Realignment across college football has caused the death of several major rivalries. How do regional rivalries impact public understandings of geography?
College football’s gradual extension of its influence across the United States over a 150-year period offers a chance to see how sport helps shape regional identities and alter our understanding of geography. With football driving the shape and composition of conference affiliations, the gridiron offers plenty of opportunity to see how the sport has been shaped by shifting transportation options, population centers, and demographics. In turn, the sport has helped reshape regional cultural identities through its evolution.
Sometimes that is a matter of tactical changes that in part evolved through the ability to practice and play various versions of the sport year-round with the demographic shift to the Sun Belt states. On occasion, it has been a matter of cultural shifts shaping the sport, for instance as policies of integration swept through the United States midway through the 20th century.
In this week’s Sunday Morning Quarterback, however, we are going to look at how the sport of college football has shaped our collective understanding of geography. To do so, we are going to look at the development of conferences and the processes of realignment that shift how people see their favorite teams in relation to other programs around them.
Conceiving of football in relation to imagined communities
Originating as the title concept of Benedict Anderson’s landmark 1983 work, imagined communities are a concept that Anderson positioned around nationalism. Early in the first chapter, for instance, Anderson discusses how nationalism is a cultural artifact “capable of being transplanted, with varying degrees of self-consciousness, to a great variety of social terrains, to merge and be merged with a correspondingly wide variety of political and ideological constellations.”
Just as nationalism took root and evolved many different flavors, so too has college football proven capable of transplanting itself and merging into the cultural identity of regions as different and as diverse politically and ideologically as one can find across the United States. Finding purchase on both coasts and everywhere else in between, the sport and each team that fields a team provides the focal point for imagined communities to form around shared interests and the values that are articulated by those interests.
The imagining, as Anderson saw it, lied not in the fact that the community itself was fake. Rather, the imagining fell within the fact that even the smallest communities existed in a space where members of that community only knew and interacted with a small fraction of the total number of individuals contained within that group. One might have a deep bond with individuals in their section of the stadium, or folks with whom they tailgate every weekend, but no individual knows every other individual identifying with a particular team.
In similar fashion, these imagined communities exist within a space of imagined geographies that are constantly being evaluated and reevaluated, defined and redefined, as populations move, institutions rise and fall, and conferences expand and evolve. No community exists outside of the space in which it functions, and thus the imagined communities one finds throughout college football exist in a constant push and pull with other imagined communities.
This is the genesis of conference affiliation and the shaping of regional identity. This is the foundation upon which rivalries are built — and upon which rivalries are severed.
The significance of conferences in college football’s regional growth
College football, as has been well documented, originated among the colleges and universities along the Atlantic seaboard. Chief among those were Yale, Harvard, and Princeton, three schools which dominated the earliest development of the sport. From that point of genesis, football followed a similar course to the geographic shifts of the American populace.
While the early titans of the sport eventually banded together decades later to form the Ivy League, conferences started to come online much earlier once the sport was popularized outside its 19th-century home base. The forebears of the Big Ten, the Pac-12, and the SEC all started to form around the turn of the 20th century.
These leagues provided the opportunity for universities to create mutually acceptable regional rules around eligibility, amateurism, recruiting, and scholarships that continue to impact the sport in the present day. They offered a guaranteed slate of games each season within a geographically contiguous space. In doing so, schools could more effectively set annual budgets and plan ahead for non-conference travel.
Conferences, as a result, came to create collectively imagined geographies in the mind of fans. The Big Ten became synonymous with Midwestern football, even as Notre Dame simultaneously developed as an independent powerhouse. When the SEC came online in the 1930s, it quickly superseded the Southern Conference as the league that shaped the gridiron game in the former Confederacy. The Pacific Coast Conference and its successors have defined football on the west coast for more than a century.
