Sunday Column: Conference Realignment Stinks….But if it Beefs Up Penn State’s Sleepy Schedule, We’ll Gladly Hold Our Noses

I find myself against the continued addition of schools to the Big Ten for reasons both mathematical — how many programs can you cram into a conference before you remove the “Ten” from its name? Twenty? Forty? — and practical — having women’s volleyball or men’s soccer teams bussing or flying to all parts of the country during the week is no good for athletic budgets, athlete well-being, or in-person fan experience.

When it comes to football expansion, however, I say bring it on.

Take a look at Penn State’s 2023 schedule. Whether you’re bearish (you see three or four losses), bullish (you see one or two losses), or super-bullish (no losses and no margins of victory less than 20 points), there are a handful of games you know are simply not going to be competitive, even accounting for the annual noon kick/looking ahead/hurricane remnant games in which Penn State forgets to show up for the first half and winds up winning by 10 instead of 28.

The Nittany Lions are not quite in college football’s elite tier, but they have returned to the next tier down, which is similar to the top tier in that there are only two or three games of consequence on the regular season slate each year. This season, for Penn State, that would be Michigan, Ohio State, and, well, pick a third. Maybe that road date at Illinois is sneakier than it seems, maybe Iowa will drag the Nittany Lions back into the 19^th century for a night in September or maybe Michigan State is ready to be less of a mess than it’s been, but in any case, in most other weeks in the current format, it’s less about the outcome for teams like Penn State as it is about execution and getting better-prepared for those marquee matchups. The upside is that, if you’re going to fork over thousands of bucks a year for tickets, parking, food, and lodging, you are going home satisfied more times than not. The downside is that, with so much of the weight of the season disproportionately attached to one or two games, those other games can lose or never even have a chance to gain luster.

This is where conference realignment, for all its money-grabbing, myopic flaws, can make the season more intriguing. As USC, UCLA, Washington, and Oregon find their way onto Penn State’s schedule over the next few seasons, the chances of there being more games of consequence on the Nittany Lions’ schedule increase. That isn’t saying that any of those programs will ascend to the top-five level of Michigan or Ohio State or that they would even have to, but a mid-November visit from a solid Oregon team sounds a lot more enticing than another trip to Piscataway, no?

If the Big Ten is clever and creative enough with its future conference scheduling (and historically speaking, that’s a monstrous “if”) you would wind up with more consistently competitive games for not only the Penn State/Michigan/Ohio State/USC tier but also setting up the Iowa/Wisconsin/Washington/Michigan State group and the Rutgers/Indiana/Northwestern/Nebraska group with similarly competitive matchups. Now, is that the way to break the vise-like grip that the elites have on the sport, the playoff chase in particular? Not at all, but it would make for a better, more consistent product for the fans of each of those programs and a tastier national television slate, particularly as the big conferences continue to cannibalize what’s left of the smaller Power 5 leagues.

The hopeful consequence and logical next step (albeit one that is anathema to athletic directors) would be the eradication of the guarantee games. Leave the small-conference teams to themselves. Now, this would take some inter-conference cooperation, of course. James Franklin, like many big-school coaches, has expressed a distaste for an increase in the number of Big Ten conference games, but mostly because he knows that if one league does it, there’s no guarantee that the others will, and his team and conference will be at a disadvantage. But if the Big Ten puts a moratorium on the Central Michigan and Northern Illinois inclusions on their teams’ schedule and the SEC does the same for the likes of Middle Tennessee and UAB, we’d have a level playing field and still have room for the occasional home-and-home between Power 5  4 schools on relatively equal footing.

Yes, this would eliminate the Appalachian State upset over Michigan, but those have been the (hilarious) exception, not the rule. And yes, this would widen the gap between college football’s haves and have-nots in a way that NIL nor scholarship limits nor recruiting restrictions could never neutralize. But by poaching the weaker of the power conferences in order to consolidate even more power, the Big Ten and the SEC are sending a clear message that they have little use for anything other than power and money, and that the Davids should not even bother dialing up the Goliaths. We are screaming toward a major league/minor league divide that is more pronounced than anything college football has ever seen, and since there is no turning that train around, the decision-makers should at least lean into it and give the fans the sort of competitive games that the realignment now makes possible on a regular basis.

Penn State-USC makes little sense when we’re talking about tennis or track and field. But on a fall Saturday in a packed stadium, that matchup and others like it have the potential to make the pill the major conferences are cramming down everyone’s throat a lot easier to swallow.