Realignment fiasco will hurt game

Our national sports nightmare appears finally to be wending its way to a fatally flawed conclusion. The University of Texas apparently has chosen a conference, or had one chosen for it by Oklahoma. But why quibble over little details on this glorious day?

Welcome to Pac-16 football, 'Horns and Sooners.

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Please make sure your Techs and States fit in the overhead bin and stay docile when bringing them West. And keep your unwieldy Longhorn Network under control at all times.

Sunday was moving day in college football. While the NFL played actual and quite exciting games, college football played realignment. For those scoring at home: Pac-16 4, ACC 2, Big 12 minus-5 and Big East minus-2 and counting.

Yes, Sunday welcomed Pitt and Syracuse to the Atlantic Coast Conference (with Rutgers and UConn on hands and knees begging to be invited). Always a good sign when a founding member of a league bolts for greener pastures, or what qualifies as less-scorched earth.

Give the ACC credit for winning the inevitable-since-realignment-began showdown with the Big East. This leaves the Big 12 losers to join with the Big East left-behinds to form the Big Ten-uous Conference, with Desperate and Scared to Death divisions.

Motto: “Why? God, why?” Or “Hoping to be intact for 2012 football season.”

Texas A&M now gets to go to the Southeastern Conference, most likely sans lawsuits, because it is physically impossible for Baylor to sue everybody with fingerprints on this latest mess. Look for a wide array of schools, from Boise State to Missouri, to begin a campaign of truthiness to convince Mike Slive they are Southern or Eastern because, well, being left behind equals big-time football death. If the BCS conferences were A-list before realignment, what is being formed now is a party of Jay-Z, Bono, Brad Pitt and Angelina and Jon Stewart. Haves and have-nots are being defined, and there will be no trickle-down football economics.

Whoever leaves whatever conference for the obviously forthcoming SEC and Big Ten invites — of course they will expand to 16 — will surely be replaced by conference climbers, or those who were left behind last time.

CONFERENCE CHAOS

Keeping track of college football's changing landscape:

• Pitt files lawsuit against Big East
• WVU clears suit, joins Big 12
• Big East may let two go early
• MWC, C-USA to form new league
• Missouri leaving Big 12 for SEC
• What's the next expansion move?
• Engel: Cash grab exposes NCAA
• CFN: ACC move precedes free-for-all
• Triumph, Tradition & Turmoil

All the Baylor lawyers in existence cannot stop this snowball rolling straight toward hell; an atrociously ill-conceived and not-properly-vetted blueprint for expansion started to become reality with Pitt and Syracuse and will not stop until every inch has been affected.

The timing of Conference Realignment 2.0 was actually well suited with Sunday’s Emmy Awards. College football has become the TV networks' fall lineup; ideas drawn up in back rooms with ratings and money in mind and unveiled with much fanfare and hyperbole and likely to last about as long as that "Charlie’s Angels" hot mess (or really anything in the NBC lineup) at the first sign of trouble. The TV footprint is what holds these conferences together, not history or loyalty or rivalry or tradition.

Good luck with all of that, and get ready for another round in a couple of years when Texans tire of trips to Washington or Stanford and say, “Wait, Oklahoma allows recruits to get in with what kind of grades?” or when the other 15 schools decide even a modified Longhorn Network is not cool.

Do not be surprised. This is what happens when nobody associated with a sport is charged with protecting any interests greater than their own.

In what may be my favorite part of this whole conference imbroglio, the NCAA was absolutely pantsed. Their fraud is showing, for all to gawk at and ponder. They are not even the most powerful four-lettered acronym in the sport. “What exactly do they do again?” I have been asking.

Sunday finally brought an answer, from the powers that be no less, that they do what the university presidents tell them to do. No, really, they said this.

"These are independent academic institutions that have enormous amounts of autonomy in everything that they do, including athletics, and we in the NCAA oversee and facilitate . . . and provide a lot of direct decision-making when it’s appropriate," NCAA president Mark Emmert told USA Today. “But when it comes to conference affiliations, that’s always been — and I suspect will always remain — decisions that are going to be made by university presidents."

NICE GEAR

New-style or old-style, uniforms and helmets were the talk of the town. Here are some of the most distinctive.

Translation: Keep paying my seven-figure salary. I am not getting my hands dirty in this mess.

Emmert’s approach on this matter certainly has merit. Like politicians in economy and job matters, it is much better to stand on the sideline and critique what others are screwing up and claim to be powerless to intervene. But if Emmert is powerless to intervene in a fight as crucially important to college football as conference alignment, then he needs to resign on grounds of impotency. Or, if he has decided that this is not an “appropriate” time to “provide a lot of direct decision-making,” he needs to be fired for incompetence.

What could possibly be a more appropriate time than now, when universities from Texas play in the Pacific conference and Big East, when 100-year rivalries such as Texas-Texas A&M are threatening to go away altogether, when the ACC basketball tourney is flirting with being played at Madison Square Garden, when the best interest of the sport is ignored for what is good right now.

University presidents behave not unlike politicians trying to get another four years and, likewise, have irrevocably damaged a thriving college sports landscape and who knows how many good, solid programs for a few more TV dollars.

There is no going back now. Conference realignment is wending toward its inevitable end.

The only bright side is what had become an interminable conversation about realignment possibilities ends for a while, and the conversation about what an embarrassingly bad job the NCAA has done in its role as steward of the game can begin.

That is, if the conference presidents allow it.