This is an old man speaking, susceptible to How Things Used To Be. Feel free to opt for trendier fare. TikTok videos. Look-at-me Instagram posts. Instant messages composed entirely of acronyms.

Nevertheless, I shall rail against the latest realignment of college athletic conferences, which really has nothing to do with colleges and very little to do with athletics as a whole. These days, it’s all about football “programs;” nobody calls them “teams” anymore, because their function is to serve as cash cows for television, coaches and athletic directors.

My problem—and here I acknowledge a fusty nostalgia—is believing in the outdated sense that conferences should reflect regional ties, traditional rivalries and institutional similarities.

Alas, the universities of Texas and Oklahoma which, in the public mind, are not so much bastions of higher learning as football operations in pursuit of wealth, have announced they will leave the already diminished Big 12 to join the nation’s richest league, the Southeastern Conference. It feels like a modern version of the priority voiced 70 years ago by Oklahoma president George L. Cross: “We’re working to develop a university that our football team can be proud of.”

I admit to loving the college game in spite of its meaner aspects, including a long history of tenuous connections to academics. In the late 1800s, for goodness sakes, the original football factory was Yale University. But there was a fairly recent time when a reasonable percentage of the hired guns were actual students and conferences facilitated contests for nothing more consequential than neighborhood bragging rights.

Then the big bucks got a little too big and the social climbing commenced, in the 1990s destroying the Southwest Conference that was modeled on geography, a collection of Texas colleges plus Arkansas. Roughly 20 years on, the Big 12—a grouping of mid-America/breadbasket schools which had cherrypicked four former SWC teams—went into decline with the departure of Nebraska (to the Big 10), Colorado (to the Pac-12), Missouri and Texas A&M (both to the SEC.)

When that shameless gold-digging was afoot, NCAA president Mark Emmert washed his hands, telling the watchdog Knight Commission in 2011 that his organization “does not have a role in conference affiliations and should never be in the business of telling universities what affiliations they should have.”

At that same Knight confab, though, then-Knight co-chair Brit Kirwan, at the time president of the University of Maryland system, expressed “great concerns over the fragmented governing structure” in which football establishments, seeking the most affluent league connections, were “wreaking havoc on a number of institutions” and their non-football athletes.

Kirwan recognized “the dance going on” to be based on the urge for Bowl Championship Series eligibility; i.e., more TV payouts. The next year, sure enough, Maryland—a founding member of the ACC more than a half-century earlier—jumped to the higher income bracket available in the Big 10.

It was then-LSU chancellor Michael Martin who in 2011 guessed, presciently, that “we could end up with just two enormous conferences, one called ESPN and the one called Fox.” Which sounds far more likely than the argument put forward in a recent article by Michael Benson, president and professor of history at Coastal Carolina University.

Benson claimed that “the two biggest brokers in these conversations” are not football muscle and TV riches; rather, “the role of academics and a given school’s ‘institutional fit.’” He cited the Big 10’s insistence that it welcomes only members of the Association of American Universities, the most exclusive club of pre-eminent research-intensive schools that includes only 64 of the nation’s roughly 4,000 degree-granting institutions (1.6 precent).

But Nebraska, now firmly ensconced in the Big 10, recently was booted out of the AAU. And when my dear old alma mater, the University of Missouri, jumped to the SEC in 2012, it became only the fourth of the league’s 14 schools—along with Vanderbilt, Florida and Texas A&M—that is inside the AAU’s velvet ropes. Texas would be No. 5. Oklahoma does not belong to the AAU, though it is doubtful that the Oklahoma football team’s pride is hurt by that fact.

Consider: Of the 23 Division I national football championship games dating to 1998, 16 were won by non-AAU schools. So much for the role of academics in these matters. Just follow the money.

Which gets back to my earlier Yale reference. Only last week, Don Kagan, Yale’s former professor of history and the classics, died at 89. In 1987, when Kagan was serving as Yale’s interim athletic director, we had a chat about that school—and its fellow conference members in the Ivy League—having long-ago chosen scholarly might over football supremacy.

Kagan said then, “This desire to gain [football] glory is understandable, and to a certain extent, not contemptible. But you have to realize that you’d still be great if you never won another football game. You have to think: Is it glorious to hire a bunch of mercenaries and then, when you win, say ‘Our mercenaries can beat your mercenaries’? What’s the point?”