CORVALLIS, Ore. — Travis Beard, wearing a T-shirt commemorating Oregon State’s epic comeback against its rival, the University of Oregon, two years ago that ended with football fans storming the field, was nursing a beer last Saturday on a Reser Stadium concourse, trying to ward off despair.
It was a futile task.
Oregon State has taken worse beatings at the hands of Oregon, but last week’s thumping — which ended 49-14 — felt so much more dispiriting to fans like Beard, who attended his first game in the Civil War, as the rivalry is known here, more than 40 years ago.
Conference consolidation, seeded with television money, has wrought bigger, bicoastal leagues that will provide more marquee games. But it has also threatened rivalries that are central to college football’s identity, which until recently was largely distinguished from North American professional sports by its regional followings and states (and sometimes homes) with divided loyalties.
Oklahoma will not play Oklahoma State this season for the first time since 1910, largely because of bruised feelings over Oklahoma’s move to the Southeastern Conference. Lincoln Riley, the University of Southern California coach, was lukewarm this summer about extending his school’s storied rivalry with Notre Dame after 2026 because of the rigors of its new Big Ten schedule.
And while conference hopping has rekindled a handful of rivalries — the University of Texas will play Texas A&M for the first time since 2011 now that Texas has moved to the SEC — it has shifted others to new conferences, like Arizona versus Arizona State now in the Big 12. Some have uncertain futures, while others have disappeared entirely. UCLA and Cal, the flagship schools of the University of California system, will not play each other this season for the first time in 92 years.
“Rivalries are at the heart of what college football is,” said Christian Anderson, a professor of higher education at the University of South Carolina and an editor of the book “The History of American College Football: Institutional Policy, Culture and Reform.” “Imagine a world without Harvard playing Yale. That said, the essence of college football is fading — if it’s not gone already. It’s about money and TV and putting yourself on a national stage.”
In Oregon, no amount of shrewd recruiting, smart coaching and gritty effort by Oregon State’s Beavers can alter the diverging directions of the state’s major programs, which took an inexorable turn last year when Oregon persuaded Washington to jump with it to the Big Ten Conference.
That decision led to the unraveling of the Pac-12 Conference and left in doubt the future of one of college football’s most enduring rivalries. The Beavers and Ducks began playing each other in 1894.
For now, the Civil War is continuing through next season. Hastily rearranged schedules allowed the series to carry on as nonconference games that will be played in mid-September, before classes begin, rather than late November, when the playoffs loom and the conditions are cold and rainy with a chance of fog.
Dan Lanning, the Oregon coach, hopes the series continues, adding that it is good for the state. But the Ducks, who have a full slate in the coming years, will have to buy their way out of contracts for existing games. “I don’t know how I feel about it,” said Trent Bray, the Oregon State coach and a former player at the school.
It is harder for Scott Barnes, the Oregon State athletic director, to turn away from what the Beavers had Saturday: a standing-room-only crowd and a resume-burnishing opponent.
“Everybody was upset with the schools that left, and that’s a natural response,” said Barnes, who plans to discuss continuing the series with Oregon athletic director Rob Mullens, who declined an interview request. “But there’s not one of our 550 student athletes that doesn’t want to play that game. When you’re seeing these rivalries break apart, common sense is thrown out the window, so let’s not let our emotions make decisions.”
The day after last season’s game, then-Oregon State coach Jonathan Smith, a beloved former star quarterback at the school, left for Michigan State, dumping his Beavers gear at a local secondhand store. Soon, most of the team’s best players had left.
At the same time, Oregon was loading up in the transfer portal.
(Included in its haul was former Oregon State kicker Atticus Sappington, who on Saturday was booed on every attempted kick.)
The talent disparity, evident in warm-ups, manifested at kickoff.
“We don’t have $23 million to bring in dudes,” said Beard, citing a well-traveled guesstimate of the amount of the so-called name, image and likeness payments to players that booster collectives at Oregon spent this season on its roster, which is as highly regarded as traditional powers like Ohio State and Georgia. “It’s the haves and the have-nots.”
