The Everything Bagel That Is Sports.

I've been a USC football fan since 1967. Not for any good reason. I didn't go to the school, don't have any family, friend, or emotional connection to it.

Truth be told, the USC-UCLA game that year was the first college game I ever watched on TV, and it happened to decide the national championship. It was won on an incredible run by an amazing back whose name I'm blanking on (cough, cough), and I was hooked.

So imagine my surprise when I tuned in to a USC game late in this disastrous Trojan season and learned that, starting next year, the school will be playing in the Big Ten. So, it seems, will half the teams in the country. "The Big Ten" is now "The Big 18," playing a schedule you can follow with this handy-dandy chart:

There aren't going to be any divisions, just a "playoff" between the two teams determined to be the best in the new, mega conference.  

Confused? Well, you shouldn't be. 

The "Big Conference" will have schedules determined by the "Flex Protect XVIII Model," which "features a combination of protected opponents and rotating opponents for universities. Teams "will play every other conference opponent at least twice—once home and once away—and will play rotating opponents no more than three times in a five-year period."

(I swear, I'm not making this up.)

Once upon a time, the major college sports conferences stayed pretty much the same for 50, 60, even 80 years, building up hallowed rivalries. No more. Some years ago now—all driven by television money—the biggest conferences started to rapidly expand, contract, and even explode and collapse, like fiery supernovas turning into dwarf stars. 

Who plays what where? Who knows? Good thing there's some AI like Flex Protect to keep it straight for us. 

This holiday weekend, I turned on a highlights show to see my New York Knicks in a uniform I did not recognize. Turns out, according to Wiki, that they have many different unis now. I truly could not even determine just how many. There is the "Association," the "Icon," the "Statement," the "Classic," and the "City," as in the loathsome, "City Connect" gear-grubbing, by which all pro teams now pretend to be "connecting" with their inner-city fans.

There is also a uniform for "Noche Latina events," and one for "St. Patrick's Day" that was also worn on Christmas Day, and a superhero, "Kryptonite versus Superman" uni, and HEY LADY!  

Your New York Yankees, of course, already disfigured their pinstripes with an ad patch this season. More, I'm sure, will follow—not to mention the special unis to "fight cancer" and "honor our armed services." Both noble goals that are besmirched by these tawdry efforts to sell more merchandise.

But that's just the thing. Sports isn't sports anymore. Like everything else in America, it's just one more platform to sell you something else.

It's the same motivation that brings you ridiculous, meaningless promotions like the NBA's "in-season tournament"—or postseason tournaments so expanded and extended that you end up with a sixth-place team battling for a World Series title.

It's everything, all the time, all at once. 

It's games broadcast over at least half-a-dozen different networks and streaming devices. It's the Yankees' own home channel being less and less about baseball and more and more about all the other things various sponsors want to sell you: golf lessons, cooking shows, workout gear, soccer and basketball.

It's regular seasons that now seem to last all year round. "Hey, a 13-game college football season! A 17-game pro season! What could possibly go wrong?"

Predictably, everything. Mostly with the human beings forced to participate in our endless expanding sports universe—at least, if they want their share of the take.

Is every quarterback in the NFL injured this year? Sure seems like it (and if not, give it a few more weeks). Is every baseball star now out for at least a month every season? And scheduled for major surgery in the postseason?

The players are the sacrificial lambs in all this, but they don't bleat much because they've got guaranteed contracts that pay them like the robber barons of yore. Or at least, they don't complain much now. We'll see how they are in a few years, with knees they can barely walk on, and brains that have been battered into an early senescence. 

Because human beings are expendable in all this, at every level. The players can't just be players, they have to be torqued up to musculatures and performance levels that could not have survived the old seasons, much less the super-extended, extra-value pak, bonus edition levels of our "play."

The fans are sacrificed as well, forced to constantly pay more and more for less and less. A few of us around here have noticed that baseball has become, well, boring in its present incarnation. So has basketball—all three-pointers and dunks, with the players spending much of the game seemingly warming up. 

So has football. I cheered mightily when that Patriots kicker missed a 35-yard field goal yesterday—cheered mostly because I wouldn't have to endure overtime in a game played that incompetently.

Same can be said for a lot of games these days. Big surprise, what with all the best players constantly injured.

But hey, suit the guys up again in the old blue-and-red-green-gold-russet-yellow-pink-cammo and send them out there to do battle against those no-goodniks from State-Tech-crosstown-up north-down south-due east-far west-round the horn and doesy-do. Our beloved stars (or benchwarmers) will battle long enough for us to (maybe) find them on our pay-per-view device of (not) our choice. 

That bagel? Make it everything, please. Nothing tastes like anything anymore anyway.