While most of the world is maniacally focused on the World Cup, sports fans in the U.S. have been transfixed by the rapid disintegration of the Big 12 Conference.

I attended Missouri back when it was part of the Big Eight. I liked the Big Eight. Missouri is a good fit with Kansas, Nebraska, Kansas State, Colorado and Iowa State. The Oklahoma schools were a bit of a stretch academically, but they did play some nice football, basketball and baseball. You take what you can get.

But then four Texas schools wandered into the party, and the Big Eight became the Big 12. I've never really liked the Big 12, largely because I've never really liked Texas. This has nothing to do with a pathological hatred of the Bush family; I graduated from high school in New Mexico--at a school that sat a scant ten miles from the Texas border. That proximity is more than enough to ensure a lifetime of antipathy.

A few months ago, the Big 10 (which has 11 members) talked about adding some new schools. Missouri was supposedly high in the list of potential additions. I was cool with that. Missouri has a lot more in common with Iowa, Wisconsin and Minnesota than Texas Tech, Texas A&M or Baylor.

But then last week Nebraska joined the Big 10, Colorado joined the Pac-10 and all hell broke loose.

Here's what I like about this: The Big 12 is now the Big 10. The Big 10 is now the Big 12. And the Pac-10 is now the Pac-11.

Complicating things were efforts by the Pac-10 and the SEC to poach the Texas schools. The Mountain West (which is essentially the old WAC) poached Boise State from the "new" WAC and then indicated that it would welcome Kansas and Missouri (and maybe K-State and Iowa State as well). The Big 10 said it wasn't necessarily done expanding and someone vaguely connected to the SEC said that Kansas and Missouri might be options for that conference as well. Oh, and the former Big 12 (the current Big 10, at least in membership) keeps saying that it will try to soldier on in some form.

Whew!

As a Missouri alum, I have a very clear preference: We should join any conference that allows us to play Kansas once a year in football and twice in basketball. This is easily accomplished, of course--New Mexico and New Mexico State do this every year, and they're in different conferences. But there needs to be some sort of real commitment to the annual grudge matches. Past that, I'm not too concerned.

As for the conferences themselves, the Big 10 is the best match for Missouri. But the Mountain West isn't the worst option in the world. A Mountain West conference that includes TCU, Boise State, Missouri. BYU, Utah and Kansas would be a conference with at least six strong football programs. On the basketball side, UNLV and New Mexico aren't slouches. The Mountain West was a better basketball conference last year than the Pac-10, the Big 10 or the SEC (you can look it up). Adding KU and MU would make it even stronger. So while the academics of the Mountain West schools may not match Missouri's profile, the athletics are okay.

The thing is, I really don't care. I like watching college sports. What I don't like is the fact that schools and coaches rake in millions while the athletes get scholarships. A scholarship isn't anything to sneeze at, but athletes in the big money sports bring in much, much more to a school than the cost of a scholarship.

Which is to say that while all of this realignment is the result of a serious money grab, I gave up on the "pristine" nature of college sports some time before I entered Missouri back in 1987. The folks in charge of college athletics are money-grubbing whores. We might as well accept that and move on.

And so it doesn't matter to me if Missouri moves on to the Big 10, the Mountain West, the SEC or (somewhat improbably) the Pac-10. The school will still sit in Columbia, Mo. It will still have one of the best journalism schools in the world and a host of top-notch programs for the rest of its students. Oh, and the biggest nuclear reactor of any school in the world. That's really sweet. Call us the glowing tigers.

I'll still root for ol' MU come football season, no matter who the opponents might be. I'll still get excited watching Mike Anderson's basketball team claw its way past teams that are much better than MU on paper. I'll still don the black and gold at the appropriate times.

Just don't ask me to get all worked up about this realignment nonsense. There's a World Cup going on, and a British goalie controversy to boot. Talk about the best of times...

Jon Worley didn't feel any pull toward his ancestral home of England during last Saturday's World Cup opener.