Imaginary Friends

Tony's day job is acting in the best fiduciary and long-term interest of a conference whose members he represents. As for the rest of you Conference Pride Enthusiasts, you've fallen for what had long been a regional disease. You caught it from The South.

They celebrate every team's wins as their own. It's socialized sports auto-eroticism.

Pretending that Washington, Illinois or Minnesota winning anything counts as a partial win for the Buckeyes is cringy mental gymnastics. You do realize Michigan is in our little club still, right? Ah, so you make exceptions. Petitti gets paid for this, do you?

Conference Pride Abstinence is the only righteous path in college fandom. You'll never feel dirty or ashamed if you're disciplined enough to simply enjoy your team winning and every other team eating as much shit as possible.

Rephrasing in a more dignified way:

(Conference Pride) fools its sufferers into believing their thimble-sized piss pumps are not inadequate or humiliating because they can simply grab onto their first-cousin's giant hog with both hands and celebrate that miscolored phallus as if it's their own.

That's disgusting, what the hell is wrong with you? Exactly. Go ahead, cheer for Purdue.

You might act this way for free, but Petitti gets paid handsomely to serve his clients. Conference pride for Ohio State fans in particular is decidedly useless, and a good way to illustrate this is happening this week.

Petitti and the athletic directors from the universities he represents are at Greg Sankey's SEC winter meetings right now - by invitation, it's not an incursion - to continue a discussion the two super conferences initiated last fall.

This is a barely covert operation to fill a longstanding governance void the NCAA has been too compromised, feckless and bureaucratic to take care of by itself. B1G and SEC shaping college athletics strategy would be a coup if the frame into the multi billion-dollar estate of this business still had any doors attached to it.

The two alliances have a whole bunch of items to discuss this week - governance, money, scheduling, rules, settlements for the former student-athletes born too soon to benefit from the current era - but the shiniest object on their agenda, at least for us fans of teams and conferences - is the expanded College Football Playoff.

Ohio State has more Sugar Bowl wins than any SEC program since the BCS began in 1998. © Andrew Weber-Imagn Images

This tournament Ohio State has won twice, in both its now-sunsetted four and new 12-team format will be tweaked and likely expanded again. The two conferences with the most money and influence in college athletics will be juicing our new postseason reality to benefit their constituencies the most.

Which brings us back to the disease we kicked this little discussion off with - Conference Pride. Conferences make sense for aggregating power and influence in negotiating deals, but cheering for consortiums is like saying the mall is your favorite store. You've never shopped at Northwestern. When it closes, you'll be totally unaffected.

So why exactly are B1G and SEC feeling so entitled and motivated to shape the playoff, which will cascade into their other topics like governance, money, scheduling and rules? Why do they believe deciding the future of the sport is within the scope of their powers?

The answer is not in prestige, contracts, money and influence. It was decided on the field:

Eleven years is a decent sample size. The first decade of the CFP delivered three playoff games each season, with two rare conference-on-conference matchups - Alabama vs. Georgia in both instances. A couple of prideful moments for Mississippi State and Vanderbilt fans, if you believe in that sort of thing. But every year was a two-game journey.

The Buckeyes just participated in four games by themselves in the first run of a 12-team tournament, running into over one conference foe on their path and would have faced another if not for Penn State's inevitable James Franklining in the Orange Bowl.

If you're a conference pride enthusiast, the familiarity of B1Gness in an expanded postseason feels like an inevitability because it is. Only (air quotes on only) three SEC teams got past the velvet rope this time, which feels like a minimum going forward even without tweaking the inclusion rules.

Both conferences will be just fine. That gap at the top of our chart is just going to get wider every year with an expanded playoff because of the law of big numbers and percentages, with or without conference commissioner meddling. So why would Tony and Greg go through the trouble?

It's not a clean answer, but compare this chart with the one you just finished looking at above:

That's the same chart with Alabama, Ohio State and Clemson removed. A lot tighter!

Georgia was basically Penn State for the first half of the CFP's existence, but its ascendance under Kirby Smart gave the SEC two playoff regulars, not just a rarity but an exclusive among all conferences.

The Bulldogs essentially replaced Clemson until the 12-team format created room for both programs to participate. Removing Alabama makes the SEC Georgia's conference to carry, while B1G's only four CFP wins come from Michigan in one season and Penn State a few weeks ago.

Remove Clemson and the ACC becomes the MWC. That's some pumpkin. Orange for a reason.

If you're not understanding why this is a Conference Pride is Stupid column yet and 11 seasons isn't a big enough sample size for you, below are the 16 which preceded it.

The BCS, for those of you fighting memory loss, was a 1 vs. 2 affair with a bouquet of handsomely rewarded and esteemed bridesmaid bowl games which were all part of the same offering.

Let's avoid making too many charts - the Big Ten minus Ohio State equals ACC.

The Buckeyes had 10 of the conference's 28 games, which equals what Alabama and Texas combined for during that stretch - mostly pre-Saban Tide and Peak Mack Brown. The only recession-proof football program in America is the one you like the most.

The Buckeyes aren't whom Petitti is protecting while representing them in this week's meetings, but he is benefiting from the work Jim Tressel, Urban Meyer and Ryan Day have done to make his case for the conference. That meeting with Sankey and their constituencies this week might seem like an effort to elevate the ceilings for the teams at the top, but isn't.

They're there to shore up the floor, which should reduce any animus directed at whichever school is fortunate enough to become the 2024 Indiana Hoosiers in the future. That debate will dissolve and return as a guarantee, and creating guarantees is all these meetings are about. Ohio State is not a part or a beneficiary of that discussion.

That's because the Buckeyes are by far the biggest winner of an expanded playoff since they have lived in the top 12 for the past 30 seasons. They are 22/25 this century alone, and the last time they finished outside of the top seven they suffered a 12-2 season. Ohio State is good even when it isn't, and it's not just because of one coach.

The SEC, which aggregates its pride does so because it has to. The power dynamics are trickier when any one of five programs just need the right coach to be title contenders. Georgia with Kirby Smart will be every bit of the fixture Ohio State is, but Alabama was a top 12 finisher just nine times in the quarter century that preceded Nick Saban.

RELATED Defiling Yourself for Conference Pride is Pointless and Bad (2018)

They have an Ohio State in the SEC and it's called LSU. Three coaches have won national titles in Baton Rouge, but the program isn't recession-proof for reasons better left to other offseason columns. Ohio State cycles through coaches without ever slipping. Recessions in Columbus are 12-2 seasons and rivalry game futility that matters more to us than it does anywhere else.

Which means you have an abundance of things for which to be grateful and thankful. And as long as you're a Buckeye fan, you have no reason to have any conference pride.

The seasons are long but the decades are short, and when you look at the B1G through that lens you quickly realize that Ohio State is the B1G. You have all the pride you need at home.