Conference realignment has shaken up the college sports world in the past decade, and the recent implosion of the PAC-12 is leaving some schools that were left behind scrambling.
As of right now, only Stanford, Cal, Oregon State, and Washington State remain as the unofficially named “PAC-4.” There have been some rumblings that PAC-12 would be absorbed into the Mountain West Conference, while other rumors have made it seem as though the four remaining teams are all trying to find new conferences to call home.
If each team is on their own, one of the options that does make sense (but at the same time doesn’t) is Stanford moving to the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC), with most of it’s footprint being on the east coast. That would be quite the trek for Stanford to make to play football games, and every other sport they sponsor, but Stanford’s football coach Troy Taylor doesn’t seem to mind the potentially chaotic travel schedule.
Taylor told ESPN:
“I’m okay with traveling. Our guys love playing football, and if you’ve got to travel a little more, that means when people come play us, they got to travel.
We want to be in a great conference, and we’re sure that will happen. The travel, if that happens, it’s fine.”
I like how he said “traveling a little more” like there’s not a big difference between traveling on a two hour flight up to Oregon and a seven hour flight to Syracuse, New York. I can’t imagine being a student-athlete and having to juggle sports, school, and non-stop cross country travel. Asking college kids to do that would be brutal.
And that’s been most of the backlash with all of these conference jumping decisions by schools. All of the moves have been money based, and not student-athlete based. Without the kids to play the game, the wheels of the billion (with a “b”) dollar college football industry would come to a screeching halt, but no one is seeming to factor that aspect in.
Stanford’s Troy Taylor thinks everyone is overreacting to the possibility of longer travel times for college athletic programs. He urges everyone that is upset to think back to the hard times of westward expansion and manifest destiny in the 1800’s, saying:
“People used to have to come across the country in a covered wagon. It would take them months and they’d be completely different people by the time they got there.
We get on a plane for five hours, six hours, that’s not the end of the world. You get drinks served to you and some snacks, and it’s not that bad.”
That is a real quote, believe it or not.
If you need more evidence, you can look to the screenshot of the article that was posted below:
Not the best comparison you could make, but anything for football, am I right?
Those of us who consume (and bet on) college sports only have to travel from our fridge to our couch on College Football Saturdays, so who cares if young college athletes have to travel across the country every week for our entertainment?
Oh, the college athletes probably care? The ones who put sacrifice their time and their bodies to play the sport that they don’t properly get paid for?
Yeah, that’s true, I didn’t think about that. It’s pretty obvious that the money hungry athletic directors were too busy stuffing their fat pockets to think about it either…
