A New Game – An Article by Jim Gazzolo

There will be some who will be left behind.

With the college football landscape changing by the minute, the superconference are here.

Television networks are cutting deals and playing kingmakers to those leagues that have made the decision to gobble up what is left.

Gone are the days when everybody played within their regionals. College football has become a national event with the Big Ten the first to have teams on each coast.

Racing through all main time zones, the conference has found a way to turn a regional sport into something much bigger.

The Big 12 is following closely behind. Meanwhile, the SEC is still mostly a southern conference with a team in Oklahoma for good measure.

It is more than a little mind-boggling to figure all this out. Just remember if you don’t understand it today it could all change by tomorrow.

This is what happens when you don’t have leadership. The NCAA once ruled all of college athletics and is now nothing more than an event planner for championship tournaments.

With that void chaos ensued.

Whether it’s good for the game depends solo on your perspective. If you follow one of the big leagues then this is a great thing. Power conferences, depending on just how many remain, will mean national championships will come from their teams. It will be hard for anybody else to find a path to a crown.

As for the midsize guys, those who used to be in a power conference and now are on the outside looking in, the feeling of being left behind is likely setting in as the days go by.

There is no chance for them to find a way to even make enough money to stay in the game let alone compete with the big guys. And finding a conference to call home might be an impossible search as well.

Then there are the guys who will never get the chance.

McNeese State could fit into this spot, left out of the entire grouping as teams scramble to find new holes. The Cowboys are hoping that an opportunity somehow leads them into the lower level of the big party.

As to what will become of the so-called money games that keep smaller programs going, they could be the biggest losses of all. Television networks don’t see the value in these games for few fans of the big schools are interested enough to pay top dollar for tickets and not enough eyes watch them to make them profitable.

That leaves us with the same question that has always been asked, just who is looking out for the student-athletes. Now paid employees in the NIL world, some are getting more than their share of the pie.

As for the other smaller schools and their players, very few are getting any real benefit of the new free agency. It is as if they are playing a different game on a completely different field.

Of course, that is exactly what is happening.

Jim Gazzolo is a freelance writer who covers McNeese State and is the host of Poke Nation on CBS-Lake Charles