College football’s new normal: Big 12 plants flag on Pac-12’s ashes

On Dec. 1, delirious Dawgs danced inside Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas. Purple confetti fell from the big barn’s roof, blanketing the Pac-12 logo at midfield. Conference commissioner George Kliavkoff (remember him?) congratulated Washington athletic director Troy Dannen (remember him?) and coach Kalen DeBoer (remember him?). The field was littered with Husky legends Dante Pettis and Will Dissly and Marcus Peters and more.

The Pac-12’s final football game – a 34-31 UW victory over rival Oregon – ended at 8:46 p.m. Less than two hours later, the end-zone art had already been ripped out, removed and replaced. The confetti had been cleared. Boise State and UNLV would meet in the Mountain West Championship Game the next night in the same stadium. A dying conference’s last stand was unceremoniously erased, a masterpiece on an Etch A Sketch.

Las Vegas keeps no allegiances. It’s a merciless moneymaking machine.

Sound familiar?

As the 2024 season approaches, college football has been unrecognizably reshaped, as conference realignment laid waste to rivalries. A game of media-rights “musical chairs” left two schools standing after the song abruptly stopped.

For better or worse, this is college football’s new normal. The past can’t be reclaimed. Eight months after Allegiant Stadium hosted the Pac-12’s football finale, its most vocal adversary planted a flag on the ashes.

“Being in Vegas is critically important to us,” Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark said this past week while hosting his conference’s media days at Allegiant Stadium. “Even before last year’s realignment I said we had to be in Vegas and a little bit more west. This is the entertainment and sports capital of the world right now. So being here is critically important to our brand and our business.”

In college football’s new normal, business is booming. The Big 12 arrived this past week with an air of ostentatiousness – with showgirls in bedazzled headdresses posing for photos on the field; with the conference’s new mascots cruising the strip in a Chevelle convertible, driven by an Elvis impersonator; with Yormark declaring, “I will not stop until we are the No. 1 conference in America.”

To do that, he pillaged the Pac-12 for four programs – Arizona, Arizona State, Colorado and Utah. And though the SEC and Big Ten remain college football’s dueling dynamos, Yormark is considering selling the Big 12’s naming rights (hello, Allstate 12!) and partnering with private equity firms to close the garish gap.

In college football’s new normal, success is bought and sold. When asked at Big 12 media days why his program’s recruiting has recently improved, Baylor coach Dave Aranda had an easy explanation for SicEm365.com writer Craig Smoak.

“We’re paying players,” he said.

The same day, Montlake Futures – UW’s NIL collective – launched the “WIN BIG” campaign, and coach Jedd Fisch implored Husky fans to help them pay for players.

“As we all know and we’ve all read, NIL is an important aspect of retaining players, recruiting players, and most important, winning championships,” Fisch said in a video message. “We know that we have one of the greatest settings in all of college football, and we know we have one of the greatest programs in all of college football. What we need to do is we need to continue to bring in the best athletes here to the University of Washington.

“It will take you and your support (of) Montlake Futures. It will take your gifts, it will take your donations, and it will take your membership to allow us to bring in the absolute best players that will help us win on Saturdays and throughout all of December and January, as we enter into this conference that is one of the best, if not the best, in the world.”

In college football’s new normal, the B1G logo lives between the 20- and 30-yard line inside Husky Stadium. UW will play conference road games this fall at Rutgers, Iowa, Indiana and Penn State. The Apple Cup will be streamed on Peacock and played at Lumen Field on Sept. 14.

Oh, and speaking of: the Cougs are co-captaining a conference’s ghost ship, orphaned by the bottom line. After the Big 12 stormed Allegiant Stadium on Wednesday, Washington State and Oregon State held a more modest media event – “After Hours with the Beavs and Cougs” – at the Bellagio. In place of a preseason all-league list, it featured Butch T. Cougar in a crimson blazer and a bare midriff … as well as an open bar.

“If anyone has earned the right to drink,” Pac-12 commissioner Teresa Gould said, according to a column by John Canzano, “it’s the Pac-12.”

College football’s new normal is not for everyone. It’s an increasingly unsentimental enterprise, a place where Utah will travel to Central Florida for a Big 12 finale on Nov. 29 that no one ever wanted. Where rivalries and regionalism are exchanged for revenue. Where Fox and ESPN are left to shake the Etch A Sketch, waylaying all we knew.