We don’t even know what to say anymore. Our ideas have been posted here for a long time on these topics, but college football is out of control. Today, we’re seeing multiple reports about the B1G finally doing the logical thing and grabbing some more of the Pacific-12 Conference now that Colorado has left the building—and the Arizona schools may follow the Buffaloes to the Big XII. The writing has been on the wall, folks.

So be it. We saw this coming a few years ago, of course, so it’s about time to see it happening. Eventually, though, we will end up with a North-South struggle to rival the Civil War, sadly—all over the asininely corrupt sport of college football. Greed has been the enemy of human harmony since the dawn of human consciousness, we suspect. If it’s not coveting the neighbor’s wife, it’s coveting the neighbor’s house, right?

As we are a published historian in addition to a published sports historian and journalist, we’ve often joked that the three most divisive forces in human civilization always have been money, power, and religion—and they’re all so intertwined. Throw college football into the mix … a religion to some, for sure … and it’s going to end up tearing apart the fabric of this nation (forget the big orangutan for the moment if you can).

Perhaps this was all inevitable, but as historians, we know better. Long sequences of events lead us into crisis moments and out of them as well, and no single change in the chain of causality is going to disrupt a hard-charging force of human nature. All we can do is examine how we got here and where we can possibly go from here, based on verifiable facts put together from multiple social sciences and their joint study.

Right now, college football is on the brink; as fans, we can honestly say we don’t care if it dies. As historians and journalists, we still think there is a good answer out there that no one really has yet to embrace: your move, NFL. As Judge Smails famously said, “Well … we’re waiting!“