The reshuffling of conference affiliations around the country has cost the game many of its oldest and most cherished rivalries, including BYU-Utah and probably, eventually, Utah State-Utah.
The last time there was a major reshuffling of conference affiliations in college football, Craig Thompson, commissioner of the Mountain West Conference, saw trouble ahead. “You watch what’s going to happen,” he told Deseret News reporter Dirk Facer in 2010. “This is going to destroy a lot of the old rivalries.”
And so it has.
Thompson has tracked the damage. He estimates that about one-third of rivalries that were 75 years old or older are finished or played on a sporadic basis.