Andrew Luck is worried about college football. And not in the way most people are worried about, like NIL collectives or transfer portal chaos. He’s worried about the weird stuff. The silly stuff. The rivalries and rituals that don’t make obvious financial sense but make the sport feel like it belongs to real people.
Luck, now Stanford’s general manager after retiring from the NFL, sat down with On3’s Nick Schultz and basically said what a lot of West Coast fans have been feeling since the Pac-12 imploded. The conference he played in from 2008 to 2011 doesn’t exist anymore. Stanford is in the ACC now. Oregon and Washington are in the Big Ten. The Apple Cup and the Civil War still happen, but they’re not conference games anymore. Something’s off.
“I hope we don’t lose some of what makes college football special,” Luck said. “Like, Oregon playing Oregon State is a really cool game. The Apple Cup in Washington is cool. I’m sad that the West Coast doesn’t have a premier conference because that conference was awesome.”
He’s not wrong. The Pac-12 was a mess administratively for years, but it had texture. Stanford and USC played 103 times before the series went dormant after 2023. Stanford still plays Cal every year, but the games against UCLA, Oregon, and USC? Gone. That’s a lot of history to just let evaporate.
Part of what Luck is getting at is the emotional side of all this realignment. The sport is now a $10 billion business, but it was built on things that didn’t make sense geographically or economically. The Big Ten adding teams from the West Coast makes dollars and cents. But it doesn’t make the same kind of sense that a backyard feud does.
“I hope we don’t lose the connective tissue that makes college football – it’s big, big, big business. It’s also silly. Like, a lot of it doesn’t make sense,” Luck said. He talked about growing up in Europe while his dad worked for NFL Europe. He watched Armed Forces Network on Saturdays and all they showed was Penn State. So he hates Penn State. Not because of anything logical. Because that’s all he could watch.
That kind of irrational attachment is what he’s afraid of losing. The sport is becoming more efficient, more national, more optimized for the College Football Playoff. And that might mean the end of weird regional grudges that made Saturdays feel like something bigger than a product.
Luck also acknowledged that the way people watch has changed. Streaming, not just TV. Recruiting is different. NIL is reshaping everything. But he’s hoping the core of the sport survives all of it.
“College football, I think, is almost religious in its convening ability, its intergenerational connective tissue,” he said. “I hope we maintain some of that spirit.”
It’s a nice thought. Whether the sport listens is another question entirely. But it matters that a guy like Luck is saying it out loud.
Leave a Comment