Colorado should be start of re-realignment. Nebraska, get thee back to Big 12!

Longing for the good old days is a bigger time-waste than TikTok.

Sure, we’re finishing the hottest month in world history, and hotter ones are just around the charred corner. But most things are better now.

Ole Pappy couldn’t get his hips replaced, so he would fall down in the field until someone found him and propped him back up. That wasn’t fun for anyone.

People used to blow cigarette smoke directly into our faces and it wasn’t even considered bad manners. If you asked someone in a bar to go outside to enjoy their cigarette, you’d leave the joint with more damage than just a smoky lung.

Why, you once couldn’t choose the ring tone on your phone, nor could you use that immobile phone for anything but talking to people. What a nightmare.

Still, re-creating the past has its occasional place. Take Colorado returning to the Big 12 Conference. It’s delightful.

In 2010, Colorado became the first of many Power Five schools to make new conference friends. It left the Big 12 because the league appeared to be going the way of Plymouths and Oldsmobiles.

Widespread panic was set off when the Pac-10 invited six Big 12 teams to come aboard to form a 16-team superconference. Iowa State wasn’t among the six. It looked as if the Cyclones would end up asking the Mountain West Conference for a more-modest roof to put over their heads.

Though Colorado was the only Big 12 member to bite on the Pac-12’s offer, Nebraska quickly flipped to the Big Ten and Missouri and Texas A&M split for the SEC. Yet, Oklahoma and Texas endured in the Big 12 and kept Iowa State out of Laramie and Fresno.

Last year, however, the Sooners and Longhorns surrendered to the SEC’s siren call. So Colorado is coming home to a diminished-but-not-decrepit Big 12.

Fear is a powerful thing. First, it drove the Buffaloes westward. Then it drove them back the other way as they viewed the Pac-12 as all hat and no cattle this summer when it came to lining up a new media rights deal.

The beauty of this is Colorado has a Pac-12 football record of 27-76. It brought little to the relationship, but was somehow desirable enough to get a more-lucrative offer. Amazing.

The Big 12 seeks all the Denver-sized markets it can get in light of Oklahoma and Texas taking off, so it welcomed back its traitorous old friend.

Of course, the Big 12 that Colorado will find is different and weirder with Nebraska, Oklahoma, Texas and Texas A&M gone, and West Virginia, Cincinnati, BYU, TCU, Houston and UCF in the melting pot.

Since Colorado is restoring a small piece of the good old days, let’s be presumptuous and undo all the dopey realignment of the last 13 years. Call it re-realignment.

USC and UCLA, scoot back to the Pac-12 and pronto. If you need an explanation, turn on your GPS, and enter “Piscataway, N.J.”

Nebraska, return to the Big 12 immediately. You got that nice Big Ten money for over a decade, but home is where the heart is, and your heart isn’t in the Rust Belt. Besides, you sold the Big Ten nothing but yellowing newspaper clippings when it comes to your football pedigree.

Missouri and West Virginia can just swap leagues and have the Mountaineers share their SEC cash with Mizzou. The Tigers should be back with their old Big 12 border buddies instead of in a football division with Florida, Georgia and South Carolina.

West Virginia has no business flying to Texas several times per winter for basketball games, so send it to the SEC. Or the ACC. Or the Coalfield Conference. It’s not our problem.

The Big Ten can adjust to the losses of USC and UCLA by remembering it never really had them in the first place. Make up for it by reviving big-time football at the hoity-toity University of Chicago.

Chicago, a founding member of the Big Ten, dropped football in 1939. School president Robert Maynard Hutchins called the sport “an infernal nuisance.”

True as that may be, this is 2023. Get back in the game, Chicago, and get in on that sweet Big Ten cash grab. Besides, experiencing the hottest month in history is the real infernal nuisance.

Comments: (319) 398-8440; mike.hlas@thegazette.com