Expansion threatens football rivalries

Craig Thompson was disappointed. It was understandable. A few days earlier, he thought his conference had discovered the keys to the palace.

That it had finally put together a league of teams that could not be denied an automatic Bowl Championship Series berth once the issue was revisited in two years.

That because Boise State had been added, because the Mountain West could offer four teams that annually make the Top 25 football rankings home, the league had finally arrived.

A few days earlier ...

"In terms of the overall marketplace, it's frustrating," the Mountain West commissioner said. "I think that it points out these are huge businesses, multimillion-dollar corporations, and the product just happens to be college athletics as it relates to the overall piece of the university and its mission.

"It's a mission where we are kind of separate and different because we are here to generate revenue and television contracts and bowl appearances and play at an extra-high level that our alumni and fans are proud of and expect us to be.

"I don't know what we're doing to each other when it comes to rivalries. We are going away from a lot of tradition and history. I'm not so sure how big a part geography even plays anymore. Those should be troubling signs."

They are words that Thompson would not have uttered had Utah not bolted the Mountain West for the Pac-10, had the Utes not made the correct decision to accept the riches and notoriety and recruiting advantages that come with being part of a BCS conference.

But in trying to remain positive while a clear tone of dejection painted another story, Thompson hit on an issue somewhat lost in the expansion and realignment craziness that has been tearing through college athletics the past several months.

How big a part do long-standing rivalries play for schools when deciding whether to change conferences?

Apparently, not much.

Nor, in this time of haves and have-nots, should they.

It won't be a popular stance for many. Few rivalries in any sport compare to those within college football, those celebrated each fall.

Ohio State-Michigan. Southern California-Notre Dame. USC-UCLA. Auburn-Alabama. Texas-Oklahoma. UNLV-Colin Kaepernick.

OK, so the last one isn't a rivalry. Just a one-sided rout each year.

This is one of the bad parts about change and yet one that must be accepted. As the days pass and the dollar signs increase and your father's college football is no longer recognizable beyond a 100-yard field, programs can't simply pass up the millions of dollars that come with big-time television contracts and the chance at a conference championship game and automatic BCS bids.

One negative: The larger a conference becomes, the less its teams will play each other.

Another: As leagues expand to a number that will generate the likelihood of a conference title game, matchups like Ohio State-Michigan will no longer hold the importance they have for decades.

It will be just another game to get to the game. It happened to Nebraska-Oklahoma in the Big 12. Now, Nebraska is gone to the Big Ten.

"We have a rivalry in the Mountain West where Colorado State and Wyoming first played in 1899 -- they have played 100 times," Thompson said. "That rivalry will continue. I don't know about the (Brigham Young)-Utah rivalry. BYU doesn't count six games it played in the 1800s, but arguably that series started in 1896."

That's a long time, a lot of games, decades upon decades worth of memories. Now, with Utah headed off to try to make noise in the land of USC and UCLA and Oregon and the like, its in-state football rivalry game will be contested much earlier in the season.

Maybe not at all some years.

Get used to it. This is part of the deal now, part of the framework of today's BCS world. One of the things that has made college football so magnificent, so exciting those last few months each year, is slowly but surely being diminished in importance.

Rivalries might never die, but they're not the same. They can't be because the system that decides who will be crowned national champion each year no longer allows it.

It has been said that a rivalry adds much to the charms of one's conquests. That charm is eroding from college football.

It's about the almighty dollar, and within that world exists little room for things such as tradition and history.

Get used to it.

Las Vegas Review-Journal sports columnist Ed Graney can be reached at egraney@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-4618.