This entire conference realignment situation should be considered morally dispicable by everyone that has any sense of justice and fair play. The fact that it isn't provides ample proof that mankind still hasn't progressed all that far from cave-men days when our early ancestors roamed in predator packs and survival of the fittest, (or the luckiest), was the number one rule in life. The preying upon weaker or less fortunate conferences by stronger and more financially powerful conferences seems to be construed as 'just the way it is', and perfectly acceptable, at least that is the outlook of the successful team-stealers. They can deny they 'stole' the team, but the fact remains if they hadn't previously promised admission the team wouldn't have left it's former league. Just because you can take another conference's team, doesn't mean it is right.
Situations similar to today's college football team-poaching by stronger and richer conferences have been occuring throughout history, although sometimes meeting with some encouraging opposition. I believe one similar event was when the U.S. decided to forcibly remove the five 'civilized' Indian tribes from their ancient homelands in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, and relocate them far across the Mississippi on land that nobody yet wanted, the 'Indian Territory' or today's Oklahoma. Although this 'stealing' of rich Indian land occured about 1830, it wasn't the nation's policy when it first started out, forty years earlier.
The nation's first Secretary of War under president George Washington, Henry Knox, was a decent, honorable man, who had originated a much more Indian-favorable agreement, due to his highly moralistic sense. In 1789 Knox wrote;
"It is presumable that a nation solicitous of establishing its character on the broad basis of justice would not only hesitate at, but reject, every proposition to benefit itself by the injury of any neighboring communitites, no matter how contemptible and weak that community may be..."
If you substitute the word 'conference' for 'nation', you have a very good idea about how I feel about the stealing of Nebraska by the Big-10, Colorado and Utah by the PAC, A&M by the SEC, Rutgers and Pitt by the ACC, etc..
In other ways I compare a college football conference to the United States, an agreed upon union that should be everlasting because the value of the whole is much more powerful than the sum of it's individual parts. Comparing a conference with the union of the states would make an action such as one/or more of the conference's member-schools leaving the same thing as one/or more states seceding from the union. It shouldn't be allowed..... and in 1861 it wasn't.
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