The latest round of NCAA realignment has been interesting to watch from afar. It became apparent that the future of alignment would revolve around television dollars gained from football and that those numbers would be driven by television market populations.

Well, who has the lowest population in the country? So I knew two decades ago that Wyoming was not even on the radar as far as the big-money lawyers who are splitting up the dividends.

The most recent foolishness has the University of Southern California (USC) and the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) would be leaving the Pac-12 in order to join the Big-10 Conference in 2024. There is a lot here that doesn’t make sense. One of the big ones is that distance is no longer a concern to those who want to cash those big television checks. The new Big-10, which has to use a different logo because there aren’t ten teams in it, will stretch from the East Coach (Rutgers) to the West Coast now with this expansion.

The announcement apparently caught the rest of the Pac-12 teams by surprise and who knows what discussions are taking place now. But some of the initial chatter is that perhaps Oregon and Washington and maybe even Utah and Colorado would go to the Big-12. Yes, that Big-12 which just recently announced the membership of BYU, Cincinnati, Central Florida and Houston.

Right behind those rumors are the ones talking about what might happen to Arizona and Arizona State.

Here’s the part I thought was very interesting because I don’t think some of these schools knew they were so much on the outside looking in when the popular and rich kids wanted to move on.

I’m talking about teams like Washington State, Oregon State, California, Stanford and maybe others. They are not invited to the party. They aren’t even invited to the secondary party. Should the Pac-12 dissolve after 107 years of competition, this is likely the first time some of these schools and their fans have realized that they are not wanted.

Feels pretty bad doesn’t it?

There was an article I read that talked about purging schools like Iowa State, Kansas State and Kansas from the Big-12 in favor of the aforementioned rumor. Can you imagine how gypped you’d feel if you were those schools? Didn’t Kansas just win the NCAA Basketball Championships?

The difference is, Wyoming is stubborn and salty enough that we really don’t care. We want to play our geographical rivals and long-time series mean something to us.

Here are a few examples of what I think could happen as the mega-money era keeps squeezing the fun out of college football.

• The Pac-12 loses the L.A. school and returns to ten teams. It wasn’t that long ago they were the Pac- 10 anyway remember. They added Utah and Colorado a decade ago and changed their name.

• The Pac-12 invites new members such as San Diego State and Boise State. These two schools have been very successful on the gridiron and fit the bill. Where they don’t is the rumored snobbiness of Pac- 12 schools on academics. But in this day of non-reason, who knows if that will even come up.

• The Big-12 snags Oregon, Washington, Utah and Colorado to move to 16 teams. This would move the Buffs back to their previous conference and would reunite BYU and Utah as conference rivals. In this scenario perhaps the Mountain West is the best fit for Washington State and Oregon State. In other words, could this benefit the MWC? It’s possible.

• The Big-12 just consumes the juiciest bits of the Pac-12 that are left, leaving the aforementioned lepers out in the cold.  For Stanford, this is no big deal. They have more money and clout than most. The others?  I really don’t know.

The bottom line is I think the realignment is out of control. To me what makes college football special is the geographical rivals and the trophy series that has one team rushing to the other sideline to hoist the spoils of the game. One thing this last announcement has done is make some pretty significant schools feel like they didn’t matter as much as they thought they did.