For shame, college sports, for shame.

Conference USA and the Mountain West Conference announced last week the two conferences will form a brand new “super conference,” although it is hardly composed of “super” schools. After the power conferences in college sports like the SEC, Big 12, Big 10, Pac-12 and the Big East have had their pick of C-USA and MWC schools, the remaining 16 teams are Air Force, University of Alabama at Birmingham, Colorado State, East Carolina, Fresno State, Hawaii (football-only), Marshall, Nevada, New Mexico, University of Nevada at Las Vegas, Southern Miss, Rice, University of Texas at El Paso, Tulane, Tulsa and Wyoming.

This new conference stretches across five time-zones and reaches from South Carolina to Honolulu. The merger, to me, makes about as much sense as throwing a toaster into a bathtub. So why did the two conferences choose to make such a decision? The answer is survival.When we reach the end of the 2013-14 college football season and it is time to decide a new national champion, it will happen either one of two ways. The champion will either be decided via a flawed BCS system in which a computer will pick who should be in the national championship game or a simple playoff system for the rights to claim the national championship. No matter how good they may be, the Tulsa Golden Hurricane or any of the other schools in this conference are not going to get the nod to climb to the top of college football’s popularity contest.

Schools like Tulsa, however, know that they will never make it to the big game. This brings me back to my original point: the new conference is all about survival. What’s left of C-USA and MWC are those schools that have traditionally comprised the “middle-class” of college football. These schools in the new conference have agreed that they are that desperate to not end up in the underbelly of college football. They want to keep their middle-class status as to not allow the power conferences to become too powerful.

This merger of two conferences is just another turn in the long road of conference realignment and we aren’t done just yet. College sports has reached a sad state when two conferences have to merge to create one sixteen team conference just to survive and to compete with the power conferences.

For shame, college sports, for shame.