West Virginia (or Louisville): Iowa State's new 'neighbor?'

UPDATE:

NOT SO FAST, MY FRIENDS, as former Louisville football coach Lee Corso is fond of saying.

Louisville is trying to flex whatever muscle it has and beat West Virginia to the Big 12. But I'm not tearing up this blog post for a minor detail like that, so I'll simply link to the New York Times story about the Louisville power play.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/27/sports/ncaafootball/big-12-may-admit-louisville-not-west-virginia.html?_r=2&ref=sports

That done, here's the original post:

If I'm a West Virginia fan, I'm probably done following my football team on the road. At least for conference games.

I could have driven to see the Mountaineers play at Pittsburgh in the Big East. Cincinnati and Rutgers are long drives, but no worse than Iowa City to Lincoln or West Lafayette. Do-able. Louisville and Syracuse are 400 and 427 miles from Morgantown, respectively. OK, it's like Iowa going to Michigan and Michigan State. Manageable if you have the time.

But now West Virginia is headed to the Big 12, where the closest school to Morgantown is Iowa State, 733 miles away. The Texas and Oklahoma schools ... they might as well be in Manitoba.

Meanwhile, Missouri's inevitable move to the Southeastern Conference is a kick in the pants to Iowa State. Two years ago, ISU had rivals in two border states, Missouri and Nebraska. Soon ... none. But ISU is gaining a rival that's 733 miles away, a school with which the Cyclones have absolutely zero history. Ridiculous.

Presumably, these switches will eventually prove more profitable for West Virginia and Mizzou. But what good is it for the student-athletes themselves? They won't be getting more out of it. It's just more time on the road. Missouri has three Big 12 rivals (ISU, Kansas, Kansas State) that are closer than its nearest SEC brother (Arkansas) will be. Idiotic.

Missouri got tired of the Big 12's Humpty Dumpty routine of falling apart -- or seeming to -- and getting put back together again. Understandable. The SEC isn't going anywhere, that's for sure. But what is this stuff really supposed to be all about? Isn't about being with like-minded academic institutions, geographic neighbors? Isn't it supposed to be about being part of something that's a lot more than just the best opportunity to squeeze every last television buck?

No, of course it isn't. Good golly, what was I thinking?

These are all just more steps toward the inevitable formation of superconferences. The SEC (which Texas A&M ran to in order to leave behind the University of Texas ... stunning) has 14 schools. It reportedly wouldn't annex Florida State and Clemson because it had a gentleman's agreement not to pluck schools from states in which it already had a member. So there is honor in all this after all. Uh huh.

But did the SEC really need to add A&M for the Texas television market? Wasn't the conference pretty well-positioned for indefinite success no matter what? At what point can you stop worrying about establishing your brand in enough different markets? It's like everything else, I guess. The rich never seem to have enough. The Big Ten is as guilty as anyone, having annexed Nebraska to add to its Big Ten Network scope.

So TCU left the Big East for the Big 12 without ever competing in a game of anything but negotiations with the Big East, which is working on adding Boise State and Air Force, among others, for football.

West Virginia is about to be in the same conference as Texas Tech, while Missouri joins Florida. The SEC is so bloated that it has two Columbias and three Tigers.

Meanwhile, Iowa somehow isn't in the same football division as Wisconsin. Iowa will be a state that borders one state with a Southeastern Conference school, but none with a Big 12 member.

A lot more change is coming. Sooner or later, the universities have to do something to change the fact they have outsourced their bowl games to money-grabbers when they could be making so much more cash by running bowls (or, perish the thought, a playoff) by themselves.

And the athletes themselves, one day, will do something to force these schools to give them more a financial piece of the pie. Change is coming, if slowly, as this column by Dan Wetzel of Yahoo Sports illustrates.

In the meantime, Connecticut plays Pittsburgh (now of the Big East, but leaving for the ACC) in football tonight, a Wednesday night. Because it's good business for the Big East, not the players.

Welcome to the Big 12, West Virginia. Maybe someone can explain to the "student-athletes" why they're on an all-night flight home from Lubbock, Texas.