You'll hear fans of an older generation (and even some younger ones) lament the fact that college football isn't as good as it was in their youth, and while a lot of that can be chalked up to nebulous concepts like nostalgia, there is one concrete example of the sport being vastly different today: rivalries.Just taking a surface-level glance at the landscape of modern college football shows us that some of the best rivalries from yesteryear may be a thing of the past.FLORIDA STATE-GEORGIA SERIES CANCELLATION IS OMINOUS SIGN FOR FUTURE OF COLLEGE FOOTBALLSome of that is due to conference realignment while other rivalry games have been cut thanks to power conference teams being incentivized to remove harder non-conference games from their schedules.Either way, I've compiled four great rivalries from the golden age of college football that are either completely dormant or are played sparingly thanks to the new parameters of the sport.The Oklahoma Sooners celebrate after defeating the Alabama Crimson Tide at Saban Field at Bryant-Denny Stadium.(David Leong/Imagn Images)If you pick pretty much any era of college football between the 1970s and early 2000s, at least one team from this annual conference rivalry was firmly entrenched in the national championship conversation.Although the regular season matchups became quasi-annual after the 1996 merging of the Big 8 and the Southwest Conference to create the Big 12, the two teams still managed to find a way to one up another with some high stakes on the line.The Sooners and Cornhuskers met nine times as top-five teams and even have the distinction of playing in the first ever BCS 1.
vs.2.
matchup in college football history.No matter how you slice it, the Oklahoma and Nebraska rivalry is college football personified, but the two teams haven't met since 2022, thanks to Nebraska bolting for the Big Ten in the early part of the 2010s and Oklahoma opting to join the SEC a few seasons ago.A mini revival is set to take place bet...