Washington State, also left adrift when the Pac-12 schools scattered, earned a measure of satisfaction for the have-nots by upsetting Washington last Saturday in the Apple Cup, which will be played at least through 2028. Jake Dickert, the Washington State coach, cheekily bounded into a postgame news conference with a cigar and a question: Anybody got a light?
The resource gap is greater over the border. Oregon, which generated $60 million more in athletic department revenue than Oregon State last year, was the only Pac-12 school to not rely on a campus subsidy, according to The San Jose Mercury News — and it has as a sugar daddy Phil Knight, the Nike founder who is the program’s main benefactor.
Knight, in a brief interview on his way into the Oregon locker room after the game, said that “of course” he hopes the series continues and that Oregon State, which he quietly donates to, “is going to have a real good future — it just happens to be in a reconstituted Pac-12.”
A model rivalry may be the one between Iowa and Iowa State, which have played every season since 1977 despite being in different conferences. Their September meeting has become such a cultural fixture that presidential candidates often attend in the run-up to the state’s caucuses.
Oregon State is at least adept at making do with less. Last season, the men’s soccer team advanced to a national semifinal, and the women’s basketball team reached a regional final. Jade Carey, the Olympic gold medal-winning gymnast, is returning for her final season, and the baseball team’s success — it has won three national titles since 2006 — inspired Oregon to resurrect its program.
The football team finished the last two regular seasons in the College Football Playoff rankings and drew an average of 2.3 million viewers last year, according to Nielsen, better than schools like North Carolina, UCLA and Michigan State. The Beavers also have a sparkling, intimate home after Reser Stadium’s recent $161 million renovation.
“We like to say we’re built, not bought,” Barnes said. “You lean into what differentiates you. We’re a developmental program, and we’ve always done that. We win battles if we get a kid on campus, but if it’s about money or if it’s about NIL, we’re not going to win that battle.”
Still, Barnes added, relevance keeps growing more expensive. Athletes are now allowed to be paid through booster collectives; an antitrust settlement may allow schools to pay athletes directly next year; and soon athletes could be classified as employees.
Oregon State and Washington State gained a measure of stability last week when Boise State, San Diego State, Fresno State and Colorado State agreed to join them in a resuscitated, if diminished, Pac-12. The conference will soon add at least two others schools, which would put it in position to participate next year in the 12-team College Football Playoff.
Nevertheless, the Pac-12 will have nowhere near the Big Ten’s television revenue — which is likely to be about $50 million less per school — and the conference champion will be up against a stacked deck if it does manage to be awarded a playoff berth.
Athletics, until recently, was rarely the realm of university presidents, whose preferred involvement was cozying up to donors at football games. But Jayathi Murthy, who arrived as Oregon State’s president two years ago, has lobbied the state Legislature for more athletics funding, been active in charting the Pac-12’s future and been a public advocate for athletics.
She spends an inordinate amount of time on a department that accounts for about 5% of the university’s $1.84 billion budget.
“I wish it were only 30% of my attention,” said Murthy, who sees athletics as a worthwhile investment because it is a way to connect a university that has operations in each of the state’s 36 counties. “As everyone says, it’s the front door to the university. It’s what brings them back every Saturday through the fall and to basketball and baseball. It connects them in a way that almost nothing else does. It’s emotional. It’s immediate.”
The night before last week’s game, Rebel Williams, an Oregon fan who lives near Phoenix, and his friend, Matt Binek, an Oregon State fan who lives in Huntington Beach, California, pondered the fate of the rivalry as they sipped cocktails at The Angry Beaver, a downtown Corvallis watering hole.
They noted that so-called platypus families — a mixed-allegiance household, named after the quirky animal with a duck’s bill and a beaver’s tail — exist from Ashland to Astoria. And that the game is christened the Civil War for a reason: Most fans don’t begrudge their rival’s success except when they’re playing each other.
“I don’t think that exists anywhere else,” Williams said. “As an Oregonian, you want to see this game. Growing up, it didn’t matter what the records were. There are kids from all over the state on both teams, and it’s a celebration of being from here. It brings a lot of sadness to think we could be losing that.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
© 2024 The New York Times Company