There is a reason why these three leagues have never lost members over the past half-century. Since the mid-1960s, the trio has been at the forefront of expansion rather than contraction. Each of the three leagues have become regional exemplars helping to define the local culture of their areas. At the same time, though, the perception of their identity belies the fact that they have maintained their fabricated identities while pushing the boundaries of what constitutes their imagined geographies.
Mergers, contractions, expansions: The Big 12 as convoluted geography
Missouri was a longtime member of the Big 8 and later the Big 12, leagues that were defined by their orientation toward the Plains states in the heartland of the United States. Texas A&M was in a similar boat when they defected from the Big 12. For the Aggies, it was a process of shifts that began with the dissolution of the Southwest Conference that was founded at a time when Texas and Arkansas were effectively the southwestern point of heavy population density between the east and west coasts.
The SWC, rife with issues of corruption, recruiting scandals, and a compact geographic footprint that was beneficial in an earlier era but which ran counter to a new period of the sport’s history where television dollars rather than gate receipts dictate school and conference decision-making processes. It was the league that left behind four of its eight members when it merged with the Big 8 in 1996 to form the Big 12.
With the departure of both teams from the Big 12, both teams deserted longtime rivalries. The Tigers left behind 120 years of Border War history with their foe to the west, Kansas. For the Aggies, the Lone Star Showdown with Texas died at 118 games and holding. Neither Missouri nor Texas A&M has faced off against the Jayhawks and Longhorns respectively on the football field since departing for the SEC.
A year earlier, the Big 12 lost Colorado and Nebraska, as the Buffaloes joined the Pac-12 and Nebraska became the 12th member of the Big Ten. There was a point where it looked like the Pac-12 might become the Pac-16 and completely destroy the Big 12. It has shouldered on as a 10-team league ever since, inviting TCU and West Virginia into the fold after the SEC’s offer to Texas A&M and Missouri briefly made the Big 12 an eight-team league.
Ahead of the curve: The SEC and expanding the geography of “southeast”
SEC country, long sitting stable in its membership, has been a conference that has consistently operated from a position of strength. After forming in 1932, it has only ever encountered two expansions. From longtime roots constitutes Missouri and Texas, two states that previously found themselves shaped by other regional identities and a different set of imagined geography. Leaving behind longtime rivals for a new group of regular opponents, Missouri and Texas A&M helped further expand a conference that helped open the floodgates for expansion late in the 20th century.
But this was hardly the first big expansion for the SEC, which became the first league to expand to 12 teams. It was the SEC that opened the floodgates to the concept of the conference championship game when the conference held its inaugural title game in 1992. The addition of Arkansas was the beginning of the end for the SWC, which became an all-Texas league after the Razorbacks defected.
Adding South Carolina, an independent program, was the far less impactful of the two additions to the membership. While this pushed the SEC further up along the Atlantic coast into territory that traditionally had been the provenance of the ACC, it did not come at the expense of another conference. Westward expansion is the most lasting legacy of both SEC expansions.
Over the course of those two expansions, the westward shift in SEC power helped shift in the American consciousness what constitutes the imaginary of the southeastern parts of the United States. States that were once considered the southwest and the gateway to the Great Plains were absorbed into a league that has traditionally identified deeply with its Dixie roots. That shift impacted not just regional imaginaries but also the national conception of the imagined geography that defines the ever-shifting and always nebulous concept of regional identities.
North, south, and west: The ACC and reconsidering Atlantic geography
The ACC is a latecomer to the college football conference game. Among the power conferences, it is the league with the shortest tenure of existence. Formed in 1953 in Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas, the ACC was chartered by a group of seven teams that departed the bloated Southern Conference to form their own league. Virginia was added into the original membership, and for most of its first two decades the league remained an eight-team loop.
In 1971 South Carolina left to take up independence, and the league pushed southward as a response. Eight years later, Georgia Tech joined in to put the ACC in the same state as the SEC for the first time ever. Adding Florida State in the early 1990s helped boost the league’s profile further, especially as it coincided with a golden era of football under Bobby Bowden.
