Before there was a coast-to-coast Big Ten, there was the Airplane Conference

Under the Southern California sun Saturday afternoon, Penn State and USC will face off in a matchup of two of college football’s most decorated and iconic programs.

The Nittany Lions and Trojans have met before — including as recently as 2017 in a thrilling 52-49 victory for USC in the Rose Bowl — but for the first time ever, they’ll play as conference foes, a once-unimaginable arrangement for two schools separated by 2,500 miles.

The 2024 season has marked the debut of the new-look, 18-team Big Ten. A traditionally midwestern conference that previously didn’t go west of Lincoln, Nebraska now has members in Los Angeles, Seattle and Eugene, Oregon. Even in a sport that abandoned the idea of regionality a long time ago, it’s a particularly audacious experiment.

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It’s not an entirely groundbreaking idea, though. Sixty-five years before Penn State and USC officially became conference mates, there was a plan afoot to bring a similar marriage together.

Long before the Big Ten stretched from New Jersey to California, the Big 12 had members in three different time zones and the ACC had two schools 3,000 miles away from the league’s namesake Atlantic Coast, there was very nearly a coast-to-coast conference in major college football.

In the late 1950s, Admiral Tom Hamilton had a grand vision for what became popularly known as the “Airplane Conference,” a 12-team outfit that would have brought together five schools from the west coast with six others from the east, with Air Force in the middle for an even dozen.

Despite Hamilton’s diligent efforts, the league never came to be and in the decades that followed, college football settled into a structure with which so many became familiar and comfortable.

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Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/coast-coast-big-ten-airplane-131225059.html

Author : USA TODAY Sports

Publish date : 2024-10-12 13:12:25

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