With college football rivalry games on the slate this weekend, The Wall Street Journal’s Matthew Futterman takes a long look at a signature event that’s threatened by continuing realignment, conference championship games and, starting in 2014, a four-team playoff for the national title.

As of this season’s there’s no more Texas-Texas A & M game, nor a Kansas-Missouri game. Saturday’s clash involving Notre Dame and USC is notable only in that the Irish are ranked No. 1 for the first time in nearly two decades. Futterman writes that while “rivalry games are selling tools,” the larger national imprint for enticing regional matchups is making increasing and unrelenting demands:

“Given all that passion, one might think college football would do everything to preserve it. But the theme of big-time sports the past quarter century is that more is better, especially when it comes to television money. The new TV contract for the football playoff is likely to be worth as much as $7 billion during the next decade.

“The test of whether that investment is worthwhile will be if the regional passion can continue to evolve into national obsession. The traditional rivalries clearly have their enduring appeal. But the tide appears to be turning. Population growth and the growing popularity of football, especially among young African-American children, have fostered a boom in talent. Now there are enough good players to build quality teams at Florida and Alabama, but also at Boise State and Kansas State, the season’s biggest surprise.”

Read more: “The Battle for the Soul of College Football”

The addition of Maryland and Rutgers to the Big Ten sent off shock waves throughout the college athletic world, and prompted some sharp, white-hot commentary right off the bat. Dana O’Neil of ESPN.com:

“The NCAA will have you believe that runners and agents are the most insidious cancer in the game today, that the notion that athletes are on the take has disenchanted the fan base to the point of no return.

“The NCAA is wrong.

“The commissioners are the ones on the proverbial take and everyone knows it.”

Read more: “Do caretakers of college sports care?”

Pat Forde of Yahoo! Sports drives down to the level of the athletic directors at the two schools to lay the biggest blame:

“Two largely underachieving, financially irresponsible athletic programs are parlaying their geographic proximity to major metropolitan areas into membership in the Big Ten. They’ve done very little on the field of competition to deserve it. But that’s not what drives conference affiliation these days.

“College Sports, Inc., is no meritocracy.

“Rutgers and Maryland might as well be the airline and automotive industries. They’re losing money left and right, but because they have inherent value (thanks to their TV markets of New York, Washington D.C. and Baltimore), here comes the institutional bailout.”

Read more: “Maryland, Rutgers cash in on their incompetence with move to Big Ten”

At Sports on Earth, Patrick Hruby lights into the NCAA in the wake of the Shabazz Muhammad “investigation” and likens its enforcement of amateurism to the War on Drugs:

“If all of the above seems unfair . . . well, that’s because it is. In college sports, justice isn’t blind; it’s a blind, trembling man throwing darts in a pitch-black room, hoping to strike a coveted recruit getting a free pair of shoes, or maybe a star player receiving a cash-stuffed envelope from an overzealous friend of the program. And things can never be otherwise. Not so long as the NCAA continues to promote and defend a false ideal rooted in ersatz morality; an unworkable mandate that makes no practical sense; a corrupting system that turns legitimate, well-meaning oversight (specifically, looking out for the safety and welfare of campus athletes) into a risible, dispiriting wabbit hunt, an endless, unwinnable war against both human nature and basic economics.”

Read more: “It’s past time for the NCAA to put an end to amateurism”

Unless you’re a Dallas Cowboys fan, it’s hard not to like Washington Redskins rookie quarterback Robert Griffin III, who had an outstanding Turkey Day game on Thursday. At The Washington Times, Rich Campbell explores the qualities the reigning Heisman Trophy winner inherited from his father:

“Robert Jr. met his son’s desire with a commitment just as deep.

“He would go to the library and watch videos of great quarterbacks. He studied Dan Marino’s quick release, Ken Stabler’s scrambling ability, Joe Montana’s poise and John Elway’s strength — to name a few — and contrasted what he saw with videos the family shot of Robert III’s games and practices.

