Tremendous article here, by Matt Hinton of Saturday Down South. In taking the view from space Matt shows us that the college football landscape has not really changed, the same land forms are recognizable, the whole world hasn't exploded. And telescoping for a closer look, yep, there are Alabama and Notre Dame, Oklahoma and Ohio State, the evergreens, ever greening, and there are the smaller-growth trees, Pitt, Oregon State, Oklahoma State, Texas Tech, all the teams of the compass schools, all the rest who play "big time" college tackle football. Reverting to the bigger view, the smaller trees still stand a chance. The college football playoff will almost certainly be expanded, giving one-year growth spurt programs like UCF and Cincinnati a chance to prove their mettle against the Sequoias (good luck with that). Pitt and Georgia Tech and Washington and BYU have won exactly as many national championships in the last fifty years as has Texas. That would be one. In the view from space Matt Hinton is dead on. Matt concludes that the game will still be as compelling, and the game is the thing.

But Matt is a little optimistic, a little sanguine on the view at terra firma. What has always distinguished college tackle football from the NFL is its ancient roots and ancient rivalries. It is not just the game but those games. 

Texas and Texas A&M,  played every Thanksgiving for years and years; they haven't played in a decade. The two schools will meet again now and it will be like the last decade never happened. Tradition recovered.

Pitt and PSU, played every year for seventy or eighty years; they've hardly played in the new millennium and have no future meetings scheduled. It's been too long now. Pitt vs PSU was the game in the Commonwealth growing up. There is a generation of people now who have little or no memory of it and the desire, especially from State College, is just not there.

"Bedlam", Oklahoma and Oklahoma State, terribly one-sided in OU's favor but THE game in the state. Whither Bedlam now? 

Nebraska and Oklahoma, the "Game of the Century," another Thanksgiving staple of the two heavyweights in the same conference, now in different conferences, with Nebraska trying to avoid the "Sooners" this year. 

The "Backyard Brawl", Pitt and West Virginia. Long, long history, a little one-sided, the passion more on the 'Eers part than the Panthers, but no future games scheduled either. If the ACC invites WVU, the Backyard Brawl will be baacck. 

Those ancient rivalries, which repeating, made college tackle football, are gone and the losses are grievous, irreplaceable  You don't see that from space but it was those games that made the college game that we love so much, not vice versa. You can't manufacture rivalries like widgets. Pitt and Cincinnati tried to jump-start a "River City Rivalry" until the last round of realignment when Pitt landed in the ACC. Bob Diaco, the Connecticut coach at the time, tried, for reasons known only to him, to create "The Civil ConFLiCT" between Connecticut and Central Florida. That was the mother of all Fails.

Who is Pitt's rival in the ACC? Syracuse? Yawn from both schools fan bases. There are no natural rivals for Pitt in the ACC.

Who was WVU's in the Big XII (a moment of prayer please over the body)? No one.

From his locale in SEC Country Matt can be sanguine. The SEC has focused, not just on the "game," but on the rivalry games. It was either genius or genius masquerading as happenstance: the Iron Bowl, then, now, forever. The Egg Bowl, The World's Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party, Florida-Tennessee, Florida-Georgia, hell, even Tennessee-Vanderbilt, and now the Red-River Rivalry transplanted in a new conference rooted in the fertile delta of the Mississippi River. Texas A&M-Alabama is a sure enough Big Game, but there is no history and if one falls on hard times it will be the Big Yawn game. 

There is nothing we can do, we fans, about any of it, but sick back and enjoy the games that exist and the game that does reek of America more than any other. That is Matt's overarching recommendation to all of us. It is sound advice.