For weeks -- and it feels a hell of a lot longer than that, but trust me: I went back and looked at the calendar, and the implosion of our beloved Big East started about six short weeks ago -- I've sat quietly by while the Best Basketball Conference in the History of Recorded HistoryTM was obliterated and rendered nearly-unrecognizable by the marauding horde that is college football.
I watched while Syracuse and Pitt swapped Madison Square Garden for something called BB&T Field at Groves Stadium, while West Virginia decided it was spending too much time in Manhattan, New York, and not nearly enough time in Manhattan, Kansas. All the while, I said nothing. It doesn't make sense to me, I thought, but these schools must have really good reasons for doing what they're doing.
I can't bite my tongue any longer, friends, because this is getting absurd. I've had enough. Maybe you're comfortable giving the finger to history and tradition and decades-old rivalries in the name of college football, but I'm not. Once upon a time, people thought you could build a conference around basketball, with college football relegated not only to the back burner, but banished to a different part of the kitchen entirely. I think we can get back to that place.
Because, when you break it down and ask: Why are we destroying the BBCitHoRH?TM the answer comes back: money. A few more bucks. And I'm not even convinced it's that MUCH money. Hell, for all I know, all this conference shuffling could be the equivalent of a couple of fat cats fighting over a fiver. It's absurd, is what it is, and I, for one ...
I'm sorry. Will you excuse me for just a second? The Admiral keeps forwarding me this email about some Husker football website getting shut down by one of its former owners, who sued for a whole bunch of money that I'm sure he didn't recover. Just lemme read this so I can tell him to shut up about it, OK?
Skimming: HuskerPedia ... HuskerMax ... guy forced out in 2003, sued to shut down the site ... site was generating over $1.5MM in revenue per year ...
Wait, what?
HuskerPedia receives more than 300,000 unique visitors per month and generates more than $1.5 million in revenue annually, according to a December 2009 news release.
That's what you get for writing about college football?
Well then.
As I was saying:
TAYLOR MARTINEZ SOMETHING SOMETHING READ OPTION SOMETHING SOMETHING BURKHEAD BURKHEAD BURKHEAD B1G B1G OMG YOU GUYS.