I thought this forum was about football ;). I agree. Big-12 will be tough to beat in basketball. We'll see if any ACC teams jump to another conference though. Florida State had a board member pondering a move.

A few years ago and I would have said that it was the Big-12 on the way out, not the PAC-12.

I just wish colleges could have stayed amateur and not gone down the path of ultimate money.

The USA needs better semi-pro leagues with pipelines to pro sports. It shouldn't be that a person who wants to make their living playing American Football has to spend 3 years in school, spending 15 hours a week in class, with many more hours a week in study hall, doing homework, doing assigned readings, etc. I couldn't care less if the Super Bowl MVP went to Stanford or Mississippi State. I think everyone should get a high school education in this country, but that's about it for what I believe should be mandatory.

I thought the PAC was solid with their geography. I didn't think it really made sense for any of those schools to join another conference just because of the distance they'd have to travel; even if I knew that UCLA, and USC were in a league of their own within the conference, and perhaps UCB and UWashington if you are counting following.

Couldn't the NFL have a youth league where young pros can battle it out without the colleges?

@GOD...there would be an enormous loss of value in replacing college football with a minor league structure like in baseball. Additionally, college football pays for college athletics generally. Our entire Olympic system is essentially funded by college football and indirectly there are spillovers for other countries. Plus college football and to a less extent college basketball play a significant role in how college market themselves.

I understand the economic and cultural significance of college football as an institution, your username itself indicates it’s importance.

I was trying to raise the more general point of wether two groups of men running into each other should really have this outsize impact on some of the most important academic institutions of a nation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61TMtH3Qw4s

You are the company that you keep, and the company that you keep is who you play football against. It all makes perfect sense when you think about it properly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1nq1tjzLWw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPWpaJlQQJ0

"...two groups of men running into each other ..... have this outsize impact on some of the most important academic institutions of a nation."

Wow, GOD, that stings even more since it is true. What a terrible day to know how to read. I look at the problems facing the US and say the UK with Brexit, and think - how is it we have LOTS of people that graduate from great schools like Harvard, MIT, Cal Tech, and the UK has Cambridge and such - how is it we cannot get the smart people to solve the hard problems? Is it because of TBI due to football, or ..... just politics getting in the way of problem solving.

Oh, and gopher27, ..... GO VOLS

Well, all those highly credentialed "smart" graduates of "great schools" are generally the progenitors of many of the "hard" problems now in need of solving.

I remember reading a smartass magazine article almost 20 years ago attempting a bit of a meta-analysis of the relative performance of American politicians who originally got elected due to high profile careers in athletics and judged them almost startlingly above average when compared to the Tier 1 Law School graduates that dominate the milieu. (Willie Brown is predicting that Ah-nold is about to mount a comeback and enter California's Senate election next year against Adam Schiff, Katie Porter and Barbara Lee)

One of the most startling stories about American Politics and Governance is Robert Putnam visiting the Obama White House and making what he clearly thought was a flattering comment to a reporter that half of the policy staffers in the West Wing had taken his graduate seminar at Harvard. Putnam's graduate seminar was historically taught every other year and admitted 12 students per cycle (so 60 people per decade). There seems a strong argument in my mind in favor of a collection of randomly selected college football players over such an incestuous gaggle. I do agree with the late William F. Buckley that we should rationally prefer to be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone directory than by the faculty of Harvard.

To ask a provocative question, has the UK been better government over the last century by David Lloyd George's inheritors than it was over the previous century by "500 ordinary men accidentally selected from among the unemployed"? :oP

Despite various accusatory speculations, David Lloyd George was in fact Hitler's target to serve as a British Pétain.

Well said.