The last three weeks have been a series of gut punches with one intervening moment of joy. At least, this is what it feels like for many fans across the Pac-1X to be metaphorically gut punched. No matter how realignment shakes out, the inaction by several schools and the NCAA while the SEC and B1G shaped the future of college football in the image that best suited their goals, will now surely leave many fans lost in their jet wash.

As it looks now, college football will morph from a three-tiered system (Power Five, Group of Five, FCS) by adding a fourth tier. I don’t want to be melodramatic and say it has destroyed college football; but it will significantly alter the sport as we know it. Even if Oregon somehow finds itself in this new upper echelon of the Super Two, schools like Oregon State, Washington State, and a dozen or so other teams will find themselves relegated to late-night games designed to take up time slots with very little long-term benefit to those schools.

In 2009, Oregon State was with a score of a Rose Bowl Berth; in 2025, they could be in the Mountain West Conference.

This gut punch was followed two weeks later by the more significant heart punch for the Oregon football family with the tragic death of Spencer Webb.

I wrote last week about just what Webb meant to the Oregon program, his teammates, and most importantly his family. This week, though, the Robert Frost poem ‘Nothing Gold Can Stay’ has been on my mind a lot. In one sense, we knew all along that in its golden youth, college football offered hope, the chance for every school to see a sunrise each season filled with hope.

Dawn goes down to day.

Then an arms race began in college football. In some respects, college football was always an arms race; schools with enough money gave scholarships out like candy at Halloween. In 1972, the NCAA began a series of moves that would limit scholarships to 85 per team. For a time, things started to even out some; new schools started showing up in top-25 polls, and some levels of parity – though never as equitable as a post-salary-cap NFL – began to take root.

Television would change all of that by giving more money to schools; the most successful of whom used that money to build better facilities as recruiting enticements. No longer able to simply offer as many scholarships as they wanted to hoard talent, top programs would buy facilities and lock up the most elite recruits to sustain their competitive advantage.

In the case of college football, however, dawn did not have to go down to day; it was sent there through languor, hubris, and vacuity. Intent on holding onto their monopoly over all things related to college athletics, the NCAA missed an opportunity to right this ship before it struck an iceberg. But this does not lay solely at the feet of the NCAA as several conferences would cling tight to days gone by as if tradition forced their hands.

The Pac-12 had a chance to shape the future of college football and continue to be a part of a bigger picture; their fear of being overpowered led to inaction – which led to the conference being overpowered.

I don’t know how this will all end. Oregon has a great national brand, with a limited market area. And that is going to create some problems.

College football was once gold. Staring at the sunsets each night with hope for a glorious sunrise. For a moment, imagine a worst-case scenario – Oregon does not get a Super Two invite and stays in a conference where they fall $60 million behind those Super Two every year; will Oregon ever have the same kind of media rights payment from a conference that USC will? That seems extremely unlikely. But I don’t know that nothing gold can stay; a new gold will be all that remains.

There will be sunrises and sunsets. How many more times will we see a new football season? I suppose that depends on your age; and yet it seems limitless. Fans are but tourists hurrying to and from the sport.

Nature’s first green is gold

As we mourned with many the passing of Spencer Webb last week, I was moved by the number of people who spoke so highly of Webb as a human being. His impact is the first green; a gold that can never truly fade. I was reminded of something I wrote in my first novel that I think sums up the life of Webb. You have given everything of yourself and with that, you have given yourself everything.

In her seminal book Grit, Angela Duckworth wrote “At its core, the idea of purpose is the idea that what we do matters to people other than ourselves.” Webb understood this which is why his celebration of life last night was so moving and why so many people – young and old – felt a sincere loss; even those that never really knew him. That is where I think Webb was at; those demons never forgotten yet overcome by his sheer grit and will.

The thought that occurred to me as I watched came from the end of The Outsiders. ‘Stay gold.’

In essence, this is what Webb was doing; he was staying gold; holding true to the version of himself that always had hope; that each day was worth experiencing to its fullest.

I think that is a lesson that those fans left outside of the Super Two are going to have to embrace. “Stay Gold Duck fans.”

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

Robert Frost