Where does Oregon fit in college football's murky future?

A special guest column by Autzen Zoo's Maine correspondent, Porter Starr Byrd
How long will Oregon sit on the Big Ten Championship's throne?
How long will Oregon sit on the Big Ten Championship's throne? | Grace Hollars/IndyStar / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images

Recruiting reversals, an overhaul of the playoff format and a revenue-sharing revolution-- will Oregon football fans even recognize the program in three years?

In two years or so, Oregon may no longer be in the B1G.

College sports, as we know are in a real mess with meltdowns inevitable. It’s all about fairness which would not be fairness. The only way out may be for football to break off from the NCAA and form its own entity. If they do, they are not going to take the Slippery Rocks or Portland States with them.

Will those teams remain in an underfunded new NCAA still struggling with all that ‘not very much’ money and how it will be split up? Will Basketball become the new emaciated cash cow? Will the hoopsters have to follow the lead of the boys on the gridiron to survive?

All that is a muddy mess. The sure thing is that Football is going to survive. There is too much money in it and a lot of high paying jobs are waiting at the next level where owners and GM’s would hate to see a major free proving ground go away.

There will still be an Oregon Duck team. With a little common sense, coast to coast conferences won’t exist and if those have to go away, so will the SEC which also includes a lot of geography. If the conferences break up the sane thing to do is to split everyone else up into regions, perhaps as many as eight of them.

Oregon would probably once again be in the west or northwest playing their old PAC12 rivals. The travel budget would smile but be overshadowed by a new version, or just a new face, of the old nemesis “East Coast Bias”.

Top all of that of with what are non-conference match-ups going to look like? Will they play the teams left behind and what kind of financial tradeoff will have to be made if they do. Will they play teams from other regions but in the big group? Perhaps the current SEC teams are going to get used to playing 8 team conference schedules.

Then, once all of that is settled, where will they play their games. Is Ohio state going to have to rent the ‘shoe from the Ohio State? Who would want to rent the Oregon State mess? If Oregon rents Autzen will it drag them back into monetarily supporting a bunch of other sports? There are not many athletic programs in the black now and they are going to want to scrape every penny they can from teams that might also be in the red.

It's all going to explode and be very interesting, and maybe not in a good way but in the end we will still have Oregon football. What will it look like?

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