Sports Illustrated: TV Killed the PAC 12
The last four paragraphs sound especially grim:
“If anything, the Big Ten’s breaking the 16-team conference ceiling could trigger further movement toward
the long-prophesied consolidation of power into two or three megaconferences. The Big Ten and SEC can become the AFC and NFC, perhaps shedding ancient members and adding more lucrative new ones. It would be NFL Lite, with less talent, having sucked nearly all the charm out of the college game.
In
Network, business tycoon Arthur Jensen launches a towering sermon to drill into TV show host Beale how the world really works: ‘There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichsmarks, rins, rubles, pounds and shekels.’
In college sports, there are no regions. There are no loyalties. And now there is no West, in terms of having its own home base and cultural center. There is only one holistic system of systems, and the system is driven by choices people make when they turn on the TV on Saturday afternoons.
Big ratings rule everything. Lousy ratings are lethal. Write it on the Pac-12’s tombstone.”