You may have noticed at some point over the past few seasons that college football fanaticism, as it relates to games and records, is undergoing some changes. With the increase in available bowls, national exposure and ultimately, the whining of the Non-BCS schools for better representation, conference games are actually losing their classic importance. Big 10 teams are actually rooting for their natural rivals, because better records and performance by conference schools means a bigger piece of the pie for your school’s conference, and by extension, your school. This is fine. It is the natural evolution of a sport in transition to pockets of intense rivalry in an almost club-like setting, to a national, well organized and intensely competitive sport. However, I believe everyone can see the day coming when the balance actually begins to tip in that direction too much. When the performance of a conference becomes so important that the next generation actually begins to become Big10 fans rather than Michigan fans. When the 10 years war loses its importance in history as Big10 vs SEC vs Pac10 takes over as the new rivalry. This is not fine. College football should be dominated by devotion to a team, school colors, in some cases an Alma Mater or in others, the jersey you grew up cheering for with your dad on Saturday afternoons. And mark my words, that is disappearing. And it makes me sad. But a solution does exist, in a sport much older than college football. Applause for Mr. Doubleday, if you please. Baseball has the solution. In fact, at one time, the Big10 embraced this solution. Only the conference champion went to the Rose Bowl. In baseball, only the top team in a division (wildcard excluded) goes to the playoffs, and it doesn’t matter how that division performed either. In college football, there are too many bowls, and too much politics involved in the postseason deciding process. I’m sorry to the Non-BCS schools, but at large bids are destroying the game. They really are. I’m not saying we need a playoff or anything. In fact, a playoff based on some sort of subjective polls is a mistake. It decides nothing, as the NC game has already proven. We need to give every single bowl game a hard and fast conference alliance. This will spur intra-conference competitiveness and rivalries back to the forefront by removing the advantage gained by having a conference as a whole perform well or poorly. Furthermore, like baseball, if we then want to have an NC game (which I do), we ensure a much better mix of teams to choose from in the bowls (if it is arranged in a +1 setup). After all, if I have 6 teams from a certain conference in NC game eligible bowls, I’m pretty likely to end up choosing two of them, not because they’re the best, but because of sheer numbers. So, football commissioners of America, lets learn from an older, unfailingly successful sport. Absolute and unflinching conference-bowl affiliations. Fewer bowls. More heated rivalries that turn areas of the country to lucrative war-zones than luke warm general affections for a conference. More good football. Less whining. Less crap.