“When he took over the local AAU track and field program when Robert III was 12, he taught himself the mechanics of field events. He studied how Olympic gold medalist hurdlers Edwin Moses and Allen Johnson ran and jumped. Father and son analyzed the video, always striving for that perfect amalgamation of skills.”

Read more: “RG3’s traits passed down from father”

This week’s blockbuster announcements that Maryland and Rutgers are joining the Big Ten and leaving the ACC and Big East, respectively, to fend for themselves, has reopened college athletic realignment machinations once again, and they figure to go on for a while.

Just weeks after Notre Dame announced it was leaving the Big East and joining the ACC in everything but football, Big Ten Commissioner Jim Delany conducted a rapid stealth campaign to get his league to 14 teams — just like the SEC — and, more importantly, move into major East Coast television markets.

This breathtaking action — coming on the heels of massive financial mismanagement within the athletics departments at both schools, and that Yahoo!’s Pat Forde rightly savaged Monday — is a stunner, even for sharp sports media types accustomed to the realignment carousel.

At ESPN.com, Dana O’Neill tore into the moves on Monday, fingering the men running the leagues for failing to be proper “caretakers” of college athletics:

“The NCAA will have you believe that runners and agents are the most insidious cancer in the game today, that the notion that athletes are on the take has disenchanted the fan base to the point of no return.

“The NCAA is wrong.

“The commissioners are the ones on the proverbial take and everyone knows it.”

What she said.

While that’s strong stuff, and the media furor figures to grow with a fresh new game of musical chairs afoot, these hardly stack up on the audacity meter with major conference moves of the past.

Including the Big Ten in a time long before lucrative television contracts and multi-million dollar coaching salaries.

Earlier this year, East Lansing, Michigan native David Young published his book “Arrogance and Scheming in the Big Ten,” which recounts Michigan State’s battle to join the Big Ten in the years after World War II.

In 1946, the Big Ten was down to nine schools, with the departure of the University of Chicago, a charter member that produced the very first Heisman Trophy winner — Jay Berwanger in 1935 — but that wrestled mightily with the balance between academics and athletics.

Four years later, Chicago dropped football, and seven years after that, de-emphasized athletics altogether.

Among the candidates to become the new 10th team of the Big Ten — commonly known as the Western Conference — included Pittsburgh and Nebraska before Michigan State was added in 1950.

But as Young, a Notre Dame graduate and physician in Holland, Mich., unfurls the story, the Spartans’ in-state archrival did everything it could to prevent the move. Thus, his book subtitle: “Michigan State’s Quest for Membership and Michigan’s Powerful Opposition.”

It was an ugly battle, according to Young, as bitter and nasty as the present-day poaching of BCS schools. While the money stakes weren’t as high, intra-state animosity and institutional status was at the heart of this dispute.

Michigan State Agricultural College wanted to upgrade not only its competitive sports opportunities, but also sought Big Ten inclusion for greater academic prestige. As a land-grant university, it had much in common with Big Ten members Illinois, Minnesota, Ohio State, Purdue and Wisconsin.

Ultimately, those affinities helped Michigan State overcome Michigan’s strident opposition. As Logan Young wrote at The Classical in an October review of Young’s book — just ahead of this season’s UM-MSU game — what we’re witnessing now shouldn’t be all that shocking:

“The misplaced priorities, epic arrogance and constant scheming on display in today’s Big Ten are more or less the same ones that were roiling, loudly, during its prehistory. How this makes you feel will depend a lot on how you feel about those particular priorities, but their evolution (or proud, high-handed and repeated refusal of it) makes for fascinating reading.”

Once Michigan State began competing athletically in 1953, the Big Ten was as stable as any conference in the land, remaining at 10 schools until the inclusion of Penn State in 1990.

That’s when the realignment ruptures that continue today were initially triggered. But the intervening 37 years of “peace” in the Big Ten wouldn’t have occurred without individuals like University of Minnesota president James Lewis Morrill acting beyond the immediate self-interest of his institution.

While it’s easy to bemoan the lack of those qualities today, the behavior that Michigan demonstrated more than 60 years ago has never been in short supply.