Quote:
Originally Posted by Young Drachma
Another thing that I probably ought to save for a blog post...is a lot of folks are quibbling about the bleeding over of geographic alliances, but we're talking about organizations with long histories that were formed due to shared interest, geography and perhaps collaborative goals the old dudes in smoke filled rooms had at the time.
The other elephant in the room is the fact that it was a lot more expensive to travel in the old days than it is now and so, of course no one would've started a large geographic conference in the days of bus trips. But now? All of our professional leagues are bicoastal behemoths, so I think if anything, college sports were just slow to the game in some ways to catch on to national trends.
Even shitty, third tier pro leagues extend nationally in many cases. So while I can understand the consternation, it just seems like a lot of these moves while strange make sense in the context of a globalized world where Greece and France share the same currency.
I feel like people will get used to it. Or the whole thing will dissolve over time and go back to how it was. But the former seems far more likely to me than the latter.
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I get what you're saying about travel and globalization, but the tradition and rivalries are stronger in college football, so it's different. Take molson's example -- and he's talking about Idaho, which doesn't even have any pro teams. The fact that college football has so many teams and extends down to more rural places makes geography more important. I think you're right, that people will get used to it (people always do, especially as a new generation of fans grows up, and it's not going away since there's more money this way), but the point is just that something is getting lost here.