They called it “Go fever,” the headlong rush by the U.S. in its Cold War space race with the then Soviet Union to get to the moon before 1970, to deliver on the deadline set by America’s martyred president, John F. Kennedy.

College athletics has been caught up in its own version of “Go fever” over the past three or four years. Conferences have been ripped apart. Decades-long rivalries have been dismantled. The authoritarian hand of the NCAA, which once banned schools from paying for student-athletes’ snacks and strong-armed LSU into cutting loose former men’s basketball coach Will Wade for shenanigans that are now mostly legal, has retreated like a melting glacier.

Into the void are stepping the Southeastern Conference and the Big Ten. College sports’ two most powerful conferences, perhaps soon to be the only two major conferences, are telling the rest of major college athletics how they want things run. Or else.

Wednesday at New Orleans’ Windsor Court Hotel, the SEC and Big Ten, its commissioners, athletic directors, football coaches and lawyers — oh yes, there were lawyers — wrapped up meetings. Little was revealed as to what was discussed regarding the College Football Playoff, other than that the two leagues want the CFP to do away with byes for the top four conference champions and go to straight seeding.

That plan is likely to meet with a stone wall of opposition Tuesday when the CFP Management Committee — which includes the other eight major conferences and Notre Dame — meets in Dallas. Any CFP changes for the 2025-26 cycle require unanimous consent. That means major changes for this playoff cycle like seeding seem to have a Hail Mary’s chance of being enacted.

That stone wall is crumbling, however. After this playoff cycle, a memorandum of understanding reportedly exists that will transfer control from the CFP Management Committee to the SEC and Big Ten.

The Big Two will still be required to consult with the other conferences and Notre Dame about changes, but we all know who’s in charge here. It’s like a family with two parents and three kids trying to decide where to go one vacation.

One child wants to go to Disney World. Another wants to go skiing. The third wants to go to the beach. The parents say, “We have heard you, but we’re going to New York for the plays and museums and a Yankees game.” And that’s it.

The CFP is expected to expand from 12 teams in 2024-25 and 2025-26 to 14 or 16 teams by 2026-27. In that number, the SEC and Big Ten both reportedly want four guaranteed bids per conference, leaving two for the ACC, two for the Big Ten, one for the “Group of Five” conferences and one for an at-large team or Notre Dame (in a 14-team scenario), provided the Irish are ranked high enough.

There’s a word for this: greed. One can make the argument that SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey and Big Ten commish Tony Petitti are looking out for their conferences and their membership, as they should.

But the SEC and Big Ten, with their 34 combined members, comprise only about a quarter of the NCAA’s Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS). What is good for some is not good for all. Especially if, as has also been reported, SEC and Big Ten schools will get more revenue from the new five-year, $1.3 billion deal with ESPN to televise the CFP starting in 2026. The rich in the SEC and Big Ten will get richer, and everyone else will have to live with the scraps. Tasty scraps – we’re talking prime rib and Fondant potatoes here – but scraps nonetheless.

What does this all mean if you’re an LSU fan? You may bemoan the end of the Oklahoma-Oklahoma State football rivalry because they’re in different leagues now. You might shake your head with dismay when imagining the ice floe that Oregon State and Washington State were left on when everyone else abandoned the Pac-12 for the Big Ten, Big 12 and ACC. But for LSU, there was perhaps never a better decision in the school’s history than the one in 1932 when the Tigers left the old Southern Conference to help form the SEC.

It may not be good for college football as a whole, but four automatic SEC bids would give LSU a shot at more CFP access. It certainly means more money. It will likely lead to a nine-game SEC schedule, which removes one “rent-a-win” from the Tigers’ annual slate. In an increasingly stormy world of college athletics, it’s a snug harbor. You think Florida State or Kansas State wouldn’t like to be in Louisiana State’s cleats right now? You’d better believe it.

All that said, there has been too much change much too fast in college athletics. There is only one set of data on a 12-team CFP before expansion is apparently on the way. Changes have been largely driven by fear, fear of being left out of the big conference payday. The face of college football, a national sport comprised of a patchwork of delightful regional factions, has been erased and redrawn.

Once “Go fever” has you in its grip, it’s hard to shake. The SEC and Big Ten aren’t even trying. They’re saying, “Go faster.”