After Days of Insanity, College Football Takes a Deep Breath–and Seeks ‘Stabilization’ at LinesMaker

So it seems the col­lege foot­ball powers-that-be peered into the abyss this week.

And some of them, appar­ently, didn’t really like what they saw.

Not even a week ago, it seemed that the col­lege foot­ball world was headed for change of an his­toric vin­tage. With sev­eral big-time domi­nos hav­ing already fallen (Texas A&M to the SEC, Pitt and Syra­cuse to the ACC), the col­lege foot­ball chat­ter early this week cen­tered mostly on what would hap­pen next–which teams were mov­ing next, which con­fer­ence would fall apart the next and, of course, which hyp­o­crit­i­cal ath­letic direc­tor or con­fer­ence com­mis­sioner would offer us all a lec­ture next.

There was talk of a mass migra­tion of Big 12 schools to the Pac-12.

There was talk of Texas and Notre Dame join­ing the ACC (which never made any sense, by the way).

There was talk of Okla­homa pulling some strings and exert­ing its influ­ence behind closed doors, talk of BYU to the Big 12, talk of UConn and Rut­gers to the ACC, talk of West Vir­ginia and Florida State to the SEC, and talk, of course, of the ulti­mate demise of the Big East.

Well, now all of that (except for the ulti­mate demise of the Big East, which is quite frankly doomed) seems to be on hold.

Because every­one, remark­ably, stopped for just a moment and real­ized that some of this stuff was insane. Absolutely insane.

On Tues­day night, the Pac-12 announced that it would not expand past its cur­rent 12-team align­ment, thereby putting the breaks (at least for now) on any implo­sion of the Big 12. With that bul­let dodged, the Big 12 powers-that-be on Wednes­day got right back to work, hop­ing upon hope (or so we think) that their league could some­how be saved (even though you know every sin­gle team in the con­fer­ence would jump at a shot to move else­where, but I digress).

Yes, after two days of noth­ing but talk of “realign­ment,” the word of the day on Wednes­day was “sta­bi­liza­tion,” and Big 12 presidents–even the folks at Texas, who are largely respon­si­ble for this mess–were set to have talks on Thurs­day to try and fig­ure out some way to secure the long-term future of a con­fer­ence that, not too long ago, was pretty darn good.

And so now … we wait. The crazi­ness, the insan­ity, the thought­less plans and rumors–all of it has come to a stop.

Col­lege foot­ball, at least for now, is saved.

But we’ll see where we stand this time next week.

Photo: Syra­cuse is mov­ing on to the ACC. But it doesn’t appear wide­spread realign­ment will happen–at least not yet. ()