I took a blog-posting break to finish the fifth edition of the USA TODAY College Football Encyclopedia--wherever good books are sold--but am back to post daily from now on. There is always plenty to talk about, and I definitely want to have exchanges with my readers so please comment whenever there is a topic worthy of discussion.
I did want to say that I am getting tired of the continued talk about conference expansion. Yes it is a big story, of course, but we are just receiving speculation packaged as news. When money is on the line these schools do not behave rationally so how is one to predict which programs are going where? Take Boston College. Was it the right move for them to bolt the Big East and jump to the ACC? Absolutely not. While they made more money guaranteed and were worried about the future of the Big East sans Miami and Virginia Tech, there are very few alumni happy about the move and recruiting is more difficult when your new rivals are hundreds of miles away. BC was always a regional university without a truckload of fans spread out throughout the country and could ill afford to have all of their conference road games scheduled hundreds of miles away. Also the Eagles have proven to be an excellent regular season team and just may have earned a BCS game or two when Matt Ryan was at quarterback if they had stayed in the Big East, where the talent is as good as the ACC but there is no pesky conference championship game to get in the way of a BCS run.
While picking on Boston College is easy regarding their choice to jump to the ACC, the lesson may or may not have been learned by others. I think the key to the reworking of the major conferences hinges not on Notre Dame, but Texas. If they stay put, or become their own entity a la Notre Dame then a lot of this maneuvering is just window dressing.
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