College football and college athletics has gone totally off the rails during the past 20-30 years. As some know, I grew up a Mountaineer and became a Hokie by choice. When I learned to love college football, WVU was an independent but might as well have been a conference member. Virtually every football schedule consisted of Pitt, Penn State, Syracuse, Maryland, Virginia Tech, Rutgers, Temple, Boston College, two punching bags from the MAC or similar conference, and a rotating collection of ECU, Miami and others. Those games were fun and they mattered because your family knew someone who had a connection to most of those schools. Tech in those pre-Big East days was different. When I got to Tech in 1985, the schedule was a mish-mash. UVa, WVU and Clemson were regulars. Maybe another nearby ACC school, Vandy or Kentucky. There was still a smattering of Richmond and William & Mary along with random opponents like Memphis State. Tech was somewhat of an outsider in the Big East but at least it had “family” that became genuine peers. And later the fit with the ACC was even better, even if the football wasn’t. I remember going to a conference in Colorado Springs in the fall of 1994. I drove up to Boulder and got a ticket to see Colorado play Kansas State. CU was a top flight program with Kordell Stewart and Rashaan Salaam, who won the Heisman that year. K State was on a parallel track with the Hokies in Bill Snyder’s early years. It was a really good game and I remember thinking I would probably never see either team play again. Now Colorado and Kansas State are conference games for WVU. WVU is in the same conference as BYU and Texas Tech, for heaven’s sake. And when WVU opens the season in Happy Valley, it will be the Mountaineers’ first game against Penn State in 30 years. WVU went 11 years between games against Pitt and the schools are 70 miles apart. I don’t know what the future holds for Tech. I just don’t think it will be in the ACC as we now know it. Maybe Tech wins the lottery and ends up in the Big Ten or SEC. Maybe Tech ends up in the Big 12 or some remnant league of former ACC and Big 12 schools. Tech will probably always play UVa; but, old timers probably said the same thing about VMI. Whatever the future is, it won’t be better. Membership in the Big Ten or SEC sounds great and it would be for a while. It would be cool to see Penn State, Michigan, Tennessee or Georgia come to Lane Stadium for a conference game. I thought the same thing when Texas and Oklahoma first started going to Morgantown. But although WVU has a lot in common with the Big 12 schools and though the fans and competition in that conference are great, once you’ve seen some of those opponents two or three times the novelty wears off. So while regular games against Penn State or Tennessee sounds awesome, what the heck would a game against Iowa or Auburn mean the second or third time around? There is no real connection with most of the schools in the Big Ten or SEC. And playing Tech will never ever mean much to those traditional conference members. And if Tech is left out of the P2, then what? There’s a good chance of playing WVU regularly again, maybe with regular games against NC State and a couple other ACC schools we haven’t played often enough. But we are also likely to see more frequent games against opponents that never did or no longer stir the soul, like BC or Cincinnati. And God help us all if we are playing conference games in Arizona and Utah like WVU will be the next few years. It just sucks. And the money does nothing for the common fan. The game has become about the television networks and the people who sit in box seats (no offense, I would sit there too if I could afford it). The rest of us are just cattle given 6 to 14 days’ notice of when to show up, jump up and down for three minutes, and then provide background scenery for ESPN or Fox. The only hope I have is that maybe someday the television bubble will burst and someone in Columbus or State College will ask why in the hell they are sending a volleyball team to Oregon, or someone in Austin or Tallahassee or Knoxville will start asking why they have to play the football equivalent of the 1927 Yankees every weekend. Maybe then common sense will return, conferences will return to 8-10 member groups with round robin play, and I can regularly watch Tech-UVa and WVU-Pitt with a smile on my face. ** Edited by Tailgate Guru at 8/4/2023, 9:55:18 PM