NCAA College Football Conference Realignments

This article is written for the benefit of those who enjoy watching college sports, namely college football and college basketball. If you're a pro football or basketball fan, this article may offend you. Just giving you fair warning. I realize what I'm about to say are my opinions, but I challenge anyone reading this to come up with a more mainstream conception about what is taking place in college sports today.
I used to enjoy watching pro sports. Baseball and football primarily. But with all the players strikes and the constant disruption of seasons, I finally lost interest. I'm digressing here a bit to try to make a point. Professional baseball used to be a passion of mine, along with college football and basketball. What turned me against baseball? The 1994 baseball strike. Does anyone remember how the playoffs and the World Series got cancelled that year, because the players and the owners "couldn't reach an agreement?" I think it took baseball a while to recover from that particular strike. Since then, we've been bombarded with threats of more strikes with the NFL and currently, with the NBA. In fact, as this article is being written, part of the NBA season has already been cancelled because of a labor dispute. With the price of tickets to professional sporting events these days, and factoring in parking and the cost of concessions, it hardly seems worth the effort to attend a professional sports event. I still enjoy attending an occasional college football or basketball game, even if those venues are now beginning to suffer similar fates like their professional counterparts in terms of costs. Some events, at least by my own quirky standards, are still worth the price of admission. One final point to make about the digression concerning professional sports. It's not about the fans any longer. It's about the players and the owners. Case in point: Michael Vick signs a contract to play pro football for $100 million while fans attending games have to subject themself to airport-type security checks just because one insane fan brought a stun gun to a Dallas Cowboys football game. I don't care that these athletes make an insane amount of money for playing the game. I think it may eventually bankrupt sports, given the buyouts for fired coaches and players. But I wonder if players and coaches have to subject themselves to the same kind of security checks when they enter the stadium that the fans now have to submit to. Like one comment I read from a disgruntled NFL fan, "with the high ticket prices, lousy high-priced food, and expensive and limited parking, I don't need to be groped on top of all that. I'll just stay home and watch the game on TV." My sentiments exactly.
And now back to college sports. I happen to be a die-hard fan of a team in the Big Twelve. That's the conference that lost Nebraska to the Big Ten and Colorado to the Pac 12. For the sake of discussion, I'm a devoted follower of the University of Kansas. Normally, not very good in football, even terrible at times, but good at basketball. At first, I'm thinking that a lot of fans from other parts of the country didn't think it would affect them, since their conferences weren't being threatened. Take a look at the Big East, now trying to add six teams to their league. And what about the current proposed merger between the Mountain West and Conference USA? Supposedly, all this conference jumping has to do with TV revenue. The Big Twelve, currently playing with only ten teams, is still in danger of losing Missouri to the SEC, although that matter hasn't been decided yet. Why? Because Missouri supposedly stands to gain substantial TV revenue by jumping conferences. Are college sports about to make the same mistake the pros have made, by forgetting that their games are about the fans and the people who watch them?
I've heard the argument, that there are likely going to be three or four "super conferences" in the college sports ranks once the dust settles. I keep wondering if a school like Ohio State might jump to the ACC along with Syracuse and Pittsburg. Not there's been any rumor that this is going to happen with Ohio State, but with a school that has an athletic budget like Ohio State's, what's to prevent them from considering that possibility if a greater TV revenue package might help to pick up the tab at a school reputed to be spending more than $100 million a year on college sports?
The traditional rivalries between schools will change under the continued conference realignments in favor of pursuing the almighty TV dollar. I'm not particularly a Nebraska fan, but I have relatives and friends who are, and instead of watching the annual Thanksgiving game between Nebraska and Colorado, I'll be treated to a game between Nebraska and Iowa. No thank you. I won't be watching that one. And now I see that Texas has rebuffed the latest pleas from Texas A&M to continue their rivalry game after Texas A&M bolts for the SEC after the 2011 season. It remains to be seen whether Texas will cave in to Texas A&M's demands, but the initial response to Texas A&M was that "their nonconference schedule was full" until 2018. Texas A&M even has a reference to their arch-rival Texas in their school fight song, and even though I'm not much of a Texas-Texas A&M fan, I wonder how the fans in Texas are going to deal with that?
At least the Big Twelve got lucky and managed to replace Texas A&M with Texas Christian. I never cared much for the KU-Texas A&M rivalry in football anyway, and it hasn't been much of a rivalry to begin with, due to KU's frequent lack of competitiveness. So while some changes in conference shuffling may be OK, at least for me, there are going to be some games in the future I will pass on, because they have no meaning. And the more they keep shuffling things around, the more college sports is just going to resemble pro sports, and I'm just not going to waste my time with it any more. Because just like professional sports, college sports will have then become all about chasing TV revenue and not about the fans. It's been said that pro sports could survive just fine without a single fan in the stadium. As long as they have a lucrative TV contract. The only ones who would get hurt if fans didn't show up would be the people selling hot dogs and popcorn. That's an opinion I share wholeheartedly, but there may be many of you reading this who would disagree.
I hope I'm proven wrong with all these conference realignments. I can't believe how every time I read news stories on ESPN, that yet another university or group of universities are considering jumping conferences. Or that conferences are out there trying to raid other conferences in search of stability. Depending on your point of view, it certainly has provided some lively entertainment trying to figure out where your particular school is going to play next season.