The two-year expansion in 2004 and 2005 that allowed the league to start hosting championship games stayed largely within the geographic confines of the league’s already-established footprint. Miami and Virginia Tech joined other members from their own states in the ACC fold in 2004, while the league broke off from geographic contiguity in 2005 by adding Boston College to the mix. A decade later, Syracuse, Pittsburgh, and Louisville were brought in to buttress the loss of charter member Maryland.
The loss of an Atlantic coast staple was in part a reaction to expansion by the ACC itself, as they reimagined what constituted the geography of the Atlantic coast with teams that identified more with the rivers and lakes near their metropolitan campuses than the Atlantic coastline. In the process, geography was reimagined due to football convenience, ignoring even the impact on the rich basketball history and rivalries within the league.
A long history of growth: The Big Ten and the Midwestern imaginary
As the oldest conference still in existence in college football, the Big Ten’s place within American geography has shifted. Originally known as the Western Conference in the last years of the 1800s before growing into the Big Nine and then the Big Ten in the course of the early 20th century, the league has can claim a place in 19th-, 20th-, and 21st-century American history.
The conference originated in five Great Lakes states in 1896, expanding to include first Iowa and then Ohio State on either side of the turn to the 20th century. Michigan State was added to the fold in 1950, but that fell within the geographic confines of the league’s footprint.
It wasn’t until 1990, when Penn State as added as the 11th member of the league, that the Big Ten really started to look at the possibility of utilizing its natural advantages of historical relevance and affiliation with the oldest bowl game in the sport to court new storied programs and media markets. Bringing in the long-independent Nittany Lions was a vanguard of the trend throughout the 1990s where historic independent powerhouses joined conferences.
But it took another 21 years before the Big Ten brought in a 12th member and started hosting a championship game. Adding Nebraska also served to weaken the Big 12 at a time when realignment could have gone many different ways. The addition of Maryland and Rutgers three years later, on the other hand, was a pure grab for the media markets from New York City to the nation’s capital. All the while, it remains rooted in its perceptions as an exemplar of the Midwest.
Anchored at the corners: The Pac-12 and conflicts of imagined geography
The Pac-12, the last of the power conferences in the sport, is really a series of several leagues that stretch time from 1915 on to the modern era. Always remaining anchored in California and Washington, the conference has at various times conceived itself geographically as a northern league, a southern league, and a Pacific coast league that didn’t even include either Oregon school.
Originating as the Pacific Coast Conference, the league stayed true to its concept. The Pacific Ocean was within a trip of several hours from each of the four charter members: California in Berkeley, Oregon in Eugene, Oregon State in Corvallis, and Washington in Seattle. Washington State pushed the geography northeasterly from its fulcrum in 1917, with Stanford joining its Bay Area rival in the league in 1918. It wasn’t until the early 1920s that the league made its first grand move to expand its footprint.
In 1922 the league added Idaho, giving Washington State a closer rival to compete against in the process. Montana was added to the league a year later. The Grizzlies lasted 27 years in the league, departing in 1950, while the Vandals remained another decade as the league struggled through scandals around payments to student-athletes throughout the 1950s. Dissolving in 1959, the PCC was quickly reconstituted as the Athletic Association of Western Universities the same year as a league excluding Idaho, Washington State, and the Oregon schools from the fold.
Washington State was the first school brought back into the fold in 1962, and Oregon and Oregon State reunited with their former rivals in 1964. Shifting from a northern focus to the new population centers in southwest, Arizona and Arizona State were plucked from the Western Athletic Conference in 1978. The Pac-10 took advantage of conference flux in 2011, bringing in mid-major powerhouse Utah and Big 12 defector Colorado to create a pair of six-team divisions. In the process, the league has shown a power shift from the northern Pacific to the southern Pacific and a grasp for what constitutes “Pacific” in the imagined geography of college football.
