On the last day of June, rapper Pitbull appeared on a stage at the University of Texas wearing a football jersey in the school’s burnt orange color. Spring classes had been going on for weeks, but his concert capped an all-day party that had taken over the Austin campus.

The occasion marked the Longhorns’ official entry into the Southeastern Conference. The blue and yellow logo adorned tents and tables, and a sculpture with the slogan “It Just Means More” stood next to a reflecting pool as fans took turns taking photos. A few hours north, a similar celebration took place at the University of Oklahoma, which joined Texas in its conference jump. As dusk arrived and the concert ended in Austin, fireworks shot off from the top of the university’s tallest tower. At midnight, when the calendar turned to July 1 and two of the nation’s wealthiest athletic departments joined its most dominant league, college football had officially entered the era of the superconferences.

More than three months later, and nearly 1,700 miles west of Texas, the first reverberations of that new era will be truly felt for the first time Saturday when third-ranked Oregon (5-0) hosts second-ranked ranked Ohio State (5-0). ).

There are, of course, football reasons to focus on the game at Autzen Stadium in Eugene (7:30 p.m. ET, NBC/Peacock). By almost any metric, Ohio State coach Ryan Day has been remarkably successful, having gone 41-3 against conference opponents since 2019 — but with all three losses coming against rival Michigan, he faces pressure and turmoil within his own fan base to finally win a national championship. Oregon is undefeated this season but somewhat unremarkable as it tries to return to the College Football Playoff for the first time in a decade.

The game marks a shift in the eras of the sport because of everything that happens outside the white lines. Until kickoff in Eugene, all of this season’s big games will have taken place between teams that would have met even in previous years when the conference geography was still regional. The September 28 showdown between Alabama and Georgia was a repeat of previous SEC title games. Although Texas and Oklahoma meet for the first time as SEC rivals Saturday morning in Dallas, they have been playing each other since 1900.

However, Ohio State vs. Oregon in a game that doesn’t count as a non-conference game, or a Rose Bowl game on New Year’s Day, but in the Big Ten standings? For the first time since the five most powerful conferences shrunk to four last year following the collapse of the Pac-12 Conference, the new reality of bicoastal conferences will materially impact college football’s playoff race in the form of a super-sized conference game of which One pairing would have been difficult to imagine.

Oregon, Washington, UCLA and Southern Cal didn’t leave the Pac-12 because they thought a conference called the “Big Ten” while counting 18 members made sense, or because they saw a shared history with schools like Rutgers, Illinois or Nebraska. The rationale for the move was that, given the turmoil surrounding the NCAA’s structure and governance, the Big Ten’s lucrative media rights deal offered a safer haven — as did the SEC’s annual big payouts to Texas and Oklahoma.