Conference Realignment and College Football's Good Old Days

Oklahoma and Texas moving to the SEC and UCLA and USC leaving for the Big Ten causes consternation for college football fans. Fans of the Big 12 and Pac-12 teams left behind feel stilted, while fans of other schools are uncertain about how their favorite teams might be affected down the road. The changes can be upsetting for fans of the affected schools and college football fans in general. Still, the changes seem less consequential when we recognize that realignments and relegation have a long history in college football. Change has occurred at every step and fans longing for the good old days largely miss a period that never existed.

Fans pining for the old days need to ask themselves when those good old days occurred. For example, which decade of college football best represents the good old days? Was it before 1920? Was it the 1960s? The 1980s? What made the good old days good? Was it the nature of the football on the field? The accessibility of games via radio, broadcast television, cable, or streaming? Was it the stability of the conferences? The stability of your preferred conference? Did the good old days arrive after Black players could participate fully? 

I can't answer those questions, but to provide some sense of the shifts and stability in college football's balance of power, I will look at college football in 1940 compared to today, a year when the world was at war and America was not. The war was a turning point in world history, directly contributing to the subsequent growth of the American university system and leading some schools to drop football in its aftermath. I'm also using that year because I own a giveaway booklet distributed by Hires Root Beer that lists the 1940 football schedules of 270 schools. I'll use elements of the brochure to show how football has changed since then. (Fun fact: Hires Root Beer is the longest continually made soft drink in the United States. Charles Hires introduced it in 1876, the same year the IFA published football's first rules.)

Page 4 of the booklet lists an All Time All-America Team which, depending on the depth of your college football fandom, may include a few names you do not recognize.