Call College Football What It Is: NFL-Lite

If you are a fan of Big 12 Conference sports like I am, this has been a gut-wrenching week as each day brought new pronouncements of gloom for our once stellar league. It seemed that each day brought us 24 hours closer to being forced to make a decision to take a loved one off life support.


The biggest names in the major conferences have exposed themselves and what their idea of amateur college athletics is - a money machine that is nothing more than a farm team system for the National Football League. Some who watch college sports politics closer than me already see a demise of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) in the near future.

Only football matters now. Other sports be damned. The college super-conferences will now attempt to strike all their own deals, write their own rules and "police" themselves.

There are reasons why the super-conference advocates are in a rush to lock down the system. Over the last several years equity rules were allowing smaller colleges to field competitive teams (Boise State comes to mind, but there are others) that threatened to eventually provide stronger competition to the traditional heavyweights. Under the systems that will soon guide college football, smaller colleges will essentially be locked out of consideration for major bowls and championships. The super-conferences will own televised coverage.

The Pac 10 already is asking that it be granted two automatic Bowl Championship Series bids if it expands. It would not surprise me if college football rankings will be limited to the super-conferences only. A team like Kansas State could be 11-0 for the season, but if it is not part of one of the four super-conferences, it won't qualify for consideration.

This week's deal-making by the likes of the Big 12 and Pac 10 conferences leave little doubt that big time college football should no longer be considered either amateur or academic. It is professional. When a university can get paid more than $20 million per year in television revenue for its football team, it is not amateur football.

So how do the have-nots get in on the juicy deals that television will bring to the super-conference teams? Easy.

To bolster their win-loss records, every member of the new super-conferences will want to pad their schedule with non-conference teams, some of whom were left standing with the Big 12 collapse. The "patsy" schools need to get together and set the price at $2 million per game. Tell the hot dogs to pay up or play entirely within their conference. That way each super-conference institution will have to shell out at least $8 million of its annual windfall in order to "buy" its record.

If the game today is all about money, it's time for the super-conferences to start paying for their automatic wins.