Opinion | College football admits it is an unembarrassable money machine

The “realignment” of the preeminent conferences, including the swift and ignominious collapse of one of them, serves common sense. Realism has displaced the fog of sanctimony and semantic obfuscations that suddenly are laughable and unnecessary. Big-time college football has shucked off the accumulated hypocrisies that have encrusted it and now stands before us with an agreeable lack of pretense: It is an unembarrassable money machine, nothing more. Football factories such as the universities of Alabama and Georgia more closely resemble Amazon and Google than the College of New Jersey (later Princeton) and Rutgers teams that in 1869 played the first intercollegiate “football” game. (Rutgers won, 6-4, as about 100 spectators witnessed something resembling a cross between rugby and a rumble.)

The realignment carousel accelerated in 2021 when the universities of Texas and Oklahoma announced they would defect from the Big 12 to the Southeastern Conference, where the annual per-team television payout is millions better. Who knew the nation’s Southeast extends to Norman, Okla.?

The Big Ten had 10 members, spanning 461 miles from Columbus, Ohio, to Iowa City until it added Penn State (1990) and Nebraska (2011). Then the Big Ten caught the television fever, adding Maryland and Rutgers in 2014 to reach the Washington and New York markets. The conference then extended 2,417 miles from Pasadena, Calif., to Piscataway, N.J.

Last year, the Big Ten poached (to begin in 2024) USC and UCLA from the Pac-12, which is now the probably terminally ill Pac-4. This month, the universities of Washington and Oregon agreed to leave the Pac-12 for the soon-to-be 18-team Big Ten, sprawling 2,389 miles from Piscataway to Seattle. (Look on the bright side: More transcontinental flights mean more uninterrupted time for the student-athletes to read Proust and organic chemistry.) Arizona, Arizona State, Utah and Colorado are joining the Big 12 from which Texas and Oklahoma departed.

By adopting the permissive transfer portal, the NCAA has allowed players to be somewhat migratory, although not as…