The entire concept of a "rivalry" has been gutted and sold for parts, and anyone who thinks otherwise is lying to themselves. The soul of this sport was the annual blood feud you circled on the calendar the day the schedule came out, a game where you knew every name on the other sideline because they were the same kids you'd been hating for three years. Now? You need a damn media guide just to figure out who is wearing the uniform, and half of them will be gone next year, chasing a better NIL deal. This isn't rivalry, it's corporate brand warfare with temporary employees.
I remember what it felt like for us, for Millikin, when we'd gear up for Augustana or Wheaton. You didn't just play the team, you played the entire history. You played against the ghosts of their alumni and the weigth of every single meeting that came before. The kids on that field understood they were just the current chapter in a story that started decades before they were born. The 1998 game against Illinois Wesleyan, that double-overtime heartbreaker, meant something because the same two institutions, with players who chose to be there for four years, were battling it out. There was a fabric to it. Now the fabric is made of Velcro, easy to tear off and stick somewhere else.
Look at what they've done at the top. Conference realignment was the first sin, ripping apart Bedlam and the Border War and the Backyard Brawl for television dollars. They sold our heritage for cable subscription fees. And now the portal and NIL have finished the job. How can you hate a kid who just showed up three months ago from a school across the country? How can you build a genuine, lasting animosity toward a program when its entire two-deep is a revolving door of mercenaries? The news about Colorado bringing in 43 transfers, or Oklahoma State with 50, it's a farce. That's not building a team, that's assembling a fantasy football roster with no connection to the place, the people, or the opponent across the field.
The new "rivalries" they try to manufacture are just TV matchups between logos. They'll tell you Oregon vs. Georgia is some new epic clash. It's not. It's just two collections of five-star talent and portal acquisitions who happened to schedule each other. There's no shared pain, no stolen championships, no decades of regional pride on the line. It's a business transaction. And the kids playing in it? They're thinking about their draft stock and their next NIL deal, not about avenging a loss from last year to their archrival, because half of them weren't even there for that loss.
The proof is in the silence. The stories aren't passed down anymore because there's no continuity to pass them down to. When I was in school, the seniors would tell the freshmen about the hit that defined the rivalry game five years prior. Now, the senior might have been at three different schools. Who is he going to tell? What history does he carry? He carries his own highlight reel, not the legacy of the p...