This is all starting to remind of NHL expansion (shudder)

Wait until Notre Dame can't put together a decent schedule because superconferences push teams to 9 game conference schedules and OOC slots for ND dry up.

you are correct, college football is not being watered down.

However the OP is correct in that tradition and rivalries are being thrown out the window in pursuit of the dollar.

Prior to expansion of the NHL, tradition and rivalry was a very large part of the NHL experience.  Perhaps its been too long now for people to remember what the old NHL was like.  But it was quite different than the generic game played today.

Bettman was attempting to expand by creating teams out of thin air.  Totally different.

Also, I think that people are getting confused.  Although the Big Ten is expanding, what is really happening in college football is a continusing push towards a centralization of power.  We'll eventually get down to four big conferences. Then maybe three.  Then just two and at that point it's really just one.

If Maryland and Rutgers football didn't exist before yesterday (i.e., didn't have D1A college football - they were effectively like the Univ of Chicago), would it have mattered to the typical B1G viewer/fan? I would gather for the large majority, while they may have casually watched them for a Thursday night game or something, if the last 20 years of Maryland and Rutgers football were wiped off the planet, it wouldn't have materially mattered -- the B1G/Michigan fans still would have enjoyed college football just as much. We would have gone to the same Rose Bowls, won the same Heismans, had the same UTL, etc.

Now, with them in our conference, they exist when they didn't before. They now matter to me, when I really didn't give them a second thought before. They are effectively the Columbus Blue Jackets and the Nashville Predators, and now my Detroit Red Wings will have to play these two new teams more often, in place of the Toronto Maple Leafs and Boston Bruins.

So in essence, Delany has "created" these teams for Michigan fans. The games we schedule (and don't schedule) and the chances of us winning the conference, etc have changed b/c of this expansion.

Same here. This expansion just for expansion's sake seems a lot like the "boom" phase of a business cycle. It just doesn't seem sustainable.

Although some schools are trying to schedule better non-conference opponents, ticket prices remain high and rising, and there do seem to be a rash of empty seats (not just students) in stadiums around the country. Last year's BCS games had record low ratings (the new playoff system will probably solve this, but it's not a guarantee). And, as Dave Brandon noted on 60 Minutes, only 22 of the 125 1-A football programs are breaking even or in the black.

College Football has been my favorite sport since I began following sports, but the last couple of years have changed that. I can't stand the tearing apart of traditional rivalries, loss of regional identity, and the NCAA's arbitrary, ad hoc approach to everything. Michigan will always be my favorite sports team (more than all my other favorite teams combined), but I don't find myself watching football from noon to midnight on Saturdays like I used to. If there are a significant number of fans like me, I suspect this bubble will pop, maybe by the end of the decade. Who knows what the landscape will look like afterwards.

What is the bubble?