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Games like USC-Michigan will help college football fans adapt to the demise of the Pac-12.
The 11th-ranked Trojans and 18th-ranked Wolverines played a regular-season game for the first time in 66 years and it was an instant Big Ten classic.
With no functional passing game, Michigan mashed and dashed to a 27-24 come-from-behind victory at the Big House against its new conference rival from the West Coast.
“I think it was just a classic, back-and-forth fight,” USC coach Lincoln Riley told reporters after his team played tough but could not quite close out the defending national champions.
When conference officials and television executives came up with the idea of a Big Ten West Wing, this is exactly what they had in mind.
“Can’t believe we’re stuck with this game when we could be watching SC play Cal in front of 40,000 empty seats,” Fox Sports executive Michael Mulvihill posted on X.
Fox shares the Big Ten’s rights with CBS and NBC.
USC-Michigan was on CBS and no doubt drew a monster audience that will make the network’s suits thrilled with their $350-million-a-year investment.
But that’s how they get you: With USC at Michigan going down the wire on a sunny Saturday in front of 110,000 fans. With No. 6 Tennessee at No. 15 Oklahoma in the Sooners’ first Southeastern Conference game, played later Saturday night.
It’s cold but true. The games always seem to deliver.
More than a year after the Pac-12 fell apart, its traditional members scattered to other power conferences, all this realignment is producing some weird stuff.
On Friday night, Stanford made a cross-country trip to Syracuse to play its first game as a member of the Atlantic Coast Conference.
It is fair to ask: What is the point of all this?
Then the Cardinal and Orange play a thriller, won by Stanford with a walk-off field goal, and the absurdity of it all fades and fans forget the greedy and destructive off-field decisions the people who run college football so often make.
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No. 7 Missouri was taken to…
Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/ap-top-25-takeaways-usc-015532005.html
Author : Associated Press
Publish date : 2024-09-22 01:55:32
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