Latest absurd college conference realignment makes a mess of math, geography

For a bunch of leaders who seem to only care about money, those who run some of the largest athletic schools and conferences in the United States seem to be terrible at math.

They aren't great in English, either. And they might be worst of all at geography.

The latest round of conference realignment last week, which seemed to take place in a span of time usually reserved for ordering a pizza, only compounded and expanded a problem that has been going on for decades now.

The Big "Ten," of course, has not had 10 teams since 1990 when Penn State joined as the 11th. Nebraska's addition in 2011 bumped the number to 12. But there was already a Big 12 Conference, so the name stayed.

Branding!

Rutgers and Maryland came aboard a few years later, but conference leaders surely knew that was just the beginning so why change the name then? They were right. We found out a year ago that USC and UCLA were defecting from the Pac-12.

And last week, Oregon and Washington followed suit while Colorado, Utah, Arizona and Arizona State are all headed to the Big 12.

So the Big Ten soon will have 18 schools, the Big 12 will have 16 schools, and the poor Pac-12 is left now with four schools.

That is, of course, until the rest of the teams leave. It sounds like Cal and Stanford could soon depart for the ACC, the most absurd possibility of all.

When you deal with acronyms too often, you might forget that ACC stands for Atlantic Coast Conference. And you might recall that Cal and Stanford are literally on the complete opposite side of the country ON THE PACIFIC COAST.

Astute followers on X — the social media platform that was absurdly rebranded from Twitter — at least noted that the ACC could get clever and keep the acronym with some subtle adjustments.

Any Coast Conference has a nice ring to it. And at least it's honest. It's far better than the new Big East having a Nebraska school (Creighton) as a member or any of the other nonsense foisted upon us rational folks in recent years.

About the only self-respecting major conference these days is the SEC. All 14 of those schools can be accurately described as South, East, or both, and the conference had the unintentional foresight almost 100 years ago upon its founding to make no promises about the number of schools it contained.

Everyone else? You're failing too many subjects. Go back to school and learn some lessons.

Here are four more things to know today:

*Vikings coach Kevin O'Connell warned us not to read too much into the team's first depth chart of training camp. But I say it delivered a clear message, particularly at running back — which I talked about on Tuesday's Daily Delivery podcast.

*There are many reasons to read any Patrick Reusse column, but I particularly enjoyed his introspection Tuesday on the St. Paul Saints.

*Ryan Jeffers has his OPS all the way up to .894 after a three-run homer Monday. The Twins seem pretty well set at catcher for many years to come.

*The removal of Orioles broadcaster Kevin Brown from games — reportedly for, um, pointing out that Baltimore used to be bad and is now good against Tampa Bay — is one of the most absurd things you will ever see.