Ready for some football?

College campuses are all Edens; inspiring, intellectually stimulating, and really bad with math–at least the athletic departments. As it stands now many large, well-known conferences are shuffling teams faster than a single deck twenty-one dealer with a full table.

Ironically, the Big Ten now has 12 teams and the Big 12 has 10.  The Pac-10 has 12 and a full one third of them are not anywhere near the Pac (Pacific). They are either in the desert or the mountains.

I understand the need for change and getting teams settled into the best possible setting to display their athletic prowess. Schools grow and many change their focus over time, but while doing so they shouldn’t expose their lack of a desire to be completely accurate on all fronts. After all, they do compose our higher educational system, the silver bullet for sustaining our revered democracy. They must lead by example.

Athletic conferences have shifted from time to time for years, but not until recently have they not accurately reflected the number of tribes representing their nation. Some have chosen names that will stand and have stood the test of time. Harvard and Yale started playing football against each other in 1875. They and the six other ancients chose the Ivy League as their collective title around the turn of the twentieth century. It didn’t become official until 1954 when the NCAA stuck its nose into the fray and designated representative divisions. The Ivy League has stayed intact ever since with no changes on the horizon.

The Big East, Southwest, and Atlantic conferences will always work too. They can add or eliminate teams with impunity and still hold an accurate moniker. The Mountain West is fine even if they carry out their plan by adding two and subtracting one. The problem stems from those pesky numerically named conferences when they get the itch to see how much more television money they can snag by adding, trading, or exiling teams.

The Big Ten, having more teams than the Big 12, should rename itself the Big Dozen or So. Rumor has it that they would like to go all the way to 16 teams. If so, maybe Chock Full O’Teams would be better. The Big 12 having lost some schools should be the Big Several.

With teams all over the topographical map, the Pac-10 wants to change its name, this time to the Pac-12. They have had numerical representation from five to 12–enough! They should be the Pacific-Mountain-Desert Conference. That doesn’t sound poetic. Maybe it could be even more general and be dubbed the School of Schools West of the Mississippi. That may not float either. They could always revert to 1959 and their original name, the Athletic Association of Western Universities (AAWU) but that is really boring so how about the Couple-a-Hands-Full Conference for the time being?

The best news coming out of my massive renaming project is that with so many numerals being freed up by conferences moving from definite to indefinite titles, Notre Dame, the staunch independent, could pick up a loose digit and dub itself the Gigantic One Conference. That may accurately represent their ego, but unfortunately, it won’t solve what may become their next biggest problem. Due to conferences around the country picking up teams at a frantic clip, in the near future there may not be room on any team’s schedule for the unattached Fighting Irish. They may have to invent football’s version of the Washington Generals, a la the Harlem Globetrotters, to find someone to line up against their golden domes. Either that or play BYU 12 times each year if they choose independency too.

Too complicated? Perhaps we should return to the days of leather helmets and few pads, play the schools on our own blocks who are about our same size, eschew complex NCAA rules, and play the game for fun. I don’t think football was ever designed to be big business. It’s not a good fit. Let’s keep both money and any conference names containing definite team counts completely away from the collegiate game.