Dan Wolken sums it up . . .
“It was always going to be the proxy war between ESPN and FOX and the soulless college presidents and administrators who have been sucking on their teat for the last decade, unable to do anything remotely visionary with their sport besides convince television executives to shovel more money at them every decade.
And now here we are, at the precipice of a realignment that will not merely be about rearranging pieces on the chess board. This, finally, is the Big One: The ultimate abandonment of tradition, of rivalry, of geographic sanity and of the unique character that distinguished one conference from another.
In the end, we’ll still have the Big Ten and the SEC standing atop college sports, but they will no longer be college athletic conferences in the same way we’ve known them for a century. Now, with USC and UCLA abandoning their West Coast roots for the riches of a league that was founded in 1896 by a group of college presidents in the Midwest trying to establish some control over college athletics, they are headed for a future as generic, soulless corporate entities that exist purely for profit and excess. The future of the SEC vs. Big Ten will look no different than Coke vs. Pepsi, FedEx vs. UPS and Apple vs. IBM.
And college sports is never going to be the same.”