Lincicome: College football has become a greedy, bloated fraud

The consensus that college football is in "chaos" imagines some sort of apocalyptic landscape without order, full of zombies and cannibals chasing alumni passersby and happy tailgaters devoured during the chorus of the old school song.

That is one way to look at it, I suppose, and I am not saying the picture is entirely false, the chief chewer being our own dear Big 10, now numerically nearly doubled.

The addition of not only USC and UCLA to the Big 10 but Oregon and Washington as well, plus the defection of both Arizonas to the Big 12, never mind Colorado returning to where it belongs and Utah ... well, who knew Utah even played football?

The thing is, what was once the self-anointed "Conference of Champions" is now a picked over carcass, just to keep the zombie metaphor going. Who knows? Maybe there is a movie in this, starring the Forgotten Four, Stanford, Cal and a couple of afterthoughts in the remote northwest.

Meanwhile college football skips merrily along, stuffing its pockets, paying the way yet seriously distressing the other sports that exist in its shadow, including basketball which is not as needy as say, volleyball or tennis or lacrosse, games that remain true to the collegiate model because, well, nobody wants to pay to watch them.

Long ago college football lost whatever amateur status it claimed, just another game for the enjoyment of students, alumni and neighbors, the thread that kept the generations and the donors connected to that brief and happy time when the world could be postponed.

College football has become a greedy, bloated fraud, shamelessly centered on dealing and disrupting, disregarding tradition and nostalgia, the twin props of its existence.

So, who is to blame? Or is there any blame? Since this is my column, I say there is blame.

Let's start with Notre Dame, as good a place as any, and lovely in the autumn.

Notre Dame has remained an independent brand with its own network television deal because it could, not because it is consistently the best football team in the land, not for some time. But folks want to see Notre Dame, or did, and that meant money to the school and to the network.

The Supreme Court ruled in 1984 that the NCAA could not control the TV rights of its members, and that's the last time the NCAA had any power to do anything, so maybe that is the place to start.

Notre Dame cleverly took advantage of this judicially endorsed independence and made its own deal with NBC, leaving other schools and conferences to lean on each other and make their own deals

I blame also the incessant demand that college football find a champion. The system for years had been to wait until after the bowl games and vote on some team. I, in fact, was a voter for a while. We always seemed to get it right, save the odd Brigham Young or Colorado, but it was a system that encouraged debate even when the debate was over.

Now, of course, the thing is settled with a kind of year-end playoff and one team becomes the official bully of the best, generally some team from the south, occasionally from the north but rarely from the west, ending debate, prompting envy and the dissolution of the Pac 12.

Television, which is where the money comes from, naturally pays the most for the best; it is going to pay less for losers, not to categorize the west coast as the land of losers, but if ESPN says so, who am I to argue.

Now, realignment is the thing, and I'm guessing it will shake out eventually something along the lines of the NFL model with college football divided into two super conferences, with playoffs and some sort of Super College Bowl at the end.

Bear Bryant, the legendary coach from Alabama, was asked why college football was important. He said he could not imagine a stadium full of people cheering a math class.

Alas, true, but I imagine those of us who watched man walk on the moon were not cheering a linebacker from LSU for getting us there. Just saying.