This is the title I chose for my personal blog, which is meant to give me an outlet for one of my favorite crafts – writing – plus to use an image from my favorite sport, golf.  Out of college, my first job was as a reporter for the Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon, and I went on from there to practice writing in all my professional positions, including as press secretary in Washington, D.C. for a Democrat Congressman from Oregon (Les AuCoin), as an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, as press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and as a private sector lobbyist.  This blog also allows me to link another favorite pastime – politics and the art of developing public policy – to what I write.  I could have called this blog “Middle Ground,” for that is what I long for in both politics and golf.  The middle ground is often where the best public policy decisions lie.  And it is where you want to be on a golf course.

I am a fan of college football, at least some of the time.

But events lately, especially athletic conference realignments, indicate that college football is after one thing – money.

In that way, it’s sort of like professional golf where the architects of the sport, not to mention many players, are going after tainted Saudi money – and they say it is to survive.

Sportswriter John Feinstein, in recent columns, got it just right when he said that college athletic administrators who say they are in favor of “student athletes” are blowing smoke.  They just want money.

Now national columnist George Will, writing in the Washington Post, goes beyond his normal political beat to write a column under this headline:  “At last, college football admits it is an unembarrassable money machine.”

Well, I am not sure that college football administrators have “admitted” that they are going after the money, it appears that is just what they are doing.

Will writes:

“There are furrowed brows as many people seriously ponder an unserious question:  Can college football be saved?  This question should be answered with a question:  Saved from what?

“Presumably, from itself.  Its sudden convulsions this summer are rational ones, in the limited sense that they are driven by cold economic calculations.  As a result, the college football industry must, at last, retire the three most important components of its tiresome, patently insincere, vocabulary:  ‘Amateurism,’ ‘student-athletes’ and ‘tradition.’

“This autumn, and ever after, college football will be played without the patina of romance that has been decreasingly successful at obscuring the absurdities that accompany grafting a multibillion-dollar entertainment industry onto institutions of higher education.

“The ‘realignment’ of the pre-eminent conferences, including the swift and ignominious collapse of one of them (the PAC 12) serves common sense.  Realism has displaced the fog of sanctimony and semantic obfuscations that suddenly are laughable and unnecessary.

“Big-time college football has shucked off the accumulated hypocrisies that have encrusted it and now stands before us with an agreeable lack of pretense:  It is an unembarrassable money machine, nothing more.”

Like Feinstein, Will is right.

College football is rarely anything more than a money machine.  Promise to give more money to so-called higher education institutions and they’ll bite.

Will recites the re-alignment:

“The re-alignment carousel accelerated in 2021 when the universities of Texas and Oklahoma announced they would defect from the Big 12 to the Southeastern Conference, where the annual per-team television payout is millions better.  Who knew the nation’s Southeast extends to Norman, Oklahoma.

“The Big Ten had 10 members, spanning 461 miles from Columbus, Ohio, to Iowa City until it added Penn State (1990) and Nebraska (2011).  Then the Big Ten caught the television fever, adding Maryland and Rutgers in 2014 to reach the Washington and New York markets.  The conference then extended 2,417 miles from Pasadena, California to Piscataway, New Jersey.

“Last year, the Big Ten poached (to begin in 2024) USC and UCLA from the Pac-12, which is now the probably terminally ill Pac-4.  This month, the universities of Washington and Oregon agreed to leave the Pac-12 for the soon-to-be 18-team Big Ten, sprawling 2,389 miles from Piscataway to Seattle.”

For my part, what I want is for those who administer “professional” sports, including college football and golf, to admit what they are doing — they are going after money.

Then, with that bit of honesty, we would have a chance to get back to being just fans, even with all the re-alignment.