Jon Steinbrecher was on a roll.The Mid-American Conference commissioner quoted song lyrics from Willie Nelson and Kacey Musgraves. He compared the Power 4 college football conferences to Lord Voldemort from the Harry Potter books. He also delivered the MAC’s best mic-drop moment since Northern Illinois beat Notre Dame two years ago in South Bend.“I’m not sure if the right response to all of this is, ‘Be careful for what you ask for because you may get it,’ or, B, ‘Karma’s a b—-,’” Steinbrecher said last week in a “state of the conference” address. “Because we’re now living with what happens when the autonomy conferences make the rules.”Steinbrecher’s comments reflected a growing resentment toward the most powerful conferences and their roles in undermining the stability of college sports. Tensions between the rich and the not-so-rich are nothing new, but a year of failed negotiations, power plays and broken promises has driven an even deeper wedge.This was Steinbrecher just 10 months ago, speaking at the MAC’s football kickoff event:“Moving forward, it is becoming more and more clear that the path for success is less fragmentation, more collaboration among all of us — certainly among the 10 FBS (conferences), and certainly among the five or six non-autonomous FBS (conferences),” Steinbrecher said then.Less than a year later, college football is closer than ever to a major crack-up. People in the SEC are talking openly about splitting away from the other conferences. Iowa State athletic director Jamie Pollard is calling for the Big 12 to break off from the SEC and the Big Ten. Every conference and every school is looking out for itself, sabotaging attempts at lasting reform.So much for collaboration.It’s worth laying out the background behind Steinbrecher’s comments. In 2014, the NCAA Division I Board of Directors voted to give more autonomy to the SEC, Big Ten, Big 12, ACC and Pac-12 as a way of pacifying the bigger conferences and keeping Division I’s sprawling coalition of 360-plus schools intact.Since then, those conferences — minus the Pac-12, which collapsed and reconstituted itself as a nonautonomous conference — have driven major upheaval through realignment, changes to college football’s postseason and the race to build the best and most expensive football roster.The House v. NCAA settlement was supposed to bring a modicum of stability by limiting how much schools can spend on their rosters and creating a new entity, the College Sports Commission, to vet third-party NIL deals and ensure schools were complying with the settlement terms. Still, the wealthiest schools don’t want to play by the rules they created, so the chaos continues.“If you look up the term ‘ungovernable,’ I am convinced a handful of conference logos pop up, and they’re all autonomy logos,” Steinbrecher said.College sports leaders have spent years begging Congress to intervene, so far to no avail. The SCORE Act, introduced last summer, failed to gain the necessary support in the U.S. House of Representatives. Now the focus has shifted to the Protect College Sports Act, a new bill introduced by Sens. Ted Cruz and Maria Cantwell that will be the subject of a hearing Wednesday on Capitol Hill.Skepticism is the appropriate response to anything involving Congress — especially if the Big Ten and the SEC aren’t on board with the new legislation, which could set limits on their power and open the door for the pooling of media rights, a concept that would seem to help the Big 12 and ACC more than it helps the Big Ten and SEC.The big conferences wanted more autonomy, and now they have it. This upward distribution of power creates fissures at every point: between the Power 4 and the Group of 6, between the Power 2 and the Big 12/ACC, between the wealthiest schools in each league and the schools that are strapped for cash.So what’s a conference like the MAC to do? Fans love a good MAC upset, whether it’s Miami (Ohio) beating SMU in the First Four of the NCAA Tournament or NIU — which will take its football program to the Mountain West starting this season — knocking off Notre Dame. Those David-versus-Goliath stories might disappear if Goliath makes all the rules.Steinbrecher, fed up with what he called a “consistent and persistent power grab” by the biggest conferences, resorted to quoting country music lyrics to describe the state of college sports. The song, a duet between Musgraves and Nelson, is called “Uncertain, TX,” about a place where “nobody ever makes up their dusty old love-bombin’, snake charmin’, bull-s—in’, heart-breakin’, god-forsaken, dumbass mind.”Sad country songs? Karma? Sounds like a break-up to me.Jun 3, 2026Connections: Sports EditionSpot the pattern. Connect the termsFind the hidden link between sports terms