The new Big Ten has lost its roots

"We want the Big Ten championship and we're gonna win it as a team," said University of Michigan coach Bo Schembechler, just prior to the start of the 1983 football season. "They can throw out all those great backs, and great quarterbacks, and great defensive players, throughout the country and in this conference, but there's gonna be one team that's gonna play solely as a team."

Schembechler's mantra was, "The team. The team. The team," and his famous motivational speech is now part of Wolverine lore. Between 1969 and 1978, Schembechler had a famous rivalry with his old mentor, Ohio State University coach Woody Hayes, a philosopher-coach himself and a man who loathed "The School Up North" with such intensity that he refused to stop for gas in Michigan. He'd rather have walked down the freeway.

You have to wonder what those two late warriors would make of the state of their beloved Big Ten today.

The Big Ten championship that was so central to Schembechler now has become almost an afterthought as the College Football Playoffs have become far more significant. In their era, the Big Ten was true to its name and its members. Aside from Northwestern University, they were land-grant universities of the Midwest, sprawling, publicly funded campuses that offered a strong, affordable education for their state's youths and fielded football teams that commanded alumni loyalty from graduation day to grave.

Teams traveled by bus through cornfields and up and down Interstates 65, 70 and 75. Fans in station wagons followed. Games were almost always at noon on a Saturday and almost never at night or on a different day. The league had wrapped up before Thanksgiving, and (not inconsequently) finals weeks at most schools.

Everyone pretty much played everyone else, meaning that the league season had the same built-in equity you find in European soccer leagues. The schools would warm up with two or three games against nonconference rivals and settle in to the Big Ten meat of the season.

Nirvana was the Rose Bowl on New Year's Day, when the winning team flew out of a Midwestern winter to sunny Los Angeles and a storied team from the PAC-10. Sitting at home watching on TV, most Big Ten fans swallowed their partisan pride and supported the league's representative.

And for all their flaws and failings, both Schembechler and Hayes unquestionably bought into the idea that athletes were also students, and that their involvement in football meant an opportunity for further education.

Now? The Universities of Oregon and Washington have announced their intention to join the Big Ten. Along with the University of Southern California and UCLA, that brings the number of teams in the Big Ten to a whopping 18. Most Midwesterners now could not even tell you that number; they knew when the Big Ten had 10.

That old culminating game against the PAC-10? Close to toast, given that what is now the PAC-12 appears to be imploding. Local rivalries? Surely diffused, at least to some extent, by all these teams. Even the "Big Game," Ohio State vs. Michigan, might now happen three times, if both teams advance to the Big Ten Championship (never used to be a thing) and then the expanded playoffs. League equity? Challenged by who plays whom.

And the student-athletes? A lot more time on planes, a lot more crazy TV schedules, a lot more of a life like a professional. And the geographic root of the Big Ten, notwithstanding its administrative headquarters in Rosemont, Ill., has been blown up. This league is no longer of the great football schools of the Midwest. It is a national entity made for television, not for tailgaters.

Last week, ESPN reported that the University of Washington's President Ana Mari Cauce had said that the school's decision was "'not just about dollars and cents' but rooted in myriad factors, one being that the proposed TV rights deal between the PAC-12 and Apple did not provide the long-term stability the school was seeking."

The Big Ten is, by many accounts, winning at the powerhouse conference competition, as its rivals flail, turning the country into a great battle between the South's SEC and the rest of the nation. That's a geographic rivalry with which America is all too familiar.