. Why must college conferences have 12 schools in order to have a conference championship game? If this were not the case, would the Pac 10 and Big 10 felt obliged to attract a 12th member? Why not have conference championship games for conferences with 10 schools?

I'm still trying to make sense of the conference shake-ups from this past summer. The Big 12, a conference I believe made a lot of sense geographically, nearly ceased to exist with the exit of Colorado and Nebraska. Had Iowa State chosen to jump ship for the Big 10, I doubt many would have noticed (maybe even not noticed for several years). It simply fits with the other Big 10 schools. But it was CU and NU that decided to leave, not Iowa State.

CU's departure was relatively minor. Sure, Buffs fans are less likely to travel to Pullman or Corvallis than Lubbock or Stillwater because of the logistics of travel, but culturally they fit in with the other Pac 10 schools. Nebraska, on the other hand, is leaving a conference that it fit geographically as well as culturally with rivalries dating back nearly 100 years.

Do I unequivocally blame the Huskers for the resulting mess? Not entirely. Maybe not even mostly. If you've read anything about Texas' monetary demands, it's tough to place too much blame on Husker Nation. Nebraska will be entering a conference that shares revenues equally with all schools in the conference. What a novel idea! One might even think academics and geography still matter there.

I bring this up today because it was announced earlier today that TCU (Fort Worth), which never was a truly good match for the Mountain West, will be leaving in 2 seasons for the Big East. A conference where their nearest rivals will be Louisville and South Florida (Tampa) and include such unlikely academic comrades as Providence, Marquette, Syracuse, and Georgetown.

I pray for the day where geographic sanity returns to the college landscape.