Jacob Thorpe: Washington follows the pack out of the Pac-12, buying time, but no guarantees

There is a computer game from my childhood I think about sometimes, and when I say my childhood I really mean it. The game was called “Lemmings” and it was released into the world about a week before me, on Valentine’s Day 1991.

This puzzle-based game was loosely based on the peculiar behavior of large groups of rodent lemmings which, while searching for a new habitat, allegedly surge en masse to their death by swimming out to sea or plunging off cliffs. My mission, basically, while playing the game was to prevent that.

I used to spend hours trying to guide those little computer critters around the screen. Of course, we had to grow up eventually. I moved out of my dad’s house and became a newspaper columnist, while the lemmings all became college football administrators.

On Friday, Oregon and Washington made the decision to follow UCLA and USC to the Big Ten Conference, an act that firmly, finally destroys the historic Pac-12 Conference. These were not the first dominoes to fall, nor will they be the last, but the end of the athletics association of the West Coast’s marquee universities is a stunning moment.

College football’s realignment into a pseudo-professional pursuit enjoyed by fewer and fewer schools has a sinister momentum. The decisions made by USC and UCLA made the circumstances for Oregon and UW more dire. When one school goes all-in on matching Alabama and Georgia for “commitment to football,” three more struggle just to stay in the game.

And what is this commitment, anyway? What has materially changed about college football by virtue of all this money? None of the TV money is being given to the players. As far as I can tell, having more money has just made the same things more expensive.

Does UW need the money? It hired its past two football coaches from Boise State and Fresno State. Does Oregon? Even if Phil Knight cut off the Ducks, they would still have a national brand and surely enough resources to hire another SEC assistant to follow Dan Lanning.

These schools already have the nicest workout facilities, highly paid coaches, whatever. UW has so much money it can fire Jimmy Lake after one year and keep paying him. UCLA and USC killed the Pac-12 for the sake of keeping up with some neighbors, and now it has new ones. With new conference-mates like Maryland and Rutgers, it seems that the outgoing teams will spend all that new money on airfare.

I once covered a football game at Rutgers. It was fine. It isn’t worth destroying all of this.

I have seen commentary that this was a necessary move for the pursuit of championships because the Pac-12 has not won a college football title since 2005. Baloney. You know what other programs have not won a championship in that time? Every Big Ten team except Ohio State, which did it once nine years ago.

The reasons the top couple of SEC and Big Ten schools are college football’s current elite are demographic more than monetary, and the four West Coast schools joining the Big Ten have harder paths to the playoffs than they did in the Pac-12.

None of this needed to happen, and any one of these lemmings could refuse to jump off the cliff. And yet, they jump. And they will continue to, as the forces exerted by the early stages of realignment put even more pressure on some schools to guard their riches, and more pressure on the other schools to simply keep their programs funded.

UW and Oregon reportedly signed contracts for significantly smaller shares of the Big Ten revenues than their new peers – maybe about half. The theory is that when the Big Ten negotiates a new TV deal in six years, they will get equal shares as full-fledged members and their payouts will be worth at least double what it is now.

But if I was an athletic director at UW or Oregon, I would be nervous. What is the guarantee they will actually be included in the new deal? Or that in six years the truly elite schools will not finally create the super-conference this all seems headed toward? Those schools may have bought themselves more time as college football continues to eat itself.

I am not sure they bought themselves security.