I had to tell the voice in my head to shut up. I didn’t want to hear it.

Texas and Texas A&M can finally host their long-awaited, tense, angry family reunion? Oklahoma gets to welcome Tennessee? Florida making a trip from The Swamp to Sixth Street? Oklahoma in Death Valley? The Longhorns back inside of what will again be a powder keg on The Hill in Fayetteville? Alabama and Georgia in the regular season?

College football is my favorite sport, and the SEC’s silly, made-for-TV reveal of games that won’t be played for 15 months was very dumb (and also must-see TV) as the show dripped out every matchup over 30 minutes and spent another 30 breaking down those matchups. It was the embodiment of “this entire meeting could have been an email.”

Realignment, especially the latest few rounds fueled by skyrocketing television money over the last two decades, has been awful for the sport. It’s killed rivalries.

But people like me are the problem. I am dying to see these games. I was dying to see which games we’d get right away.

People like me are why ESPN is willing to pay the kind of money that makes Texas A&M and Texas take 13 years off from one of the best, nastiest rivalries in sports. The kind of money that makes Oklahoma break away from Oklahoma State for the first time in almost a century and convinces Nebraska that its rivalry with Oklahoma should be secondary to becoming bedfellows with Northwestern, Minnesota, Illinois and Purdue.