College football is a rapidly changing sport, and with the recent news that the Save College Sports Act has once again , it doesn’t look like the game will be given some much-needed guardrails any time soon.
You’ll hear fans of an older generation (and even some younger ones) lament the fact that college football isn’t as good as it was in their youth, and while a lot of that can be chalked up to nebulous concepts like nostalgia, there is one concrete example of the sport being vastly different today: rivalries.
Just taking a surface-level glance at the landscape of modern shows us that some of the best rivalries from yesteryear may be a thing of the past.
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Some of that is due to conference realignment while other rivalry games have been cut thanks to power conference teams being incentivized to remove harder non-conference games from their schedules.
Either way, I’ve compiled four great rivalries from the golden age of college football that are either completely dormant or are played sparingly thanks to the new parameters of the sport.
If you pick pretty much any era of college football between the 1970s and early 2000s, at least one team from this annual conference rivalry was firmly entrenched in the national championship conversation.
Although the regular season matchups became quasi-annual after the 1996 merging of the Big 8 and the Southwest Conference to create the Big 12, the two teams still managed to find a way to one up another with some high stakes on the line.
The Sooners and Cornhuskers met nine times as top-five teams and even have the distinction of playing in the first ever BCS 1. vs. 2. matchup in college football history.
No matter how you slice it, the Oklahoma and Nebraska rivalry is college football personified, but the two teams haven’t met since 2022, thanks to Nebraska bolting for the Big Ten in the early part of the 2010s and Oklahoma opting to join the SEC a few seasons ago.
A mini revival is set to take place between the two teams in 2029, but as we’ve established, that game is likely to get canceled so that both teams can pad their schedule with some cannon fodder by then.
While the Backyard Brawl might not have the pop and pizzazz of Oklahoma and Nebraska’s rivalry, it was still one of the most vitriolic annual rivalries the sport had to offer.
If you know nothing about the rivalry between Pitt and West Virginia, look no further than their 2007 meeting, when the Mountaineers welcomed the Panthers to Morgantown sporting a shiny number two ranking in the BCS only to have their hopes and dreams of a national title get nuked on their home field by a team that wasn’t even heading to a bowl game.
It’s such a famous (or infamous) game that Pitt fans will still tease West Virginia fans by only chanting the score at them, “13-9! 13-9! 13-9!”
What made this rivalry so special was the proximity of the two campuses and the fact that they both resided in the now-defunct Big East.
After the resolution of the conference, Pitt joined the ACC and West Virginia became a member of the Big 12, and 2011 was the last time these two met as members of the same conference.
The rivalry would remain dormant for more than a decade, and although they have played each other on an annual basis since 2022, the game isn’t set to be played again until 2029 with the long term status of the rivalry in limbo.
Part of what makes college football so special and something that Playoff expansionists fail to realize is