The takeaways from thinking about college football in geographic terms
Increasingly, conferences have proven less interested in geographic contiguity as nabbing the best possible partners. A game of conference membership musical chairs, combined with an increased significance in conference affiliation itself, has resulted in a constant unease around when the needle will hit the vinyl again and send things back in motion.
Where this really shows up most is at the Group of Five level. Serving as the only option for Rocky Mountain and Pacific mid-majors after the death of the WAC, the Mountain West Conference is the successor to that league both in terms of shared charter members and a place of significance in the sport as a spoiler. Part of the reason the WAC died was its mid-1990s expansion to include members of the deceased SWC that didn’t make the Big 12 cut, as they became the first 16-team league to hold a championship game in 1996. But a four-time-zone span was too much for a mid-major league to sustain, leading to defections and a rotating door of membership.
The Mid-American Conference has been relatively stable in its geographic positioning within Great Lakes states and its membership. While the Sun Belt Conference has remained relatively anchored in the same footprints as the ACC and SEC, they have also served as a feeder league splicing the transition from the I-AA/FCS ranks to the I-A/FBS level of the sport.
In the case of Conference USA and the AAC, their positioning as national leagues affords them a flexibility that allows each to continually recreate themselves in any geographic context.
As imagined geographies have become more prevalent within college football, we are seeing more examples like the addition of West Virginia to the Big 12 where regionality is less valuable than getting the best possible members. This has long been the modus operandi of Conference USA, which has taken many of those Sun Belt members as a way to replace teams that have fed to leagues like the Big East and its successor, the American Athletic Conference.
In the case of Conference USA and the AAC, their positioning as national leagues affords them a flexibility that allows each league to continually recreate themselves in any geographic context that provides the best possible economic return. Where proximity was once the most attractive aspect of conference formation, providing an ability to guarantee annual games within reasonable distance to curb expansive travel costs, now that proximity means a limited range of television markets that are the lifeblood of conferences in a modern context.
But that is increasingly becoming the case for the Power Five conferences as well. The Pac-12 and its predecessor leagues have spent decades looking at ways to break beyond the geographic confines of their names. The Big Ten stretches far afield of its original regional footprint, encompassing a stretch of territory that runs laterally across nearly 1300 miles of territory east to west between the campuses of Rutgers and Nebraska. The ACC includes Louisville, located inland more than 500 miles from the Atlantic coastline.
In the end, the expanding geographies of every FBS conference and even many FCS conferences means that fans are less likely to engage in person with fans of conference rivals. They are less likely to get opportunities to interact with a broad cross-section of them inside the stadium. While inclusion in a group of fans means that each individual imagined community affords limited opportunity for engagement both within the community and with members of rival communities, the linkages continue to grow more ephemeral as the geographies get more convoluted.
What does this all mean, in the end? Not much, really.
Long-established conferences, especially those at the Power Five level, have the opportunity to effectively write their own narratives. In some cases, such as the SEC expanding westward and into ACC territory, it is a show of power and expanding into territory with kindred spirits. In others, such as the jump across the Rockies to include Colorado or the expansion to New Jersey, leagues like the Pac-12 and the Big Ten will continue to be defined by their Rose Bowl association with one another rather than their increasingly nebulous conception of regional identities.
That is because those first impressions have proven powerfully lasting in the public consciousness. As imagined communities comprised of imagined communities within the national project, conferences offer an opportunity to continually define and redefine how we as a society value regionality and tribal identity vis-à-vis the confederation of communities that is the FBS and the College Football Playoff structure and hierarchy within the top division.
Geographies defined by generations of yesteryear have remained anchored in the modern consciousness thanks to college football, even as the borderlands of those geographies have shifted over time. Increasingly little more than a branding exercise, the imagined geography of college football conferences provides an anchor for leagues that are already powerful and a Sisyphean battle for the mid-majors fighting uphill for a seat at the table.