Penn State Sports Magazine
Issue link: https://comanpub.uberflip.com/i/1507572
O C T O B E R 2 0 2 3 6 1 W W W . B L U E W H I T E O N L I N E . C O M A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN Joe Paterno's ill-fated Eastern all-sports conference will always be a tantalizing 'what if' W hen the ACC formally admitted Stanford, Cal and SMU in early September, it was likely the last major seismic event in the most recent spasm of conference upheaval. Yes, Oregon State and Washington State still need somewhere to call home following the looting of the Pac-12. Yes, the American Athletic Conference must replace the Mustangs. And yes, Florida State and Clemson have been feeling rest- less in the ACC. But much of the dust that's been kicked up over the past two years appears to have settled. When the 2024 college football season begins, the geography of the sport will be very different. It will also be very nonsensical. Cal and Stanford both lie within 25 miles of the Pacific Ocean, a fact that until recently would have been a deal-breaker for a league whose whole identity has been tied to its roots on the Eastern seaboard. The geographic incoherence might seem par for the course in a college sports universe that will soon feature an 18-team Big Ten and a 16-team Big 12, but it does underscore just how far the Power Five (soon to be Power Four) con- ferences have veered from the idea that they are supposed to exist as bastions of regional solidarity. It didn't have to be this way. There's an alt-history of modern college sports in which the move that started it all — Penn State's admission into the Big Ten in 1990 — never happened. PSU's first choice had been to band together with its independent brethren and form an Eastern all-sports conference. Had that conference come together the way its main proponent had hoped, the past three decades of constant realignment might have unfolded in a very differ- ent way. M A T T H E R B | M AT T. H E R B @ O N 3 . C O M Paterno had hoped to convince the Eastern football independents to band together. The failure of his proposed confer- ence eventually led to Penn State's admission into the Big Ten in 1990. PHOTO COURTESY PENN STATE ATHLETICS