Lincicome: Gerrymandered Big 10 probably has room for more

As we all know, the Big 10 is Michigan, Ohio State and a bunch of schools whose names begin with "I." It is as Midwestern as corn and apologizes to no one for being able to count, one school for each finger.

The storied conference has retained a stubborn firmness with the number 10 as its actual membership grew to 11, to 12, then to 14 and, soon, into 16 with the inclusion of two Los Angeles colleges long known hereabout for being the occasional opponent in the Rose Bowl.

UCLA plays its home games in the Rose Bowl so that antediluvian pile of slat seats has no special appeal to the Bruins, while USC, with a vintage home stadium of its own, looks longingly at any place that has parking and cup holders.

Sad to think that the Granddaddy of them All, long the venerable and celebrated prize for the best Big 10 team at the end of the year, is likely to fall into the wastebasket - or is it waste bowls? - of vulgar marketing, down there with the table fruit and fast food afterthoughts.

There is, I guess, some sort of smug satisfaction in having those sunlit, arrogant academies slink eastward, seeking acceptance from a bunch of land grant schools with woodland critters for mascots, where the best and brightest can fix the windchill factor in their heads.

As we also know, West Coast football is all Technicolor flash and bad taste, played in tomorrow's time zone but fun and intermittently significant, usually against Notre Dame.

Oddly, Notre Dame figures not at all in any of this latest assault on college football, keeping for now its own counsel and the NBC TV money it does not have to share, although it has allowed its hallowed brand to leak into Eastern Shore basketball.

What the Irish will do as they are squeezed into inconsequence is yet to be seen, though their options and their clout are diminishing. Maybe best to jump into the gerrymandered Big 10 now while the school is a prize and not a panhandler.

So, is all this mixing and matching, from sea to shining sea, really necessary? In short, no, but in the grip of our times, yes.

It is about money, as most things are, money needed by the LA schools to fix debt and fund beach volleyball, and if they must come to Iowa City or Evanston to get it, well, we will just stick out our tongues and write the check.

To say this has anything to do with education is to guffaw while speaking, a trick I learned while fishing for walleye in Minnesota. If it were about academics, welcoming Stanford and California would make sense, whereas those two fine schools may be left to play each other over and over in a conference of two.

Not to dismiss the Oregons, the Washingtons and the Arizonas although it is easy to do when altogether they do not have the TV market pull that brings in the billions now dangling out there.

Any one of those schools and others as well would join the line outside the Big 10's offices in Rosemont, school beanies in hand, waiting while someone behind the money door shouts, "Next!"

The real owners of college football, television enablers like ESPN and Fox, should each just form their own leagues and be done with it, with playoffs and payoffs and pretend concern for the reason colleges exist in the first place.

Otherwise, the college football map will look like a North Carolina voting district, a serpent eating its own tail.

This is about economics, or more bluntly about greed, an American motive and not to be dismissed from the general curriculum of life. It is also about a way to stack the attack against Alabama, or Georgia, the occasional LSU or Clemson, those southern schools who have made it a habit of winning it all.

When this all shakes out there will be a Southeastern Conference, which will include Texas and Oklahoma, no slaves to geography they, and the Big 10, as mentioned now requiring all the fingers and most of the toes to get the correct accounting.