The Most Logically Illogical Thing Ever?
Some things in life continue to concern me no matter how hard I try and move on: Why is there more than one Mannequin movie?
Is Justin Bieber made up of 47,000,028 tiny little Justin Biebers all dancing in unison?
If Sam from Quantum Leap leapt into Sam from Quantum Leap at the precise time that he initially leapt in the first place, would he be trapped forever in space time continuum ping pong?
And while we’re at it, is the College Sports structure in America the most complicated, absurd and baffling system in the history of the world, ever? (Yes, I’m including Italian politics)
Here’s the basic principle. Leagues featuring a roster of colleges (universities, not the kind of colleges we’ve got in the UK that do courses like sewing and golf green management) exist principally based on the geographical location of that institute of higher learning.
So let’s take the Big Ten – sadly there’s not a Small Ten, but if there was, presumably it’d be the athletic equivalent of the special Maths class at school where they played with plastic containers and didn’t bother with things like, y’know, numbers.
All the teams in the Big Ten are from the Mid-West of America, like Michigan & Iowa. And the fact that they include women’s wrestling on the list of participatory sports automatically gets them a tick in my book. Even the name makes sense. Big 10? 10 teams dummy. What’s that? There are 11 teams in the Big 10? Ah, who cares? It’s quirky. Like Bill Shatner’s acid induced Shakespearean meanderings.
It’s this geometric logic that makes all the recent furore about another conference, the Pac-10 all the more absurd. Here’s the deal: Pac = Pacific. The teams in the Pac 10 are based on the West Coast of America – in close proximity to the Pacific Ocean. Smart.
The Pac-10 is also the self proclaimed “conference of champions” and given the fact that they compete in what’s now dubbed the “Football bowl subdivision”, that’s marginally less ironic than calling John Wayne Gacy “a bit weird”.
Except the Pac-10 is now, err, 12 teams with the inclusion of 2 new colleges, the first of which is Utah which of course is nowhere near the sea, but presumably gained access because it’s a state where birds legally have the right of way on the public highway. Alongside Utah, the other newbie is Colorado, which is even further East and away from the Pacific. So far, so crazy. But when we consider the teams that almost joined at the same time as these two, but decided not to, presumably for reasons absolutely nothing to do with money whatsoever, we move up the gears from crazy to plain, unadulterated MariahCareyville.
Texas – a state which seems to have more students than President Obama’s Facebook Fan Page – put forward Texas Tech, Texas A&M and the University of Texas to make the leap across from the Big 12, which in fact isn’t so big, given that it now only has 10 teams in it. Which I’m guessing gives the entirely separate Big 10 Conference a further headache to add to the “11 Team” migraine that we’ve it already established.
Joining our intrepid Texans in the proposed mass exodus? Okalahoma, Okalahoma State and the aforementioned Colorado, who became the first – and ultimately only team - to move over from the Big 12 to the Pac 10 – making them the sporting equivalent of the guy who dives into the freezing cold swimming pool while the rest of his mates grab his pants and run for the hills. As opposed to the mountains.
Texas apparently got the yips when they found out that their demand for a better TV deal than everyone else in the conference was considered, well, unreasonable. Funny that. It’s like Animal Farm never existed.
More to the point, even though they didn’t make the jump, what were these almost-turncoats thinking? What about the conferences they left behind? Conferences that they’d been part of for years, rivalries established over decades and decades? Not to mention the ridiculous fact that the Pac 10 could have conceivably featured 16 teams, almost half of which were further away from the Pacific than Budapest.
Let’s be clear. When it comes to tribal, partisan allegiances US College Sports ranks number 3 on the all-time list behind:
1. Organised religion
2. Dis-organised religion
(who perpetually battle for the top-spot like the Lakers & the Celtics only with more money)
The very idea that a group of highly paid minds sat round a table and pontificated upon this: “If we junk in everything we’ve ever stood for in, in exchange for some extra moolah, that’s like, OK, right?”
One things for sure. I’m now as baffled as the bartender I observed at LAX fielding the following query from an attractive blonde: “Do you guys have, like, wine?”
Time to dig deeper into the most paradoxically logically illogical Sports system in the world or as they like to call it: the NCAA.
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